This is an interesting reader question: Does watching porn make you fat?
In theory, the only thing that actually makes you fat is eating more calories than you burn, so technically, watching porn does not directly make you fat because porn does not have any calories.
Practically, it contributes to fat gain as it increases food cravings, promotes snacking, lowers activity levels, and lowers your testosterone levels.
How Porn Makes You Fat
Porn gives you a lot of dopamine in your brain (for 0 effort) that indirectly contributes to making you fatter.
1. Porn will get you eating midnight snacks.
People who watch porn often stay up late at night watching porn. This leads to more midnight snacking and overeating.
When people snack after a porn binge, it’s never something healthy like eggs or chicken or milk. It’s always junk food.
Junk food is mostly vegetable oil, sugar, and grains i.e. calorie dense garbage that significantly contributes to fat gain.
2. Porn increases hunger cravings for junk food.
Porn triggers your dopamine which in turn causes you to want more dopamine release. This is why addictive things like short form video (reels, shorts, etc.) try to give you a hit every 20-30 seconds.
When you watch porn, your brain starts craving more dopamine when you are done with your masturbation and orgasms. This means you will often crave junk food and will order it to your house.
Be it Zomato, DoorDash, UberEats – a ton of people order junk food to their home after watching porn.
In fact, some food companies actually advertise on porn sites and say it leads to orders.
“Look, people watch porn, and people get hungry, so stop judging me.” – Pramod Rao (senior vice-president of growth at Zomato)
“Turns out advertising on a porn site is a great idea if ridiculously low CPCs turn you on. These are pretty awesome numbers by any standard, and we’re quite pleased with the number of clicks and app installs driven by these ads so far.” – Zomato in a blog post
Basically, you watch porn, you feel tired (psychologically) and hungry, and you order some junk food.
The food you will order will mostly be junk food – mostly low-protein foods made from gains, sugar, and vegetable oils. Think pizza, pasta, burgers, etc. Not healthy or nutritious food.
All the extra calories start adding up and you get fatter.
3. Porn will reduce your activity levels.
Porn kills your motivation to get anything done. Anyone who watches porn will attest to this. The dopamine overload slows you down.
You want to go for a walk or hit the gym. You decide to do a “quickie” first.
By the time you are done, the motivation to do the physical activity is gone. You might just laze around or start binge watching even more porn – but the main activity you planned to do is skipped.
Reduced physical activity means fewer burned calories. Combine that with increased calorie consumption and you’re looking at fat gain.
4. Porn will compromise your hormones and promote fat storage.
People who watch too much porn tend to sleep less because they’re up late at night watching porn.
They also eat more junk food and have lower activity levels (see the points above).
What does low sleep, junk food, and low exercise do to a man? It reduces testosterone levels.
Lower testosterone means more fat storage and less muscle mass. There are no two ways about it. Testosterone encourages your body to gain muscle mass.
When women inject testosterone, they also become muscular and rugged. Without the testosterone injections, their bodies are rounded, soft, and feminine.
In conclusion, porn does make you fat. It increases junk food cravings, midnight snacking, and reduces activity levels. Porn also leads to less sleep which means lower testosterone levels.
What I recommend? Just stop watching porn.
It literally brings NOTHING positive into your life and messes you up in lots of ways.
If you can’t stop (no shame in needing help), take the Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program. It has helped 10,000+ people quit their embarrassing porn habit for good.
Whatever you do, get rid of porn from your life and see how much healthier you become.
Until next time.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
