It is quite apparent that you can’t assume that all of the weight gain comes from the material that holds the calories.
An equivalent example would be breathing. We take in oxygen, O[sub]2[/sub] and nitrogen, N[sub]2[/sub]. Then we breathe out the nitrogen and the oxygen molecule with carbon added to it, CO[sub]2[/sub]. Since we breathe out the same amount of gas that we breathe in over the long haul it’s obvious that we continually lose weight from breathing.
If there were such a thing as an inexpensive oral CO[sub]2[/sub] monitor, someone could make a killing in the weight loss market with an “air diet.”
Yep. A gift for our plantaceous friends. 
The answer to this thread would be a whole lot clearer and simpler if people would stop all the talk of calories. Calories have nothing to do with it.
Bottom line is that basic chemistry says you cannot create matter or mass out of nothing. Your body is not except from this. Therefore you cannot gain a pound in weight if you have not put a pound of food into your mouth. That includes water, dry crackers, lard or big fat cream and chocolate cakes. The number of calories are irrelevant. If it weighs less than a pound you cannot, at all, in any way, ever gain more than a pound in weight.
All the calories do is determine the energy value of the food and how much activity you would be required to expend to avoid converting the mass of it into fat. But even if you lie down all day and did nothing more active than breathing you could never succeed in making that less than one pound of food into more than a pound of fat.
exempt :smack:
Thank you, FG, thank you.
BTW; nobody is exept from making a little typo. 
You can’t increase your weight by more than a pound if you eat only a pound or less. But people who are checking their weight and bodies minute by minute have taught themselves (or think they have taught themselves) what a pound “looks like”. Fat is the most voluminous sort of food. So, if someone like that ate a pound of pure sugar, they’d see their bodies add what looks, to their “trained” dieter’s eye, like 10 pounds of body mass.
I don’t think that it is required that the food containing the excess 3500 calories be the only thing that is converted to fat. The calories are important. As I understand it, if you take in more energy than you use the excess is used to manufacture fat (hydrocarbons and water) which is stored in various places and is available for use during times of a deficiency. I don’t think the statement that 3500 excess calories adds one pound means that the food containing the calories is instantly converted to fat. I envisage the process more as taking place over a period of time and using a part of all of the food and water that is ingested to make the fat.
And I agree that you can’t manufacture matter out of energy by chemical processes.
What if water already in the body is retained in the added fat, instead of being excreted as excess water? Could 3/4 of a pound of butter result in 1 pound of body fat including retained water that would not have otherwise stayed in the body?
Alright, I’m going to say yes, as long as you take away the water and air restrictions, and I’m not sure that it will work for quantities up to a pound, but what about glycogen storage?
Let’s say our human guinea pig has just consumed all the calories they need for the day to maintain the same weight, but constant glucagon injections have left them with absolutely no glycogen stores left in their liver. Som they eat a pound of lard, and somehow the body can convert this fat into storage carbohydrate, right? And this fat gets turned into stored carbohydrate via water, right, and the person is more than one pound heavier after this process is completed, even though the actual “water-weight” in their system can balance out afterwards.
What’s wrong with this, beyond the fact that your body isn’t 100% with converting fat into glycogen in the situation described and that you most certainly cannot store and entire pound-worth of lard-calories in glycogen?
In a way, you’re sucking up extra water, but not storing it in water form, your storing it as carbohydrate. It’s the best fit I can find for the paramaters of the question.
I think this might be part of the answer. The byproducts of metabolism are CO[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub]O. Those are the raw materials for fat which is hydrocarbon. If excess energy is available could fat be made from them? The body has lots of enzymes for catalysing reactions. I’m a poor chemist, which is being charitable, but there has to be some reason for nutritionists to say than on average an excess of 3500 calories results in a weight gain of 1 pound and not put any caveats on the statement about having to also eat a pound of food along with the calories.
Does one of you have have a really accurate scale? Please, eat exactly 1/4 lb of ice creamand see if you gain more that 4 oz. Stand on the scale as you eat and see what happens.
