Again, if one only consumes 500 ml of corn syrup a day one would not only lose weight, one would fairly rapidly become seriously dehydrated and in not too long die.
Not I think what the op meant.
It looks like a pound of Crisco has about 2,700 calories (that’s the most calorie intensive food I have in the house). That is less than a pound of human fat, which has 3,500 calories-- or, at least, I’ve always been told that you need to burn 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat. That sounds like an awfully convenient number, since it comes to 500 calories a day for a week, so I’m guessing it’s an estimate. I don’t know whether lard is closer to Crisco, or closer to human fat, or actually higher than human fat, but having more than 3,500 calories is what would be necessary. It would have to have enough calories to cover what it takes to metabolize itself, and then some more on top of that.
Now, that doesn’t mean that in the short run, you couldn’t eat a meal that made you gain a lot-- water weighs more than Crisco, after all. But the answer the question fairly, you have to consider what you weigh after the item has been entirely metabolized.
One thing to consider is that if you store calories, you store water with them, as opposed to burning them off, where you just have to burn off the calories themselves, so water weight gain is a consideration only if the food item is in excess of your caloric expenditure for a time period.
Let us suppose that winter is coming and somebody offers to help you with your heating. You get your choice of 1 tonne of fresh cut green wood, 1 tonne of seasoned wood or 1 tonne of charcoal. Which are you going to choose?
Definitely not the green wood. Pow!
A pound of Crisco has4010 calories. Lard 4091.
A good account of the answer is given here.
The number is an estimate, and derived from many other estimates, but those have nothing to do with days.
The OP’s question was ambiguous, and depending on how we interpret, both DSeid and Exapno are correct. They aren’t contradicting each other, except possibly as regards to what the OP meant.
If the OP wanted to know whether we can violate conservation of mass, the answer is clearly “no”, as Exapno points out. In this, he is completely correct.
If the OP wanted to know whether changing our diet by adding more food could cause us to gain more weight than the weight of the food (but ignoring the amount of water consumed but not excreted), then DSeid is (I believe) correct, in saying that it is possible. For that to happen, though, certain conditions have to be met.
I meant that dieters are told to eliminate 500 calories from their diet per day (or burn 500 more) to lose a pound a week.
Then I am using Crisco completely wrong. I was going by how much I use to sub for animal fat by weight in old recipes. The can says to use it exactly like you use lard or suet.
Because the first question is simply answered and uninteresting, I tend to believe that the OP is asking question 2.
Exactly. The op is not asking if eating and weight gain can violate the laws of physics and create mass from nothing. The intent was made clearer in the following interchange:
And while the put on a pound is wrong (with the exception of if she had been low carbing it a long time before then, then it could be close to correct, if it was very sweet chocolate) it is indeed posible that adding food over and beyond what your baseline is can cause you to gain more weight than the weight of the food consumed.
I apologize if I had come off strident. Nutrtition science does not violate the laws of physics; it does require a more complicated application of them. Not just one step thinking of “Conservation of Mass” or “Second law of Thermodynamics.”
I’m not sure why this is even an argument. The water stuff was covered by the first few responses to this thread, and brought up repeatedly since. I think we all agree that, yes, without water, no, you can’t gain more weight than the food you eat weighs, but, accounting for water, yes, you can retain more water because of the type of food you eat.
I am not sure it is an argument. It’s just answering a GQ in a comprehensive manner. “Water being retained” is both incomplete and implies something other than what is actually occurring which is water as a critical part of the storage of glycogen and fat and as part of new muscle mass.
Not counting the oxygen that comes in and out in close to equal amount as well, we take in at least 3 pounds of mass each day (going on the low side of water intake). We also usually get rid of that much mass each day - through exhaled carbon in CO2 and water vapor both exhaled and lost through skin, through water and nitrogenous compounds in urine, through stool. Indeed we only gain weight when the outputs are less than the inputs and only lose weight when the outputs exceed the inputs. Water output all sources will ramp up or down to match changing water input in almost any steady state condition. And in every excess energy condition water output will be less than water input as water is stored as an integral part of retaining any other mass … for either energy storage (fat and glycogen) or new tissue built (e.g. muscle hypertrophy).
Weight gain or loss is an alteration in a steady state match between mass input and output. If a net mass gain occurs it is always a small fraction of the total input but it can be a mass larger than the marginal mass changed from the steady state, or even occur in some condtions of less marginal mass input, as the gain is more related to the energy content added, the tissue that the additional energy allows to be formed (and its energy density), and the energy cost of processing the additional energy input (the Thermic Effect of Food). We can leave the impact of additional surplus energy input on energy output as a variable out of it for now but that is a major factor as well and in my mind an interesting one.
Yes, yes, and yes, I understand what you are saying. However, just to be clear, let us also point out that,
If you eat one pound, you will weigh more than one pound more, until you excrete.
The food is oxidised, ‘burnt’, using oxygen from the air. (weight gained ‘from thin air’). The oxygen has real weight, you weigh more as you digest the food, when you wake up in the morning you weigh more than you did when you went to bed last night.
So if by ‘gain more weight’ you mean ‘weigh more’. yes, you weigh more than the wight of the food you ate.
You also loose weight by presperation/breathing. Food is converted to H20 and CO2, and you gradually loose that. (Then you dump a whole load of it…). Where you are in the cycle depends on the balance of oxidation and transpiration, but on the simple measurement made by my friends, YES in the morning when you weight yourself, YOU PUT ON MORE WEIGHT overnight.
Cite? Never heard of someone gaining weight thru breathing. Oddly, the only thread on that subject I could find was from our erstwhile member Liberal.
Actually you weigh* less* in the morning, a surprising large amount less. We’ve even had a thread on it here before, with cites. Why so much less? The reason for the large number is mostly increased water loss through skin (transepidermal water loss) caused by increased parasypathetic activity during slow wave sleep (SWS).
Respiration btw is a consistent net loss of mass: yes O2 in but the same O2 out attached to carbon in CO2 and some water vapor as well.
Well, we know the law of conservation of matter: matter cannot be created or destroyed.
And in *The World We Live In, *it reads “it would take 10,000 pounds of diatoms to make 1000 pounds of copepods to make 100 pounds of herring to make ten pounds of squid to make one pound of bass to make 1/10 pound of man.”