From personal experience, I find that gaining weight when eating one or two meals a day is very difficult—that is, if you don’t eat cake, drink large amounts of fruit juices, or consume other similar sweet foods. With one or two meals, even if they may be quite large (and with huge quantities of white rice), I find keeping the weight is actually the challenge (although I am managing quite well now).
To eat 1750 kcal, without sweets—say the other 500 kcal is from fats/other, totalling 2250 kcal—you would need to eat almost 9 cups of white rice (especially taking into consideration the meal probably also consists of vegetables, protein, etc.). That is a lot of rice to eat in one or two sittings, every single day. So, I’m guessing that monks who are obese are probably getting quite a bit of help from sweets.
I’d be interested in hearing how monastics experience weight loss/weight gain/stable weight with one or two meals a day (# of meals, meal size, types of food).
@Pasanna @anon61506839