How much fat can you gain in one day I What to do the next day after overeating
In this YouTube video, Eric Roberts breaks down the math behind weight gain and loss, emphasizing that 1 lb of body fat equals roughly 3,500 kcal. He uses a 2,000 kcal maintenance baseline (and a 1,500 kcal deficit example) to illustrate how occasional overeating—whether a single 250–5,500 kcal excess or a lenient weekend of 3,000 kcal per day—affects weekly calorie balance. Roberts shows that modest over‑eating rarely pushes a person into a net weekly surplus, so no significant fat is gained; any scale increase is mostly water weight from extra carbs and the weight of food in the stomach. He also discusses the thermic effect of food (TEF) and non‑exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) as minor calorie‑burning factors that can offset a small portion of excess calories. The second half addresses common fat‑loss misconceptions: cutting calories too low (e.g., 1,200 kcal/day) leads to severe hunger, bingeing on weekends, and ultimately a net zero or even weight‑maintenance outcome, despite the illusion of rapid loss. Roberts advises consistency, warns against extreme restriction, and reassures viewers that a single day or weekend of overeating will not ruin progress if the overall weekly balance remains in deficit.
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YouTube, what is going on? Welcome back to the channel. In this video, we are going to be talking about how much fat can you gain in one day, in one weekend of overeating. We're going to simply just discuss everything you need to know about how you gain fat, how you lose fat. Should you be freaking out if you go over your calories? How much body fat are you gaining when you go over your calories? All things alike. Now I will say this, stick with me here because there is going to be a lot of math in this video. You don't have to do the math. I will do the math for you, but there's going to be a lot of numbers, some stuff I'm going to write on the board here. Even if you're not the mathematician, I promise you I'm going to do this for a reason and it's all going to make sense as we go through this video. So please just stick with me here. I promise it'll make sense. Promise it's going to make you feel a lot better. Better. So stick with me. All right. First and foremost, the thing I want to make sure we are both on the same page of is 1 pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. And you may have heard this before, but to gain 1 pound of fat, you need to eat 3,500 calories above your maintenance calories. To lose 1 pound of fat, you need to eat 3,500 calories below your maintenance calories. 3,500 calories less than your maintenance calories. So just remember that as we start to go through this right here, because that is going to be a very important thing. Also remember, your maintenance calories are not just looked at one day, but we typically look at your maintenance calories for over the course of a week. And so let's kind of start to dive into some things when it comes to What happens if you overeat on calories one day, or if you overeat on calories for an entire weekend? All right, so for the sake of this video, we're going to be acting under the premises that your maintenance calories are 2,000 calories and your calorie deficit calories are 1,500 calories. And this is a little bit of a spoiler alert for when we get to the fat loss section. This is why you may have heard before eat 500 calories under your maintenance calories. If you take 500 calories less than your maintenance calories and you times that by 7, 7 days in a week, that would give you 3,500 calories. And so if you eat 3,500 calories less than your maintenance calories, you would lose 1 pound of body fat. And that's how that came about. So just kind of keep that in mind. We'll get to that a little bit more In the fat loss section. But for right now, let's say again the premise of 2,000 maintenance calories, 1,500 calorie deficit calories. Now remember what I said, we look at things from a weekly basis as well. So not just a daily, but an overall weekly basis. And so let's say again, for the entire week, if you take your maintenance calories every single day, that gives you 14,000 calories for So over the course of a week, if you eat 14,000 calories, you are going to maintain your weight. And again, these are just arbitrary numbers. Everybody's maintenance calories are different. If you want to find out your maintenance calories roughly, I'll put some links here in the description of this video to hopefully help you out with that. Now, again, your calorie deficit is 1,500 calories per day. So over the course of a week, if you eat 10,500 calories, you will lose 1 pound over the course of that week. So with that being said, let's take if you overate on calories one day, and let's say you overate on calories by 250. Let's say the entire week you ate 1,500 calories, and then Sunday rolled around and you ate 1,750 calories. If you overate on calories by 250 one day, not only would you not gain body fat, you would actually still still be in a significant calorie deficit. Your weekly total calories would be 10,250, which is very close to the 10,500 that you would need in order to lose 1 pound of body fat. So just keep in mind, the next time you overeat by 100 or 200 or 300 calories on one day, you did not ruin all of your progress. I promise you, you're actually in a calorie deficit. Because again, think about it from a weekly and a daily. If you ate 1,750 calories one day, that's still less than your maintenance calories. So you were still in a calorie deficit for that day, and you were still in a calorie deficit for the entire week as well. Now let's just say that something happened and you ate 5,500 calories one day. So one day you ate 3,500 calories above your your maintenance calories. Let's just say that happened, but the rest of the week you were in your overall calorie deficit. That math would come out to 1,500 times 6 equals 9,000. 