Calorie content and physical weight of foods.

Factual Questions
1

I have a feeling I will struggle to describe what I am trying to find out in any coherent manner but i’m always up for a challenge so here goes…

Whilst having lunch just now the subject of dieting came up, (we are on something of a family diet at the moment), here is a loose transcript of the conversation:

Mother: I have bought some Rivita for you to eat if you get hungry late at night.

Me: I prefer rice cakes for a snack at night.

Mother: I know, but rice cakes contain x calories each (I forget what x is) and when you eat them you tend to eat the whole packet (which is not too far from the truth).

Me: It doesn’t matter how many I eat because they are so light anyway, the whole packet only weighs about 5g (a gross under-estimate I know) so if I eat them the most I could possibly put on in weight is 5g.

The conversation then went on about the pros and cons of eating food that was low in calories compared to foods which are physically light. I was certain that if I ate 100g of food there was no way I could put on more than 100g of weight (in fat), whilst my mother insisted that the number of calories in the rice cakes was more important than the weight.

So who was right (or closest to being right)? Me saying that it is impossible to put on more weight than the weight of the food you consume of my mother saying that the calorific content of said food was far more important than the physical weight of the food?

I realise of course that eating food that weighs the same but has fewer calories is always the preferred option but am I wrong in saying eating a pack of rice cakes is no big deal because they weigh so little physically they couldn’t possibly ruin my diet?

2

Weight of foods includes stuff thats just filtered out of your body almost immediately; for example, water is a common one. Water will add weight to an apple, but apple will have very little calories.

3

Weight and Caloric content aren’t tied together. Just because you eat something that’s ‘light weight’ doesn’t mean you can’t get fat off it. Weight is mostly based on the water content of the food you’re eating.

Eating a table spoon of lard might “weigh” the same as a slice of apple but that apple is mostly water while that lard is mostly pure energy.

BTW, a whole bag of rice cakes isn’t that good for you. As each cake might only be 35 calories (I don’t know) a serving is usually only 2-4. A whole bag probably contains 300-400 calories and if you’re plowing through them every night you’re going to gain weight.

Eat a cumcumber instead. ~35 calories for an entire (large) cucumber is really good. Since you can’t actually digest most of the cucumber it’s a really light snack and good for you as well (unlike a rice cake).

4

Granted eating a full pack every night is a bad idea but am I right in the assumption that if I eat a 300g packet of rice cakes it is impossible for it to cause me to put on more than 300g in weight?

5

A general rule is that fats contain 9 calories per gram, while carbohydrates and proteins contain about 4 calories per gram. (The 9-calories-per-gram rule goes, pretty much, for stored fat too, so you need to consume/burn roughly 4,000 calories to gain/lose a pound of fat.) You also need to consider the fact that many foods are mostly water (0 calories/gram) and that fiber also does not count towards the energy total.

It’s not possible to gain more weight than the weight of the food you eat. If you eat, say, 100 grams of butter or lard, you could potentially gain 100 grams of fat. But even if you ate 100 grams of sugar, you couldn’t gain 100 grams of fat, since 100 grams of sugar contains only 400 calories, enough to gain (in theory) only 44 grams of fat.

According to Ryvita’s site, original Ryvita and their rice cakes contain about the same number of calories per slice. 100 g of original Ryvita contains 315 calories; 100 g of the rice cakes contains 394 calories. It’s not a huge difference in calories, and it’s quite possible that 100 g of rice cakes would be more filling than 100 g of crispbread. Divide the number of calories per 100 g (or whatever amount you typically eat) by 9 to determine the number of grams of fat you could theoretically gain provided you’re consuming more calories than you expend, overall.

6

No carbs at night. Seriously.

If you’re serious about losing weight, plain dieting isn’t going to do much. You have to combine that with relatively frequent exercise, and then try your utmost to maintain both regimens.

Split up your meals. An easy way to do this is to half each one of your meals, so you have one every two or three hours.

Drink plenty of green tea. Fresh, preferably. Make up a big batch, then throw in a lot of splenda and then throw it in the fridge. It’s pretty good, even if you’re not a fan of green tea.

And oh - try to only eat combinations of carbs/protein or protein/fat in any sitting. You want insulin as low as possible when you ingest any fat at all.

Get yourself a big tub of skimmed cottage cheese. This is an excellent night snack. Nuts, too, but you might choke on that if you go lie down after a mouthful.

7

Thanks for the advice, I do eat healthily with lots of fruit and veg, though sometimes I think I eat too many vegetables. At dinner times my mother piles up the plates with usually 4 different types of veg and a mountain of potatoes, seemingly working on the theory that if it contains half the calories you can eat twice as much of it. More often than not I end up leaving some of the dinner as i’m stuffed to bursting with vegetables.

I think my problem mainly lies with eating late at night. For some reason I always get hungry at about 11 o’clock at night and end up eating just before I go to bed. I’m still eating healthy foods, rice cakes and cottage cheese is common but is it a real sin to eat late in the evenings?

8

I’m not too fond of the Atkins diet, but I think a low-carb approach might help you. Carbs actually MAKE you hungry, and fats are filling. This way you eat less all around. Avoid saturated (animal) fats, and try to get some monounsaturated and unsaturated fats in your diet, from fish, natural (really natural. If you see the word hydrogenated on the back label, it’s the kind that makes you fat and gives you heart attacks) peanut butter, almonds, flax seeds, and cod liver oil. Olive and canola oil for cooking, instead of butter.

