[Retric]

Excess protein gets you just as fat as excess carbs or fat does. The only difference is people tend to think of protein as more essential even if it’s just being used as energy.

1000 of each isn’t obviously excessive of any one but without exercise you will get fat.

[yawaworht1978]

Well, not really. This all depends on other factors as well. For example, how much glucose is stored at the moment of the food intake. If you are full of glucose, any fat will go straight to the fat deposits. Carbs, if the stores are full, will be converted to body fat in a calorie surplus, up to 25percent, depending on genetics. If glucogen stores are empty, fat won't get stored easily. And carbs will not be converted to fat until the stores are full. And the most important, carbs are metabolized very fast, especially sugars. Fats are relatively slow, protein takes forever and gives you a fullness sensation much sooner than the other macros. Try to eat 500gramm of cake(400grams of carbs give or take) and then try to eat 1.3 kilos of tuna in water, 400gramms of protein, give or take.

[Retric]

The perceptual differences between different energy sources are one thing, but in the end energy is energy. Take a perfectly healthy and balanced diet without weight gain or weight loss, then add just 100 calories per day of extra protein and you will gain weight.

[yawaworht1978]

But the body does not work like that. Metabolism is an ongoing mechanism with very fast adaptions and it cares a great deal about macros. Sugars will cause blood sugar spikes and release many hormones to trigger hunger soon again. In the strictest sense, a calorie is a calorie, but you can't expect that someone who eats a protein scoop a day and the remainder comes from oil and beer will have the same results and body composition as someone who eats mostly protein, some rice and a bit of fats and no junk food at all, then that's wrong.

There is a reason why olímpica athletes have special diets.

[Retric]

> a calorie is a calorie

See that voice in the back of your head is a little cognitive dissonance. People’s behavior changes based on their diet, but outside of starvation metabolism doesn’t speed up with extra calories they just result in weight gain.

Look all kinds of stuff happens when you go to extremes. But, the human diet has a lot of flexibility which is why we don’t have the one true diet despite a lot of research. At the middle of the healthy range +/- a few percent doesn’t do anything. That’s why so much nutrition research is inconclusive we can’t optimize for an ideal peak of perfect nutrition because close enough gives identical results.

Which is what I am talking about. Take a perfectly reasonable heathy diet that wouldn’t result in long term weight gain or loss and then toss in 100 calories of protein and you get weight gain the same way adding 100 of any other macronutrients or even an even split of all three. That’s true because a perfectly reasonable diet is far from the limits on how much protein you can digest per day.

[kiba]

It's more costly to turn protein into glucose, though.

[Retric]

Efficiency isn’t that important. An extra 100 calories per day of protein, fat, or carbs is largely interchangeable assuming an otherwise balanced diet. In other words if your in a balanced diet with 33% of each and you add 100 calories of any of them you will gain weight.