9,000 plus 5,500 comes out to 14,500 calories for the overall week. So if you had one day where you significantly overate in calories but you were on track the rest of the week, that calorie number would roughly come out to your maintenance calories for the entire week. So even though you might not have lost weight that week, you did not gain any significant amount of body fat at all whatsoever, even if the scale goes up a bit, which we will talk about here in a second. So I hope that at least calmed you down, that if you eat a little bit over your calories, or even if you eat a lot of your calories one day, you didn't ruin all your progress. You didn't gain tons of body fat because the math says simply just would not add up in order for you to gain tons and tons and tons of body fat despite what the scale says, which again, we'll talk about in a second. Now let's take a weekend for example. Let's say Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you're a little bit more lenient with your calorie intake. And I don't mean like you're eating every single thing. I don't mean you're eating 5,500 calories for 3 days out of the week. That's not what I mean. I mean like you're a little bit more loosey-goosey. You're being a little bit more flexible. You're having an extra bite here and there or an extra drink here and there. And let's say you ate 3,000 calories on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So you ate 1,000 calories over your maintenance calories for those 3 days. And the rest of the week beforehand, you were in your 1,500 calorie deficit. So again, if you had 1,500 calories 4 days out of the week, that would be 6,000 calories. If you had 3,000 calories 3 days out of the week, that would be 9,000 calories overall for the week. You would have eaten 15,000 calories for the week. If we go back up here, remember to maintain your weight, you would have to eat 14,000 calories to maintain your weight. Let's say this happens to you and you ate 15,000 calories, so you ate 1,000 calories over your maintenance calories. Remember, to gain 1 pound of body fat, you need 3,500 calories above your maintenance calories. You ate 1,000 calories above your maintenance calories. You might not have lost weight that week. I understand you. You might not have lost body fat that week, but you did not gain tons and tons and tons of body fat. You literally gained less than a half a pound of body fat that week, even if the scale went up a bit. And here's why. The scale would go up a bit, even if you're not gaining tons of body fat. Like you just saw, you literally gained less than half a pound of body fat. The reason the scale would go up is because the scale doesn't just measure your muscle mass and your body fat. Your scale measures your water weight, the food in your stomach, your bones, your, your every single thing to your body. So when you have a weekend like this, you're going to probably eat more carbs and you're probably going to have more food in your stomach. For every 1 gram of carb you eat, you store 3 to 4 grams of water weight. So if you significantly eat more carbohydrates, you are going to store more water weight, which is going to show on the scale. And again, number 2, if you just eat more calories, you just quite literally have more food in your stomach, which makes you weigh more on the scale. So if the scale goes up 3, 4, 5, 6 pounds, that is absolutely normal. It doesn't mean you gained 6 pounds of body fat. Like in this situation, for example, again, this is like a lenient weekend, not eating everything in fucking sight, but a lenient weekend. You gained literally less than half a pound of body fat. So even if that scale does go up a bit, you did not gain 5, 6, 7 pounds of body fat in one weekend. It's really fucking hard in order for you to do that. And a side note not to mention, and this is kind of getting in the weeds a bit, but there's something called your NEAT and your thermic effect of food. So the thermic effect of food just means your body has to burn calories digesting food. So if you do end up eating a little bit more food, your thermic effect of food is going to kick up as well, which can then burn some extra calories. And now again, this is like, there's a limit to this, right? We can't just eat whatever the hell we want and like, oh, thermic effect of food will just burn more calories. No, like it doesn't like negate you eating more calories, but I will say with more food there's going to be a little bit more calorie burn. Let's say for example, this 15,000 dropped down to 14,900. And