Hi, my name is Zac
This may be a unique question as I’ve searched the from to see if there is any existing discussion, but not found any.
I am a competitive eater. I am involved in around a dozen eating challenges per year that I film for YouTube and other platforms.
I lift 3-4x a week and do cardio for about 2 hours or so a week and keep as active as my schedule permits. I believe I meet the BBM exercise prescription. I am 30, 6,0 and around 185lbs with okay-I-guess body fat (33-34” waist)
However I train for eating challenges 2-3x a month where I need to get used to consuming several thousand (6-8k usually) calories ahead of what’s typically a times eating challenge. In most cases these challenges involve difficult to eat food, but in recent months they’ve involved absolute calories (eg a recent one saw me challenge 24k kcal in 24 hours.)
Short term I can gain 10-15lbs that subsides in a few days. I will maybe lose one day of eating and fast post challenge but I then resume maintenance calories (around 3000 for me, which I track religiously) and find I return to my typical weight within a week. I experience similar to a lesser degree on my challenge training days, although I don’t fast after these days.
In the two years I’ve been doing this I’ve not gained any weight or followed any kind of structured calorie deficit, despite being chronically over my maintenance so often. Yet I see so many people who are overweight and aren’t eating nearly the same amount of calories I do when we factor in these challenges. The maths for me doesn’t math.
Can you help me explain this?