Freaky Eaters Cola and Calories

So the gf wanted to watch a show called Freaky Eaters the last week and I somewhat grumpily complied.

Turns out it's a very informative little production.

22 yr old radiology tech drinks 30 - 36 cans of 'cola' (Coke) a day for 4+ years. Lets say 30 to make the math easier...

30 x 140 cal = 4,200 calories from cola daily

She does also eat other food too (mostly Twinkies that she dunks in cola), so lets say 5,000 calories a day (probably low-balling that by a grand or so).

5,000 calories a day. She's 22, looks awful, doesn't exercise, eats nothing but sugar/carbs. BUT. She's a healthy weight and takes no meds or has any conditions requiring meds. She's apparently is pre-diabetic (aren't we all, ha) according to JJ Virgin but otherwise just peachy.

How does that happen!? I mean, it was pretty clear she was not 'healthy' in the strictest sense of the word, but everything I've ever been taught about nutrition (taught, not researched independently) says that she should be a whale within 6 months of starting her cola and Twinkies diet.

Other medical stuff aside, at the very least she should be noticeably obese if not morbidly obese by now.

Some people just have crazy metabolism I guess! My SO's best friend used to weight over 300 pounds, and then all at once he dropped half his weight even though he isn't eating anything differently (all junk food and meat, no vegetables or fruit).

I'm currently in hospital to gain weight, and didn't start gaining until my dietician upped my intake to three meals, three snacks, several high-calories drinks (juice, Coke, etc.), and 1500 calories worth of supplements a day. The doctors can't figure out why I need to eat so much to gain.

I thought my coke addiction was bad - I can drink between 500ml and 1 litre a day - maybe that's not so bad after all!

I don't worry about coke being bad for me since my overall diet is balanced (and was outside of hospital too - in fact more so, since NHS food is atrocious). If I were overweight (I wish!) I'd switch to Diet Coke. But even I wouldn't dream of saying that 30 - 36 cans a day is ok!

Maybe she has an undiagnosed malabsorbtion problem? Did they say on the programme whether she'd undergone any medical testing?

Talking with staff here in the hospital, who, for obvious reasons, often bring up the subject of how I can eat so much and be so underweight, I've come across the opposite phenomenon far more often - people eat hardly anything, and yet maintain a healthy weight or are even overweight.

For example, a nurse, who was recording my food intake at dinner time one evening, told me he'd eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast, a couple of pieces of fruit and cups of coffee during the day, and that he'd go home and have a cooked meal in the evening (though I realise the amount of calories in a meal can vary hugely). He's a little overweight. Or there's another woman on the ward, very underweight at the moment, but gaining weight faster than I am, and eats a fraction of what I am currently eating - a few supplement drinks, a few cups of coffee, and a fairly small evening meal; that's about all, and yet she's gaining.

I usually assume that people who say they eat very little yet don't loose weight are either lying or consuming calories without realising it - for example, thinking drinks don't count as calorie intake, or underestimating the amount of calories in foods.

There's always the malabsorbtion possibility for people who eat lots yet don't gain the expected weight, but when people gain weight supposedly without eating enough to justify it, there really doesn't seem to be an explanation besides lying about or misjudging foods and calories.

And how much must she pee drinking that amount of liquid?! Isn't cola a diuretic? :eek2:

UnXmas said:

I usually assume that people who say they eat very little yet don't loose weight are either lying or consuming calories without realising it - for example, thinking drinks don't count as calorie intake, or underestimating the amount of calories in foods.

There's always the malabsorbtion possibility for people who eat lots yet don't gain the expected weight, but when people gain weight supposedly without eating enough to justify it, there really doesn't seem to be an explanation besides lying about or misjudging foods and calories.

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Metabolism rate very massively. If you go long enough without consuming the amount to support your basal metabolic, that rate will change and your body will adapt to support itself at that level. The same thing can happen if you reduce the amount that you eat over time. If you you suddenly just reduce your intake drastically there will be a weight reduction to begin with but you'll adjust.

As far as the overweight nurse, there is a very good chance that when he started his current eating habits that there was some weight loss, but his body has just adapted to subsisting on less.

One should also remember that gaining weight is not just about calorie intake, it is also equally about calorie burning, activity level of life and also genetics. Nice topic.

I have no clue how that works for people like that radiology tech other than an INSANE metabolism. I'm also left to wonder this about that radiology tech....

• How much do they pee?
• How much GAS does this person have on a daily basis lol (...30 cans of highly corrosive, carbonated beverage....)???
• What do their teeth look like drinking all this metal-cleaning cola and eating/drinking tons of sugar?
• How hyper-active are they with all of that sugar?

