About 6 weeks into a cross country bike tour, I spent a rest day eating all day. I think I ate 4 massive burgers and a large supreme pizza. Probably somewhere around 6000 calories.
A week prior, I ran out of food in the mountains. I finally got to a store, bought a loaf of bread, a pack of Oscar-Meyer bologna, a pack of cheese slices, two sodas, and a red bull. When I left the bench near the store, I had a few slices of bread left.
When you put out incredible amounts of energy, you can eat a fairly incredible amount of food. I don't understand where the food goes, it really doesn't feel like you should be able to eat that much volume but you can.
Those foods you ate are all more calorically dense than plain potatoes so my point still stands. It's not about the calories but the total volume of food that the human gut can process in a day. Have you seen 13 pounds of potatoes?
Potatoes are ~0.7kg/L, so that's ~8.4L of potato over the course of the day & 370 grams per waking hour, which is one big potato.
Yes my examples were somewhat high energy density but in the second example, I probably had 3L+ in my belly in just one meal. Honestly I think your body just gets used to it.
I'm not familiar with the 13 lb of potato claim, but it strikes me as a stretch (hah!) but not inherently implausible.
A week prior, I ran out of food in the mountains. I finally got to a store, bought a loaf of bread, a pack of Oscar-Meyer bologna, a pack of cheese slices, two sodas, and a red bull. When I left the bench near the store, I had a few slices of bread left.
When you put out incredible amounts of energy, you can eat a fairly incredible amount of food. I don't understand where the food goes, it really doesn't feel like you should be able to eat that much volume but you can.