Beth Skwarecki
Published 56 minutes ago: March 10, 2023 at 8:30 am
Image: The Wolverine/20. century
Hugh Jackman recently posted a photo of packaged meals worth over 8,000 calories with the caption, “Bulking. A day in the life.” Gossip headlines ran with the number, reporting that Jackman “eats a crazy 8,300 calories” to prepare for his role as Wolverine. But is he really? Does anyone?
While it certainly takes a lot of nutrition to train hard and build muscle, the specific number offered above is probably an exaggeration – similar to when Michael Phelps reportedly ate 12,000 calories to focus on the to prepare for the Olympic Games. (He later said he definitely wasn’t.)
But, man, it sure is dramatic to be talking about a number that big. Most of us only talk about calories in the context of restrictions: we want to stay under 2,000 calories, or we consider a 1,200-calorie diet — although most people need more than 2,000 calories, and 1,200 is basically a starvation diet. When we see a number that big, we are appalled that it is so high, but we also have no frame of reference that could lead us not to believe it.
What is the purpose of such a high-calorie diet?
If you spend most of your time dieting (or think about it), you may need to step outside of your comfort zone to read this, but often in order to stay healthy or pursue an athletic goal, a person requires eating more food than they do would otherwise do . Sometimes they need to eat even when they are not really hungry.
For example, a high-level marathon runner who trains 100 miles each week needs to fuel every step of that mileage, which can mean snacking during the run and big meals post-workout. If they don’t meet their body’s nutritional needs, they could lose weight and even muscle and bone mass. Malnutrition is a serious health and performance problem for athletes. And yes, sometimes the number of calories an athlete needs can be absolutely staggering.
Another reason to eat more is to gain weight. Jackman is trying to build muscle for his role as Wolverine in Deadpool 3, and it takes a lot of food to provide both the workouts he’s doing and the raw materials – like protein – to build the muscle tissue itself.
It’s not just actors who bulk up: bodybuilders typically spend much of their off-season building more muscle, and strength athletes of all kinds (like weightlifters) will bulk up from time to time in order to build more muscle and get stronger. No matter how much energy you expend in your daily life and exercise, you need to eat more to give your body enough excess to gain weight.
How Many Calories Do People Actually Eat When They Gain Mass?
To get an approximate number of how many calories a person might eat while bulking, go to a calculator like tdeecalculator.net and enter your height and weight. Knowing your body fat percentage helps too, as it tells the calculator how much of your weight is muscle. (The more muscle mass you have, the more energy your body needs.)
For example, as a short woman, the calculator estimates that I have a BMR of 1,421 and that I’m likely to burn a total of 2,200 calories per day with moderate exercise. At an “athletic” level of training, which is probably closer to the truth, my total calorie burn is 2,700. As luck would have it, I’m currently bulking (probably the only thing I have in common with Hugh Jackman) and I know from experience that if I want to keep gaining weight, I need to eat about 3,000 calories.
I entered Hugh Jackman’s height and weight as I found them on a celebrity gossip website (6’2″ and 84 kg, but please take these as totally unverified estimates) and we get a BMR of 1,800 and a ” Athletes” calorie burn of about 3,500. To gain mass, he would most likely need around 4,000 calories a day if he were training hard. This isn’t a blanket; it’s possible he’s training harder than the calculator suggests. And maybe his trainer wants him to aim for a little more just to be safe, so he can stay affluent if he misses a meal.
I can’t tell you exactly how many calories Hugh Jackman actually eats, but the rivalry he’s fueling with his co-star Ryan Reynolds might have something to do with his “Day in the Life” post roughly doubling so many calories contains number of calories someone his size would consume for a large part. I find it interesting that there are two of each box in the picture. What if his meals are prepared to provide around 4,000 calories a day, with some allowance for additional snacks and desserts?
Jackman previously said his trainer made him eat 4,500 calories a day while he was appearing on The Music Man. He also said that sticking to that number was “not nice” and said that as of January he was “just eating and exercising.” It sounds like he has it easier now – not like he’s eating almost twice as much.
Let’s compare him to Michael Phelps for another data point. The Olympic swimmer reportedly ate 12,000 calories a day, but as far as I can tell, he never actually said he ate that — it was a figure calculated by reporters. He’s since said he ate more like 8,000 to 10,000, which is still a lot. Research on athletes has shown that no matter how much they eat, the human digestive system cannot keep up with more than 2.5 times our basal metabolic rate over the long term. For Phelps, that would be about 5,500 calories, although it’s probably safe to assume that Olympic athletes aren’t like the rest of us — and that he may have managed to burn more calories for brief periods at the peak of his training. (It’s also possible that he aimed for 8,000 or more but didn’t manage to eat that much on a daily basis.)
A review of studies of bodybuilders’ eating habits found that the average calorie intake for bulking was about 3,800 per day for men and 3,300 for women. So if you want to know what people typically eat when trying to build muscle, here you have it.
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