kilocalories

To put these numbers in context, 8000 joules is about 2 kilocalories (or about half an M&M candy).

The naive one that measures the average heat output of a human (about 100 watts, or 2,000 kilocalories/day).

A burger and fries meal at one place could be +/- 500 kilocalories despite looking the same.

It is true in the sense that the basal metabolic rate of a dead body is zero kilocalories per hour.

The average American dietary intake per day is around 3,700 kilocalories[1], compared to a recommended value of around 2,000 kilocalories, so it's no mystery why people are getting fatter.

I assume by calories you mean kilocalories in which case you are probably looking around 1000 KJ (kilojoules) for two slices of toast with Nutella.

I assumed by the uppercase 'C' it was kilocalories, but maybe it was just how it was formatted.

Note though that that's calories, and not kilocalories, which is what we generally talk about for dietary purposes.

Convert the units and you've got a few years worth of calories (which I think I mixed up with kilocalories the first time).

And kilocalories out is a function of your voluntary physical activity and your automatic metabolic processes, again based on variables we don't yet fully understand.

Dietary calories are actually kilocalories.

Yes, I get a few year's worth of kilocalories (1 kcal = 4180 Joules, and assuming a 2,000 kcal per day diet) for a 100 kg human.

That explains about as much as saying, "God did it." Caloric surplus equals kilocalories in minus kilocalories out.

It's easy to see that most nutriton specialists aren't very scientific: they refer to meat as "proteins" and measure everything in "calories" (which are really kilocalories) instead of joules.

The efficacy of metabolism is in my opinion very much the big question mark here, and why I think relying on one-size-fits-all concepts like "a carbohydrate translates to 4 kilocalories" is simplistic and in all likelihood flawed.

Even gaining 34 pounds of weight in 4 weeks (not just muscle, but fat as well) would be a serious challenge: 34 pounds of weight equates to about 119,000 kilocalories[1], meaning you would have to eat 119k/28=4,250 kcal a day in addition to your "maintenance" calorie level (i.e.