then there's something called your NEAT, which is your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which just means like the extraneous movements you do throughout the day. And like me doing these random fucking hand signals, that's NEAT. Like you walking to the store, walking to the car, doing whatever, that's NEAT. So when you have more food, you typically increase your NEAT as well, which would increase your calorie burn as well. So for example, again, let's say that brought that down to 14,800, not a tremendous difference, but there is some, you know, it might not even be as bad as what I wrote right here. So just kind of keep all this stuff in mind and I really hope it helped you with this aspect of like the weight gain aspect. You didn't ruin all your progress by, you know, overeating calories by 200 calories or overeating calories by 1,000 calories. Like, Even if you overate one day by 1,000 calories, you would still probably be in a calorie deficit for that week. So please realize, stop beating yourself up for going over in calories one day. It's all good. You do not need to be an asshole to yourself, man, and you didn't ruin all your progress. Now let's quickly talk about the fat loss side of things because I want to touch on this because this happens a lot and it's probably happened to you. Remember, you need 3,500 calories in order to lose 1 pound. of body fat. For this example, let's say your maintenance calories are 2,200 calories. That would mean a 500-calorie deficit, which again, 500 calories per day spread out over 7 days, that is going to be a 3,500 overall calorie deficit for that week, which would make you lose 1 pound of body fat. Now, let's say you do that, right? So 1,700 times 7, that is 11,900 calories. that you would be eating throughout the course of a week to then lose 1 pound of body fat per week. Now, what a lot of people do is say, oh, well, I can eat 1,700 calories and lose a pound. Why not eat 1,200 calories and lose 2 pounds per week? Because you want to speed up your weight loss. So, here's how that works out. In numbers form, yes, you would lose 2 pounds per week if you ate 1,200 calories per day. What really happens though is you eat 1,200 calories for like 4 days, you get fucking starving, your cravings are through the roof, you're tired, you're lethargic, you have no willpower. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday rolls around, kind of going back to what we said here. Friday, Saturday, Sunday rolls around and you eat 3,500 calories for those 3 days. 12,000 calories for 4 days and 3,500 calories for 3 days. So 1,200 calories times 4 plus 3,500 calories times 3 is 15,300 calories. If you take your maintenance calories and times it by 7, you're gonna get 15,400 calories. So I guess if your goal was to just maintain your weight, you could potentially do this. I still wouldn't recommend it because it's very unhealthy, and the relationship with food that you are going to develop is incredibly unhealthy, and I would not recommend it at all whatsoever. But you can see Because you actually ate more calories, you actually ate less calories because you didn't try to take your calories so low to the point where your cravings are insane. You're so hungry, you're tired, you're over-restricted. You haven't eaten fucking a— you haven't eaten a goddamn carb in 4 days. Like that's not going to work out long-term, but a lot of people try to speed up their weight loss by doing this thing where they cut their calories super low. And you wonder why you lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, gain weight, and you never actually make any progress with fat loss. You can literally see why right here on this whiteboard. You are doing exactly what you need to maintain your weight. So your weight will go down for a few days and it'll go back up. It'll go down, it'll go back up. It'll never actually trend down. You're just going to stay the same the entire time because you're trying to speed up your weight loss by eating fewer and fewer and fewer calories. And I really hoped this calculation literally proved to you eating fewer calories just to go and binge is not going to work out in the long run. So that was the video for today, guys. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did enjoy it, please feel free to leave a 5-star rating and review. I'm talking about my podcast. I do have a podcast, Eric Roberts Fitness Podcast. If you enjoy this video, give a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and let me know below if this helped you. I hope it helped you with a few things. Number one, realizing one day of going over your calories is not going to ruin all your progress, especially if, like, God forbid you ate 1,700 calories as opposed to 1,500. Remember, you need one pound— one pound of fat is 3,500 calories. So if you overate one day, you'd need— you wouldn't even gain body fat if you were in a deficit because the rest of the week would play itself out. So you didn't ruin all your progress by having one day or one weekend where you went over calories a bit. You do have to be consistent. Don't do this shit every single weekend or you're not going to make any progress, obviously. And again, stop trying to speed up your weight loss because it is not going to work. All right.