Ok, eat something that has 875 calories and see if you gain a pound.
Four onces. I’m tired.
Let me take a run at this, and see if it makes sense. No, I am not a biochemist or nutritionist or anything like that. I’ve had my own doubts and worked through them, maybe.
Over the very short term, eating a pound of food causes a pound weight rise. Conservation of mass and all that.
However, only a part of what we ingest and excrete is food. We drink fluids, we breath, we sweat.
Furthermore, the biochemistry of food digestion is probably pretty darn complex. Without knowing many details, what I understand is that given too many calories, the body changes them into fat. That is, we should insert a long disertation here about just what exact chemical processes the body uses to convert the extra chemicals into human fat - just how much water combines with how much air supply, et cetera. How many extra oxygen and hydrogen atoms did we pick up, and from where?
But anyhow, I think I see that a pound of extra food could indeed cause a weight gain of more than a pound without violating the workings of the universe.
Boy, I wish Cecil would take on simple, obvious questions like this one.
There are two answers;
Yes, assuming you drink pleny of water to wash it all down with. ** Futile Gesture** is correct. No matter what you consume- if you only consume a pound of it, you can’t gain more than a pound afterwards.
However, when considering weight gain from calories, they do figure that you drink water, breathe, urinate, excrete, swaet, etc. The critical thing when eating that pound of lard is to remember that your body needs a lot of water to digest it. And that your body uses up energy (“burns calories”) just digesting the food.
The OP asked a meaningless question when he added in the restriction “without taking in anything else like water”- since then you’re no longer talking about the way the human body works.
Mangeorge - I, too, wonder where the public gets its misinformation from, but one answer is, of course, advertisements. As Futile Gesture points out, a lot of people are hung up on “calories.” Most people equate them with fat, or at least with something tangible. Many people consider “calorie” to be a rough measure of weight. As I read these posts, I see a lot of people trying to rationalize a belief that it is somehow possible to gain more than a pound by eating less than a pound. I’ve had this conversation a number of times with folks who are mostly diet-crazy. And it’s like talking two languages. I say, “You can’t gain more than a pound by picking up a one-pound rock,” and they say, “Yeah, but…” There is, in the science ed biz, a large amount of literature on “misconceptions.” It is at the center of a lot of curriculum design. And I, too, wish The Great Master would answer this one for once and for all. How do we summon him? xo C.
No, I don’t think it violates the rules of the question. The question seems to be realated to real life, practical effects, and people define weight as how much your body weighs averaged out a bit to neglect hour-by-hour and day-to-day variations due to hydration, waste accumulation, etc.
And nobody expects people to sit there and not drink anything until they die to count something towards “putting on weight.” Let’s say we had a hypothetical material called Tastesogoodbutmakeyoutubbium with a calorie density of 20 kcal/gram. You eat a pound of this stuff, you end of with two pounds of fat after your body converts it to its prefered storage-means. Of course water or something else will be involved here in the chemical conversion, but I think that’s a reasonable allowance for day-to-day life. Eating one pound of Tastesogoodbutmakeyoutubbium has caused you to gain two pounds of how people typically define “my weight.” I’m arguing the same deal might possibly take place between eating a pound of lard and glycogen. Although you can only store what, 100-120 grams of glycogen?
threemae, I am dedicated to the First Amendment above all the Others, therefore I value your opinion as highly as I do my own.
So, if saying “water or something else will be involved” means the same as “the weight of water or something else will be added”, well, then I don’t think anyone is disagreeing. But that’s not what the OP’s friend, or others, say or mean. The implication is that those foods are so grossly fat-making that they add more than their own weight to your body. I’ve heard, and argued, that statement a million times. At least. I’ve even asked “You mean it makes you hold water?” and the reply was always “no”.
But I don’t, of course, expect anyone to die of dehydration to prove that.
This fallacy is as hard to convince against as the one about the supposed “Sugar High” in kids.
Oh, oh. Here we go!!!