Calories, Cake, Fat

Factual Questions
1

So if you have a piece of cake that weighs, say, four ounces, and is composed of lots of fat and sugar and good things like that, and you eat it – there’s no way you can gain more than four ounces of weight from it, right? So why are people so paranoid about eating things like that? Or does the cake somehow magically turn into fat cells which can then absorb more water and junk than what initially created them in the first place?

And does this mean that, if two people are the same age but one person weighs 100 pounds more, that that person had to have eaten at least 100 pounds more food than the other person within their life spans?

Hmmmm. I guess it just seems funny that sometimes I will stress out about not eating a Hershey’s kiss, when it’s impossible (I would think) to gain more weight on my body than the piece of chocolate weighs itself.

2

Those ounces add up to pounds in time…

3

It is possible, but not by much. The human body stores Calories at around 3500 per pound, but fat is stored at around 4100 per pound. So if you ate 1 pound of fat, you’d gain about 1.2 pounds. Most foods you encounter, I would imagine, have less than 3500 Calories per pound, so as long as you stay away from pure fat, what you say should be true.

4

Eating a piece of cake is not bad. It’s the total diet for the day that might have been soured.

Let’s say the cake eater that day at 2000 calories (and was a guy who weighed about 180 lbs).

Then, gulp, he eats the cake.

Okay, he now ate say 2600 calories, provided he washed it down with water.

Now, he just made a deposit of 600 cals into what we’ll call his ‘fat bank’. He deposited 17% of one pound of body fat (600/3500).

If he repeats these habits daily (eating a little more than the 2000 cals he burns by living everyday), he will start to see 1/4 or 1/2 pound per week.

Coversely, if he eliminates some bad habits AND boosted exercise, he’d lose 1+ per week (a typical modest diet).

on your other issue: You could outweigh someone on equal eating because the other person was more active (over a period of time).

Most issues of gaining/losing weight occur of fairly long periods of time where the same bad habit was never broken (eating junk).

5

qazz, you really should read

It’ll shed some light on your question.

6

I always enjoy the ads going down the left side of that page, they are in stark contrast to the sober and accurate advice given on the page itself.

7

Wow, that’s a cool site. Thanks. :slight_smile:

8

G’day

You ought to be aware that the assumption that all calories consumed and not burned are stored as fat at a rate of 3500 calories per pound has no experimental support. And it seems unlikely in face of the fact that high-energy compounds (such as ketones and bile salts) are secreted in the breath, sweat, urine, and faeces (from bile). Several diets, which are apparently successful, do not work by limiting calories (eg. the Atkins diet). Note well that type I diabetics lose weight no matter how much they eat, unless insulin is supplied. Note also that biochemical researchers were able to produce a strain of genetically-engineered mice with defective insulin-receptors on their fat cells: these mice ate 20% more than controls, but achieved only half the weight.

In response to the OP:

A piece of cake is about 1/4 each of sugar, flour, butter, and eggs, so it consists about 50% of carbohydrate. This carbohydrate will be broken down to monosaccharides in the gut, absorbed into the blood, and converted to glucose. When this glucose reaches the pancreas it will suppress the secretion of glucagon by the alpha cells and stimulate the production of insulin by the beta cells.

Among other effects (some of which bear on long-term storage of fat) glucagon stimulates the production of urine, and insulin suppresses it. So the effects of eating a slice of cake include retention of fluid, and a short-term increase in weight at the scales.

For example, last Sunday night I was forced by politeness to eat a serving of about 750 mL of thick soup or thin stew with quite a lot of barley, carrots, parsnips, turnip, and pasta in it. The following morning, I had gained 2 kg in weight (about 4.5 pounds). By Tuesday morning the weight gained had disappeared again.

As regards the longer term, insulin stimulates fat cells to lay down fat, glucagon stimulates them to release it into the bloodstream. These two hormones also determine whether metabolically active cells run on fat or on glucose (except for nerve cells and red blood cells, which are obligate sugar-burners). They also control the production of cholesterol (by the liver), vasodilation, vasoconstriction, eicosanoid synthesis, blood pressure, and a handful of other things.

It is well worth looking up ‘insulin’ and ‘glucagon’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Regards,
Agback

9

I strongly disagree. Having been on many diets I found the only one that works is limit your calories and exercise.

Atkins is a joke. I was on it and didn’t lose anything. And I was 100% true to it. It allows you to eat so you do. A calorie is a calorie.

What you need to do is find your daily metobolic rate. Mine is 1800 calories a day. If I do not work out and eat more than 1800 calories I gain. If I eat less I lose.

Not everbody can eat 2000 calories for some, expecially the smaller types it is too much.

The average person should multiply their desired weight by 11. For me that would be 190X11 or 2090. This would be the number a TYPICAL person would need to eat to maintain that weight. But as you see I need less. Why? I am getting older. Even though I run for over 1 hour 4-5 times a week, as you get older you simply need less food.

10

Agback, their are excellent pieces of advice in the link I provided, which lays the grounwork for understanding how weight is gained.

Like anything, the are other subplots, exceptions, other things to know, etc. And the link delves in things link how insulin works, etc.

For the overwhelming majority of the masses, it pays to know how efficient the body is at burning few calories, and how easy it is to exceed the amount burned.

Health and fitness experts make their bread and butter knowing the basics, while specialists can deal with the other stuff.

And Atkins…well, maybe you should read his book again.

11

I was not aware of that; thank you. But I was under the impression that the only way to lose weight (short of surgery and purgation, I suppose) is by burning more Calories than you consume. Is this untrue?

Markxxx, your formula seems somewhat conservative, using just myself as an example. It predicts I need 2225 Calories per day, whereas HowStuffWorks predicts 2388 assuming zero activity. For what I would consider normal activity, the estimate is more like 2650. I realize that it’s not exact, and maybe an uncertainty of over 400 Calories is to be expected. But is there something I’m overlooking?