Q. It was another one of those days: The fat guy didn't eat all that much but expended barely 1/7th horsepower as a "couch potato" in front of the TV. The other guy, heavier than the first, consumed plenty for the day — 3 orange juices, 5 eggs over easy, 1/2 pound of hash browns, a big ribeye breakfast steak, 2 candy bars for morning snack, a couple of helpings of lasagna, 2 coleslaws, 6 buttered rolls, 2 quarts Gatorade, 3 apples, 3 pork chops, 2 baked potatoes with cheese sauce, 3 bananas, a big ice-cream sundae, 2 slices of peach pie, and a dish of low-fat yogurt sprinkled with artificial sweetener for a midnight snack, totaling 10,000 calories. Yet the first guy added weight while the second added not an ounce. Guess how.

A. On football game day, players the size of Anthony Munoz or Lawrence Taylor can easily burn off the rough equivalent of the above menu, says physicist Timothy Gay in "Football Physics: The Science of the Game." Assuming 50 plays for an offensive lineman and 21-22 horsepower-seconds per play, that's 1,100 horsepower seconds, or close to 200 food calories. But this doesn't factor in the body shifting into higher gear metabolically, so the burnoff continues well after the mechanical work stops. PLUS there's the grunting standoff push-on-push where nothing seems to move mechanically, but in fact the players' muscles contract and relax and do ample force-through-distance work. Lots of food for thought.

 
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