I just can't imagine them walking away from this without any effects whatsoever. Definitely DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME hahahaha!

That's just crazy! :ywow:....I'm going to have to find this film.

Freaky Eaters Season 1 Episode 6 "Addicted To Cola" on TLC and/or Netflix depending on your region.

"A Russian woman needs to eat junkfood and drink 30 cans of Cola a day ever since she came to America. She refuses to say she has an addiction, and according to the epilogue, still drinks more than 24 cans of cola a day."


We must find her and study her. She may hold the key to creating a mutant digestive tract that's impervious to toxins.

I guess we all know what I will be watching on Netflix tonight.....

With a case of...

a case of tea bags! Hahahaha!! (I don't drink cola! )

Ha. Me either but I feel almost obligated...

Next time I will have to watch the tartar sauce addict! I do love tartar sauce.

vonfunk said:

Metabolism rate very massively. If you go long enough without consuming the amount to support your basal metabolic, that rate will change and your body will adapt to support itself at that level. The same thing can happen if you reduce the amount that you eat over time. If you you suddenly just reduce your intake drastically there will be a weight reduction to begin with but you'll adjust.

As far as the overweight nurse, there is a very good chance that when he started his current eating habits that there was some weight loss, but his body has just adapted to subsisting on less.

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But why don't I adapt to subsisting on less? I just kept losing weight. Plus in famines, in concentration camps, no one adapted. They starved.

Trevor said:

We must find her and study her. She may hold the key to creating a mutant digestive tract that's impervious to toxins.

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If I could bottle and sell my ability to lose weight, and never feel hungry and never deny myself any food I want (well... except salad and fruit since I can't tolerate fibre, but they aren't the foods people usually think of when dieting for weight loss), I'd make billions.

But it's way more unpleasant than many people realise. I hate having to eat when I'm stuffed full and feeling sick. Last night I was having to force food down as it was coming back up the other way from really bad reflux... I did the same thing with breakfast this morning, and now I have a series of supplements and snacks to get down before lunch. And I still have to panic that my weight may go down and I'll miss my chance to get out of hospital and go home.

Short answer is because you're sick, you're in a healing phase.

and now the long answer.

There is a huge difference between subsisting on less and subsisting on next to nothing. People in famine situations are barely consuming enough to live let alone thrive. As such the body isn't able to build up a store of glycogen to use as energy, when this happens the body will first begin to consume the fat tissue and then the muscle tissue begins to degrade.

In the two situations in one is a 100kg man adapting to consuming 1900 calories (down from 2400*) than that same person surviving on sporadic feeding of low caloric intake every couple of days, which might be 500 calories on a good day.

The other factor depends on the state of health that the person is in, if someone is sick, suffering from chronic illness, or healing the body takes additional energy from glycogen stores in an attempt to mitigate and heal. As such because those store are getting depleted as opposed to replenished, the body then uses up the fat stores. There might be other factors: absorption issues, reduction in appetite might create the illusion that a person has consumed more than they actually did etc etc.


*based on a generic formula, there are more advanced ones that factor for an increase or decrease in basal metabolic rate due to lifestyle activity rate
Men - kg x 24hr x 1 = caloric intake required
Women kg x 24hr x 0.7= caloric intake required

I watched that episode last night with my cup of green tea and fresh mint leaves . Wow I can't even imagine drinking all of that! I personally would have been shocked into change if I saw all of those cases and bags of sugar sitting in front of me. I'm surprised pre diabetic and one lump is all she's dealing with on a serious level (or at least all they care to share on camera, you could sense there was more going on besides what aired)

As for tartar sauce....I don't do mayo either but I make exceptions for tartar sauce and aioli! (Sparingly, of course)

Trevor said:

Ha. Me either but I feel almost obligated...

Next time I will have to watch the tartar sauce addict! I do love tartar sauce.

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CrohnsChicago said:

I watched that episode last night with my cup of green tea and fresh mint leaves . Wow I can't even imagine drinking all of that! I personally would have been shocked into change if I saw all of those cases and bags of sugar sitting in front of me. I'm surprised pre diabetic and one lump is all she's dealing with on a serious level (or at least all they care to share on camera, you could sense there was more going on besides what aired)

As for tartar sauce....I don't do mayo either but I make exceptions for tartar sauce and aioli! (Sparingly, of course)

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It's shameful but she reminded me a little of myself when I was first diagnosed. Not the cola, just the denial, haha.

I watched the tartar sauce woman. More calorie myth-busting as she consumes 2,000 calories in just tartar sauce (main ingredient: soy bean oil, bleck uke_r: ) each day. A whole bottle a day and she puts it on absolutely anything and everything.

