So, I’ve been losing weight lately, mostly by changing my diet to include more healthy food and, well, less food in general. Something that I’ve been wondering about is the consequences of eating junk food like candy bars or twinkies. I would normally assume that if I eat a twinkie, I would at most gain one twinkie’s worth of weight, right?
Does junk food do something wonky to your body chemistry to make you gain weight more than if you ate one twinkie’s weight in carrots, or is the problem mostly when you, say, eat a box of twinkies, or half of a pizza, or other similarly large quantities of junk food?
Fat is stored in your body in association with other things such as water, so it is at least technically possible to put on more than one pound in weight for only one pound of (hypothetical) foodstuff eaten, assuming you’re drinking water or something else as normal.
I’m not sure what, if any, everyday foodstuffs would actually make this happen though; maybe cubes of pure lard would.
But generally speaking, it’s nothing much to do with the weight of the food items; it’s the calories they contain.
To elaborate, 1 pound of fat is the equivalent of 3,500 calories. A twinkie is 150 calories, so if you ate 23 1/3 twinkies, you’d gain one pound. And have a sugar swing from hell!
If you check out Dr. Shapiro’s Picture Perfect Weight Loss books, you can see how much food you could eat for how many calories. The image that clicks on shows you what you could scarf down for the same number of calories as a bakery muffin. Very cool books!
The damage from a twinkie isn’t just the calories it contains, but the insulin spike it causes as well. Short version is that it’ll cause your body to store whatever nutrients are floating in your bloodstream, whether they’re from the twinkie or from something else you ate previously.
Sugar swing = the insulin spike ultrafilter refered to. While he was refering to a single twinkie, I’m pretty sure if I ate 20+ twinkies at one time I’d be pretty much feeling like crap. The sugar low is alot lower than you started off, when eating alot of refined sugar.