Lets say I ingest 500ml corn syrup every day (and nothing else) and I “output” 500g to toilet every day.
Do I gain weight?
Or put differently… can food let us gain more weight than it actually weighs?
(I also posted the question (here, but I think the teeming millions might be quicker to respond, or just more eyes.)
Then you’ll die of dehydration.
If you drink normally, your diet can influence how much water is retained in your cells, and it is possible to gain more weight in the first period after an abrupt change than the total weight of the food eaten.
Right, but apart from that, no. The weight gain from any food in itself is going much, much less than the weight of the food. Even if it all metabolized, most will be excreted as CO2 in your breath, and as water (in breath, sweat and urine).
Posting from my phone so please pardon the errors but:
Will a Doper dietician please weigh in on this? This question keeps popping up here and I think that the answers people are offering are wrong.
Maybe its me or maybe its a misunderstanding of the question. But as I understand it, the physical weight of the food has little to do with weight gain. Its the calories, right?
Like I would gain more weight from eating a pound of lard than from eating a pound of carrots?
You would likely retain more weight from eating a pound of lard. That is because the lard is fat, while the carrots are mostly water…so that is a terrible example.
The answer is no. You cannot get more from a system than you put in. That is crazy.
If you ate a pound of lard, the most you could hypothetically gain, in weight, is <1 lb. And it is going to be a lot less in reality, because the majority of the lard will be used as energy or passed.
I’m not a dietician, but I think you’re mistaking the question that was asked. To your question: yes, all things being equal, assuming (let’s say,) very little metabolism to offset it or reason for water retention, you’ll gain more weight by eating that lard than by eating the pound of carrots. In fact, you’ll probably gain nearly a pound of body weight from eating the lard, and a few ounces, if anything, by eating the carrots.
What Reenen was asking, on the other hand, was if there was anything you could eat a pound of that would let you gain more than a pound of body weight long-term. Lard is very close to that limit, most low-calorie foods are far below it. They have fewer calories per pound.
Does that help?
Maybe, but you wouldn’t gain more than a pound, which is the OP’s question.
ETA: Dammit, doubly ninja’d.
Hi guys, thanks for the feedback! I highly appreciate it.
I’ll come by this page every now and then to check if we had the dietitian or some expert chimed in, but I appreciate and concur with all your information.
A dietician may tell you what to eat to better gain or lose but you really asked a physics question.
Other than causing some extra water to be gained, i.e. really salty foods, you will not gain more than you eat.
Of course, you have to drink water to gain it – salty foods won’t create water out of nothing. I know you understand that, but just wanted to make it crystal clear that you can’t gain more weight than the food/drink you put into your mouth.
I wonder if you could create some substance that would absorb oxygen and CO2 from your bloodstream or something, so that the food you ate would also take in the stuff you breathe, making you gain more weight than you ate (although, not more than went into your mouth)? Before it killed you, that is.
No. If you weigh 100 pounds, eat a one-pound bag of M&Ms, and a liter-sized Coca-Cola weighing about 2.2 pounds, you’ll weight 103.2 pounds. That number will change as it is metabolized and eliminated, but you’ll never weigh more than your original weight plus the weight of the food and drink.
And, with all due respect, why would you think otherwise? Where is that extra weight coming from?
So when Mrs Bob says that if she eats 4oz of chocolate, she puts on a pound, is she wrong?
Yeah bob++ that is the origin of the question. I am sharing the office with a lady that is running a weight loss competition at work, and I try to tell them that it’s not the slice of cake that made them pick up 500g, it’s the total combined foods that they eat. If they cut back on other stuff because they ate the cake, they’d be OK.
I don’t know the answer but I don’t think it is a completely irrational question. Think of it this way: Is there a food that has a greater calorie density than stored body fat? If so, there would still be questions about the efficiency of metabolising that food into stored fat.
Nope, for women the laws of conservation of matter don’t apply. In fact a woman can put on weight simply by thinking about chocolate.
To followup on my own post: Because water has no calories, people tend to forget about it in their weight calculations. My guess is that the “extra” weight is water in the fat storage.
As a very pedantic limiting case, eating an unsaturated fat, may meet the OP’s definition, but only just. The body is able to saturate some bonds in unsaturated fats - for instance to make omega−9 fatty acids from unsaturated precursors. This involves the addition of a single hydrogen atom to the lipid chain. So the fat gets very very slightly denser. Eventually this hydrogen atom probably was obtained from water, but if we are not counting drinking water in the question, we do get a situation where, in principle, the laid down fat is slightly denser than the fat that was eaten, and there is a mass gain. However the energy cost of saturating the bond probably more than neutralises the gain. Let alone all the other energy costs in running the digestion.
It might be possible if that slice of cake somehow caused them to retain much more water, (and the extra weight is coming from the liquids they drink, of course.) I know that when I was more carefully dieting and watching my weight, I could gain three or four pounds or so of water weight after my “cheat” days, when I’d have carb and salt-heavy meals. The weight would stabilize after a couple of days or so back to normal. It seems to me that some people are more prone to these weight variations (my own 180lb body can vary up to 4 lbs on a normal day, and 8 after heavy exercise.)
Yes, you are quite right.
Pure lard or oil probably does, but it is beside the point. As has been said, it is a mater of simple physics. You can’t increase the mass o f you body beyond the amount you take into it. Your body cannot create mass by itself.
I very much doubt that the extra hydrogen atoms, in such a case, will have come from water. They will probably have come from some other food (perhaps other fat) that has been metabolized.
In any case, it will take energy to carry out the reaction that saturates the bond, which will mean other food has been burned up in the process. Saturating a bond is going to lead to more mass burned off than the increase in mass resulting from the addition of hydrogen to the molecule.