I usually find these sorts of shows pretty exploitative but they seem to really genuinely be trying to help these people and from what I've seen they all certainly could use a hand and in some cases it's potentially a life and death decision.

vonfunk said:

Short answer is because you're sick, you're in a healing phase.

and now the long answer.

There is a huge difference between subsisting on less and subsisting on next to nothing. People in famine situations are barely consuming enough to live let alone thrive. As such the body isn't able to build up a store of glycogen to use as energy, when this happens the body will first begin to consume the fat tissue and then the muscle tissue begins to degrade.

In the two situations in one is a 100kg man adapting to consuming 1900 calories (down from 2400*) than that same person surviving on sporadic feeding of low caloric intake every couple of days, which might be 500 calories on a good day.

The other factor depends on the state of health that the person is in, if someone is sick, suffering from chronic illness, or healing the body takes additional energy from glycogen stores in an attempt to mitigate and heal. As such because those store are getting depleted as opposed to replenished, the body then uses up the fat stores. There might be other factors: absorption issues, reduction in appetite might create the illusion that a person has consumed more than they actually did etc etc.


*based on a generic formula, there are more advanced ones that factor for an increase or decrease in basal metabolic rate due to lifestyle activity rate
Men - kg x 24hr x 1 = caloric intake required
Women kg x 24hr x 0.7= caloric intake required

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But I'm not in a healing phase, unless you count my whole life as a healing phase. I wasn't subsisting on nothing. I've been subsisting on less for a very long time, over years, with various degrees of "less", and I would still carry one loosing weight. My weight has been up and down, but I've never starved, except for a few weeks when I was very sick after surgery. I always ate consistently - several small, snack-size meals a day, but my weight would keep dropping, though my weight loss was usually very gradual. When I was admitted to hospital, I had a BMI of 10.

And if I had any doubt over my perception of the amount of food I'm consuming, that's certainly been ruled out in the past weeks when doctors have been monitoring every mouthful of food, every drink, and all the urine and stoma output I produce have been measured and recorded.

But I'm an exception. The doctors couldn't believe how I could eat so much yet be so thin. There is another patient on the ward with me with anorexia (she's on the gastro ward because at this hospital the consultants specialising in nutrition and weight gain work on the gastro ward, so weight gain from anorexia is covered by them), and she is gaining weight faster than me, yet eating a fraction of what I eat. The doctors view her as normal, in her body's response to starvation and refeeding, and me as a complete mystery.

But I still don't get why some people claim they "can't" loose weight. If they ate little enough, then they must.

But please let me know if I've misunderstood your explanation.

In periods of inflammation, even if you are not aware of it, your body uses more energy than if you were healthy, if someone already has a high metabolism that makes it difficult to gain weight. It takes a deficit of 3500 calories to lose a pound but 6000 calories to gain (on average), provided that the person overall healthy.

With some people who can't lose weight there can be a variety of factors, medical conditions can be a contributing factors. A person with a sedentary lifestyle will have a lower basal metabolic rate than someone who is more active, which means they require less energy to function, unless there is a sudden drop off, a planned intake reduction weight will not be easily lost because the metabolism adjusts.

The amount of stored glycogen in the body can affect weight loss ability, carbs are turned into glycogen,the body uses glycogen, if there is too much it gets stored in your fat. If no glycogen is readily available it converts fat tissue into glycogens. You can reduce your intake and will slowly see results, however the glycogen stores are still being replenished, if you continually feed those stores the process can take incredibly long.

It is far easier for the body to convert carbs to energy in to usable than energy it is to convert protein and fat. You can drop from a 2500 diet that is high in protein and fat to a 1700 calorie diet that is made mostly of carbs and not lose weight. It usually takes a couple of days for the readily available glycogen to get used up after people stop eating carbs, at that point the fat will start to get broken down, but if there is a constant stream of carbs, that just gets used as opposed to the glycogen stored in fat tissue. With a lot of non-crash diets people start to use up the glycogen in fat tissue, but they eat carbs again so the body goes back to feeding on that as opposed to breaking down the fat.

I loose weight even when there is no inflammation present.

If someone has a sedentary lifestyle, or some other factor which means they require less calories than they would otherwise, they'd still loose weight if they reduced their intake to below the amount they're currently requiring.

Punctuation may have been off, you can be in a period of minor inflammation and not be aware of. It happened to me and even when the doctors took a look inside with a scope they didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, however there was other physical evidence to point to the fact that I was.

As far the explaining why someone who doesn't eat a lot can be overweight, I have explained it, and offered further breakdown. It is at a point where I can't reduce the concepts or re-explain it further in a different way. I have explained the body's use of glycogens, I have explained the storage, I have explained how the deficit causes body fat to break down. I am done attempting to explain. I have fully explained the concept on an an energy intake level, and I have not even broached the other factors that could be in play (thyroid, hormonal imbalances etc).

