How to Eat 45,000 Extra Calories Without Gaining Weight

Fabio asks:

I came across a study on bodybuilders, which suggests that a caloric surfeit doesn´t contribute to weight gain, as you would expect, when the extra calories come solely from protein. Can you comment on it?

The study Fabio asked about was published in 2014 in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. And it's definitely worth a closer look

The subjects were all in their early twenties and all engaged in heavy resistance training (i.e, weight lifting). They were quite lean and very muscular going into the study. In fact, if you looked only at their BMI (body mass index), it looked as if the subjects were on the verge of obesity. But when you look at their body composition, it’s clear that the higher body weights relative to their heights were due to high muscle mass.

RELATED: Is BMI an Accurate Way to Measure Body Fat?

One group added a lot of extra protein to their diet in the form of whey protein powder. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot.

These athletes had previously been consuming about 1 gram of protein per pound per day, or about 20-25 percent of calories. This is about twice the recommended minimum intake but comfortably within the acceptable range for protein laid out by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly known as the Institute of Medicine.

RELATED: How Much Protein Should You Eat?

For the study, the researchers essentially doubled the athlete's protein intake to an average of 300 grams per day, which is quite a bit higher than NAM’s maximum  recommended intake. It’s also, as the researchers write, “the highest recorded intake of dietary protein in the scientific literature that we are aware of.”

Nobody is recommending that eating this much protein would be is a good idea on a long-term basis.

The researchers did not evaluate whether this extremely high intake had any negative impacts on liver or kidney function, but many of the subjects complained of intestinal distress.  However, nobody is recommending that eating this much protein would be is a good idea on a long-term basis. The point of this short-term study was simply to find out how eating protein in excess of caloric requirements would affect body composition in highly trained people. 

The subjects didn’t eat less of other foods; they just added the whey protein on top of what they were already eating. Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to...

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