Can’t find the article (of Cecil’s, I think) about weight gain and food mass. Summary: My friend thinks one can gain more weight than the weight of the food ingested. (More than a pound from a pound of chocolate.) I think you cannot gain more weight than whatever you eat or drink weighed. Anyone know the answer or where to find the relevant article?
So, um, if I eat a pound of chocolate, and I gain two pounds, where did that extra pound come from? I’m not a plant, after all; I can’t make sugar out of air.
That’s an invalid ‘if’. You won’t gain 2 pounds by eating 1 pound of anything. But it’s worth checking. Weigh yourself on a good scale, eat a pound of chocolate and weigh again. Get back to me with the results.
You cannot gain more weight than the food itself.
1 pound of body fat = 3500 calories.
So, you could eat a meal weighing two pounds, step on a scale and you will have gained two pounds immediatley.
How many calories are in that food? Say it’s 3500 calories…if you could suspend time and keep your body from burning calories, then all the food you ate through some magic trick to make the food digest without burning any calories could turn that food into one pound of body fat.
You cannot eat one meal and gain more wieght than the meal contains.
You would have to eat about 7 pounds of very fattening foods, almost to the point of getting sick, eating about 10,000 calories then sit in a coma for a few days and you will gain 1-2 pounds NET! Gross weight gained until you pass that food = 7 pounds minus about 1 pound to exist while you burn it.
You body at rest is still burning 2000-2500 calories a day.
Your friend is a dope.
If the food has a very high salt content, perhaps it would cause the body to retain more water? Though I’m not sure if you call that “gaining weight.”
Well, your body also stores extra water in it’s fat cells as well. When eaten, fat provides 9 Calories per gram, or (454g * 9 Cal/g) 4086 Calories, but one pound of body fat represents 3500 extra calories stored. The discrepancy is due to the extra % water in the cells.
Anyhow, I think it’s possible to gain more than one pound per pound of food, if you’re also allowed to drink and you take this water retention into account.
Fact:
stand next to scale (reliable one)…step on and weigh self.
Eat 1 pound candy bar.
weigh self again
if the scale is sensitive enough, it’ll detect the extra pound
You could get a scale to register two pounds, but that is purely because the scale is accurate +/- 1-3 pounds.
Scales are not perfect, and digital doesn’t mean “better”. Actually, a brutally accurate analog scale is superior to any digital scale for such small increments. Even then, around 1 pound of weight is still within the variance.
You might eat 3 pounds of meat, step on the scale and see that it registers 4 pounds…or it might register 2 pounds.
Yes, JJ, “it’s possible to gain more than one pound per pound of food, if you’re also allowed to drink and you take this water retention into account.” It’s also possible to gain more than one pound if you wrap a wet towel around your waist before weighing. The concept here is that you can’t gain more weight than the weight of what you ingest. If you ingest water, of course you add that weight also. About 9 pounds per gallon, I think.
So, nobody recalls this article by Cecil?
Yes, but if you don’t ingest the food, you won’t retain the water. If you have twins who weigh exactly the same, eat the same, and do the exact same activities, one twin eating a pound of fat will weigh more than a pound more than the other one after the body has had a chance to get back to equilibrium.
Comparing it to putting on a wet towel is innacurate.
Philster, for this sort of discussion it’s more important to have a precise scale than an accurate one, as it is if you’re trying to lose or gain weight.
You phrase it incorrectly. The point here is you can’t weigh more than the food / drink you ingested.
So if both twins ingest 1 pound of food and 1 pound of water, yes, twin A who ate the fat might weigh 1.15 pounds more when all is said and done, while twin B might weigh .4 pounds more…but both of those are less than the 2 pounds of stuff they took into their systems. No matter how much water twin A retains, they’ll not weigh more than 2 pounds more at any time.
Many conflicting views on what the OP exactly means. My interpretation is this: say you are on a stable diet and your weight is constant. One day you eat, in addition to your usual diet, one pound of pure fat. After that go back to the regular diet. The extra fat will cause a temporary weight gain, and after a few days (?) the weight will go back down to normal. The question is, can that temporary weight gain be more than one pound? It could be, if the fat caused the body to retain more water, but I don’t know for sure.
We’re missing one last factor.
Everybody has agreed that we have to weigh both food and water in this experiment–in any form ingested. Luckily, humans don’t absorb water or food in a lot of different ways, so they’re fairly easy to monitor.
However, air is a different thing. I seem to remember that just a bathtub full of air weighs about the same as a hammer. Most of the air you breathe in is nitrogen, and it’s breathed back out, but a lot of the oxygen leaves with an added carbon atom as carbon dioxide. That’s the “smoke” from your body engine–if you add up all that carbon, you can see that you can lose a pound or so of carbon in your breath overnight, just sleeping!
Does your body retain oxygen when it digests and stores fat? How much? If you ate a pound of fat, how much more would you weigh after it was processed?
Thank you, Jman; I am astonished at the extensive mental masturbation so many posters are indulging in over this simple concept. You state it correctly. Cecil has answered this clearly but I haven’t located the article.
Maybe this will clarify the point for some who are having difficulty: Nothing you ingest, be it solid or liquid, can initiate some chemical process that will cause you to gain more weight than the weight of whatever you ingested. You can gain more from eating a pound of chocolate than from eating a pound of lettuce but neither can cause you to gain more than a pound. That’s the only point.
Absolutely not true, at least for people on a low carb diet. When on such a diet the glycogen stores are low. If you eat a pound of carbs (or close to it) your body will refill glycogen stores which are stored with (IIRC) 9x their weight in water!!!. Also I believe fat needs some water to store too.
So if you eat 1 lb of choc. you will need to also store extra water to store the food.