Do remember that in sleep you’re burning less calories than when you’re awake. Whatever’s left over when your body deducts what it needs throughout the night is either excreted or stored. Especially carbs. Most of them are supposed to be used pretty quickly. If you must, avoid high-GI carbs (these provoke an insulin response over a longer period of time rather than a huge spike) and stick with proteins and the healthy fats I listed. Unless you’re a bodybuilder or do a crapload of exercise, eating too much before you sleep is a no-no.

If you haven’t started counting calories, www.FitDay.com allows you to log your diet and counts your calories for you.

9

In one sense, you’re right: eating a 300g rice cake can’t cause you to gain more than 300g. However, some foods can cause you to retain water, so that complicates the matter.

And there’s the little matter that the gram is not a unit of weight, but we’ll leave that be…

10

Well, the problem is not with the definition of the gram, it’s with people saying they’ve lost weight when they’ve really lost mass. But as long as they’re staying on Earth you’re right to leave it be :slight_smile:

11

I want to lose weight but i’m not going to go planet hopping to achieve it :slight_smile:

12

Huh? If I’m hungry, and I eat carbs (or anything else), I become less hungry, or (if I eat enough) not hungry at all. In fact, the most filling foods I know of are all high in carbs.

13

It’s important to note that this retained water isn’t just some osmotic effect caused by the dissolved components of the rice cakes floating about your system, it’s more integrated than that; your body stores fat in specialised structures - these structures necessarily contain water by virtue of their construction and function - in this case, I wouldn’t call it too much of a stretch to say that you can gain more than 300g from eating 300g - in the sense that it can be an utterly inevitable aspect of the process.

14

The answer is actually that you’re mostly wrong.

Eating 100g of some food can make you put on more than 100g of mass.
The most calories you can get out of 300g of food is (depending on school fo thought) 900 to 1000 (fat and alcohol respectively, some argue alcohol is not metabolized at 10 calories a gram, but that’s for another discussion). If your body is extremely efficient and you are in a caloric surplus, eating 1000 calories can make you gain a little over 100g of fat and retain quite a bit of water, pushing your mass gain over 100g.

However, you seem to be using an weird approach to begin with. Food, in of itself, regardless of the kind of food, does not make you gain fat mass. A caloric surplus does. A caloric surplus occurs when calories consumed through food exceed those burned through basic metabolism and activity.

Eating a package of rice cakes that is 100g in of itself can at most make you gain just a bit of weight(4 x 100g = 400 kcal max), since rice cakes typically do not contain fat or alcohol. However, being mostly carbohydrate, routinely eating them before bedtime can make you hungrier throughout the day due to blood sugar low in the morning, which can start a chain reaction of carb indulgence.
To answer another question posed in the thread, carbs can be very filling, but if they are simple, they are metabolized very quickly, raise your blood sugar, and cause (if your pancreas are working) a strong insulin response, which can lower your blood sugar below normal and make you hungry again very shortly.

Also, the “filling” effect of carbs is sometimes an illusion. Consider the extremes. For example, compare a large slice (1/6th of a 10" cake) of scrumptious carrot cake with icing at ~ 1000 calories, to a 30oz ultra-lean buffalo steak at ~ 1000 calories. Most people can eat a meal and then wrestle down such a slice for dessert, yet I doubt a lot of people can eat a 30oz cut of meat without effort on an empty stomach.

I don’t claim to be an expert in anything, but when it comes to dietary knowledge, what most people consider common sense is often very very wrong. Even people who claim expertise are often wrong about diet and exercise. And I don’t mean debatable aspects, plain biological aspects. People will often talk about “working off fat” in certain areas, and eating “foods that don’t make you fat”.

I realize that I haven’t cited anything, but I closed my Firefox page, if somebody demands citations I’ll pull 'em up and post them.

[debatable opinions ahead, sorry]

My general advice to most people wanting to lose weight to replace a couple meals a day with lean meat and fish and raw vegetables(not a salad). In my humble, non-dietician opinion, a lean cut of buffalo or beef, raw broccoli and a cucumber is the best food you can eat. Eat an occasional apple or orange. Avoid sweets, juices, fats, grains and cereals.

15

This has been discussed recently in another thread; I’m at work right now so I can’t go looking for it.

However, to shorten the conclusion from the other thread: the law of conservation of mass means that you can’t gain more weight than the substances you ingest.

HOWEVER, the substances you ingest include water and other liquids, and oxygen and other gasses - how much of these are digested and turned into fat or energy depends on the food, and the amount of these ingested per day is much larger than any potential weight gain (the rest is…discarded) – so the “conservation of mass” argument doesn’t hold unless you count it all.

Assuming you can’t measure all intake/output, the right way to figure it out is your mother’s: 3500 calories ~= 1 pound. If, over time, you consume 3500 calories more than you metabolize, you gain a pound. If you consume 3500 calories less, you lose a pound. That’s it; the weight or mass of the food doesn’t matter. Only total calories consumed and expended (and by extension, the metabolic rate that determines the expending rate).