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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

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If you chug down 3 lites of vegetable oil, and it somehow all ends up in your lipid stores rather than giving you an unpleasant visit to the ceramic throne, you gain at most 2.8 kg.

This may indeed take months to shift, but it's not even close to the maximum possible damage to someone's finances from gambling.

Your number is exactly correct (1.4kg/day) [1] but you can easily do it without oil as they did in the study (there are a lot of waking hours in the day and a lot of good fatty foods.) Alcohol (and some medication) of course makes both storage and consumption easier.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7598063/

3 lites of oil is approximately 10 times the recommended calorific input for adult men; it certainly isn't "easy", on the basis of what I've heard from a now-long-deceased acquaintance with cystic fibrosis who was required to consume 10,000 kcal/day just to overcome the medical condition; and 10,000 kcal/day is less than half the amount here (24,436 kcal), which I chose on the basis of it being a lot of fluid to drink in one day even if it was water.

> Everyone who's ever had a feast knows you can gain enough weight in a weekend it'll take months if not years to diet off.

Is this actually a thing? I've definitely massively overeaten for short periods before (e.g. Christmas dinner). But the effect on weight was very transient.

I've lost about 65 lbs, then gained about half of that back. If I overeat in a single day, I can put on a pound or 2. If I don't compensate the next day for that excess, some of that weight will stay on. If I don't compensate within a couple days, all of that weight will stay.

I've had this struggle for a few years, gaining about 30 lbs over the course of a few years.

What the GP said might not apply to everyone, but it does apply to those who have eaten to excess in the past and are now struggling to keep that excess weight off again.

Yes i highly doubt the validity of his statement. My calorie intake is around 2500 a day to maintain a weight of around 70kg (with some excerise). If i wanted to gain 2kg of weight id have to consume around 10000 excess calories over a period of two weeks.

I have also many times lost 2kg over a period of a few weeks by simply being lazy to calculate my calorie intake while excersising more than usual. Gaining weight takes ridiculously more effort for me than losing weight.

> If i wanted to gain 2kg of weight id have to consume around 10000 excess calories over a period of two weeks.

Which is of course trivial to do. That's one kebab extra per day.

You just don't eat caloricilly dense food at a high frequency and grossly underestimate how many calories someone can eat in a day [1]. Also, for most people losing 1kg a week is considered very fast weight loss at the border of what's recommended for safe caloric restriction.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36339530

There is no way that a normal person can gain 1.4kg of body mass in a day unless they are on some sort of eating challenge. Even then I doubt that they would metabolise even half of the food unless they built up to it.

That's a 10,000+ calorie surplus, you'd have to eat 1.5kg of straight mayonnaise and digest it all.

Sure, you can get the scale to shift by that much, I can do that in a few minutes by drinking 1.4L of water.

If you want to learn about actual realistic bodyweight tuning, look into the bodybuilding community, or any sport that has weight classes. Much more accurate information than using indirect measures of what people sort of felt like they sort of wanted to eat.

except people need food to survive? you don't need gambling. thats why its fine to ban. you're jsut engaging in a very bad faith argument since they aren't even close to equivalent.

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