In the loop wrote:
Look at it this way, say that your office has a 1x per month birthday celebration for all employees born that month. Cake is served, with frosting. Say a small piece is 300 calories. You just add this one item in per month and a year later you've got 3600 excess calories total. That's one pound of fat. Repeat for a 20 year career and now you are at 180 instead of 160 lbs. It creeped up on you and now you're 50 years old and to get rid of the chunk you need to eliminate 36,000 calories. So you have to eliminate those cake days and run around 360 miles at 100 calories per mile to ditch the fat. Or cycle forever. Or HIIT and not get injured.
That’s stupid and. Or how this works. You’d almost certainly eat a bit less for dinner after having that cake. Junk food is not great to have every day, but a monthly indulgence is not moving the needle on the scale in the way you describe. Now, eating out for lunch 3x per week and several beers a night be a bigger contributor…not that I ever had experience with that scenario…