You keep saying the exact same two things, and ask to explain further without asking for clarification on any point. I am done with this subject, because you either can't get past or won't try to get past the concept of "just eat less" when it comes to losing weight.

I'm finished with this.

I'm asking for clarification because I don't understand your point. If someone eats little enough, whatever other factors (thyroid, slow metabolism, etc.) they will loose weight. It's physically impossible not to.

This is my last attempt.

If the caloric reduction is more than the body can adapt to then it will lose weight. This happens quicker if there are no carbohydrates in the system to convert to glycogens. If it was as simple as eating less equals weight loss, then if the average person went a day and a half without eating they would lose 1-2 pounds. The reason it doesn't is because of the glycogen in your system.

When you stop eating carbs it takes the average person anywhere from 24hrs to 5 days to use up the glycogen stores (depending on diet & activity level). If your diet is 2700 calories a day and you reduce it 2100 calories everyday, but continue to eat carbs your body is still getting most the energy it needs, but realises that it isn't getting as much so it tweaks how it works in an effort to conserve energy. There will initially be some weight loss (often minor) as your body sorts out the new normal. You are still consuming carbs, and still producing glycogen, your body has now learned to cope at that intake level so that is the new amount it requires, as such no more weight is lost.

Fat lose occurs at the point where your body is unable to properly adapt. This generally happens when the caloric intake drop is massive. You convert less food into the glycogens than your body needs to survive, and your body starts breaking down the fat tissue where excess glycogens are stored.

Atkins & paleo for weight loss work on the fact that your body body processes carbs better than it processes fat & protein, the process for breaking those down into energy is inefficient. If you eliminate carbs, your body uses up the glycogens in your system, then starts breaking down fat tissue to get at the stored glycogens (ketosis). You could be consuming more calories than you were before, but because they are not carbs they are not being processed as efficiently, so your body turns to the glycogens it stores in the fat tissue.

The things you two are saying aren't mutually exclusive.

Von is correct, weight loss has to do with many things, not just calories. I can attest to this very much recently as I've gained and lost the same 20 pounds 2 or 3 times in the last year and it was often against the swing of my caloric intake. Recently I've cut my intake and still gained despite being fat and protien heavy.

Xmas is also correct in that sustained calorie deficits of an appropriate size will pretty well always result in weight loss. But for many, myself included, keeping those sorts of gains is well nigh impossible.

Vonfunk: thankyou for your explanation. I wasn't trying to be difficult, or argue with you for the sake of it - sorry if it came across that way. I really am just trying to understand.

My doctors are completely baffled by how I just keep losing weight and losing weight, and by how I needed to eat far more than anyone else to gain, so it's a subject that's been frustrating me a lot recently. I hear people say that it's difficult to lose weight; that weight loss will stop as the body adjusts, etc., and yet it doesn't seem to happen for me, even though I've tried all different levels of calories intake and diet - increasing gradually, increasing suddenly, the doctors tried me on mainly liquid calories, high protein, high sugar, high fat, etc. etc. I have started gaining now, but only by having a massive calorie intake which just doesn't feel sustainable long-term, especially with how full I get, and how I'm regularly getting various different episodes of digestive problems that mean I'm physically unable to eat as much. I hate having to eat this much and how ill it's making me feel all the time. I'm desperately looking to find a way to get my body better at conserving calories!

Prior to dd dx with Crohn's. My daughter was eating amazing amount of food and failing to gain any weight. No one would believe how much she eating until she attended and swimming competition in camp situation. The other parents, and coach were amazed that she was eating much more food than the teenage boys.

As the disease developed she unable to maintain weight. She lost 14kgs in under 2 months.

She has now stop swimming, maintaining a weight lower than her GI would like. She is in remission.

Her weight is always higher when is exercising regularly.

Watched another... It's addictive (ha...).

She only ate deep fried french fries for like thirty years. Less of a calorie 'freak' and more of a nutrition condition.

How does one survive on potatoes and nothing else for so long? It's a strange world.

Trevor said:

Watched another... It's addictive (ha...).

She only ate deep fried french fries for like thirty years. Less of a calorie 'freak' and more of a nutrition condition.

How does one survive on potatoes and nothing else for so long? It's a strange world.

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Is there anywhere online people in the UK can watch these?

I would have thought potatoes would be one of the easier things to survive on, if you're surviving on only one food - they have vitamin C, carbohydrate, fat if they're in the form of fries. Not sure why someone would choose to do so though!