7-Eleven's Double Gulp Exceeds Your Stomach Capacity

Your stomach is an impressive organ. When empty, it's about the size of a fist, but it can expand to hold roughly 1 to 1.5 liters (33 to 50 ounces) of food and liquid when you're comfortably full. That's already quite a bit—equivalent to about four cans of soda.

Then there's the 7-Eleven Double Gulp.

A Monument to Excess

The Double Gulp holds a staggering 64 fluid ounces of whatever beverage you choose to fill it with. That's half a gallon. To put that in perspective, it's roughly 60% larger than the comfortable capacity of an adult human stomach. If you actually drank the entire thing, you'd be consuming more liquid than your stomach is designed to handle at once.

The Double Gulp isn't 7-Eleven's only oversized offering. The Big Gulp family includes several sizes that progressively challenge the limits of human thirst:

• Big Gulp: 32 ounces (manageable)
• Super Big Gulp: 44 ounces (pushing it)
• X-Treme Gulp: 52 ounces (seriously?)
• Double Gulp: 64 ounces (why)
• Team Gulp: 128 ounces, or one full gallon (absolutely not)

The Texas Connection

The original Big Gulp debuted in 1976, and it was revolutionary at the time. Before then, the largest fountain drink you could typically buy was 16 ounces. The 32-ounce Big Gulp doubled that and became an instant icon of American consumer culture.

The escalation didn't stop there. By the 1990s, 7-Eleven was experimenting with even larger sizes, eventually launching the Double Gulp. For a brief time, the chain even sold the Team Gulp—a full gallon of soda meant for sharing, though we all know someone who tried to finish one alone.

Your Stomach's Limit

Here's the thing: your stomach can technically stretch beyond its comfortable capacity. In extreme cases, it can expand to hold up to 4 liters (135 ounces), but this is deeply unpleasant and potentially dangerous. The stomach's muscular walls are designed to expand gradually, not to be bombarded with 64 ounces of fizzy liquid in one sitting.

Drinking a full Double Gulp means you're essentially forcing your stomach to operate well beyond its comfort zone. You'll feel bloated, sluggish, and probably regretful. Plus, you've just consumed somewhere between 600 and 800 calories if you filled it with regular soda—roughly a third of an adult's daily caloric intake.

But hey, at least you're hydrated. Sort of.