Are there foods that would cause a person to gain more weight than the food itself weighs? For example, if I ate a pound of sugar, could I gain more than one pound (assuming that I didn’t work out enough to burn off the calories)?
I’d assume, if it’s possible, that such foods cause me to retain other material in addition to their own mass. Or am I just hopelessly confused?
There was a thread about this a while back. I believe the conclusion was that it comes down mostly to calories. 3500 extra calories equals one pound of fat.
You’d be hard pressed to find a food that is 3500 calories per pound. I don’t think sugar would do it. I found a reference putting peanut butter at 166 calories per ounce which only gives you 2656.
Some foods might cause you to retain water, but that would only be temporary.
A calorie is a unit of energy. If you eat more calories than you burn and expel, the excess energy is stored as body fat.
The fat contained in the food you eat is not the fat that ends up on your thighs. Your body makes its own fat from the nutrients in digested food. Some foods like fats and sugars have a high concentration of calories per pound. It is very easy to eat more calories than you burn (and therefore put on weight) if you eat a lot of these foods.
My hypothetical example involved sugar, which has no fat content that I’m aware of.
cher3’s response cut to the heart of what I (inelegantly) asked: is there a food that contains enough calories to cause me to gain more weight than the food itself weights? (Is there any food containing more than 3500 calories per pound?)
The question isn’t “Can I lose weight if I stop eating heavy foods?”
mmm, olive oil… yummy… add some garlic, a bit of salt and just drink it with a straw. Right up there with the Man Show’s Gravy Smoothies.
Basically you’d be looking for something extrodinarily high in fat…or just plain fat… 1 gram fat =9 calories while 1 gram carb (sugar) = 4 IIRC… so, if you feel like eating a block of suet one afternoon, you could probably skip the olive oil and have nice crunchy sunflower seeds to chew on as well.
All oil has 14 grams of fat per serving (1? 2 tbsp?) so they’d all be about the same caloric value (1800 or so calories per cup), though they of course all vary in saturated and monosaturated and turbo-kryptonite-enhanced-radioactive fats.
Granted, TGI Fridays had a praline cheesecake that seemed to defy all the natural laws of food… a thin slice was something like 900 calories… I suppose a cheesecake binge might just put you over the top, though I think 4 slices would be well over a pound.
I have to add, according to that chart and taking into consideration we’re talking about eating one kind of food, it’d take 44 pounds of asparagas to = one pound on your body. Doesn’t that just sound…delish? Mmmm (I hate asparagas with a passion)…
This is kind of tempting to turn into a contest of some sort… a prize if someone can eat what’s equal to a bodyweight pound of mayonnaise… or pork rinds or…
gah!
Cliff bars… which would include a trip to the ER free of charge to get the person’s teeth unglued, cleaned and flossed…
Meg “cliff? More like petrified tootsie roll bars” aira
Mmm, probably right… but overall, all protien/power/popeye bars seem to all be a form of flavored chewy plastic sugary crap. Perhaps the idea is that you can chew it up and use it to: spackle, pack a wound, fix an air/water leak in your bike/kayak/boat/4x4… or, if used in the context of their name, perhaps cliff bars can be chewed up and squished onto the pads of one’s hands for great spiderman action on the face of El Capitan.
Other possible uses include resoling your shoes in the wilderness, throwing at bears & mountian lions in self-defense, pounding in tent pegs, stuffing in the sides of your boots to enhance rattlesnake protection, sealing shingles to your roof, teaching the dog not to steal food of the table, teaching your inlaws not to steal food from the table, road repair, roach repellent (in the manner of borox or boric acid or whatever the heck that stuff is)…
I’m now pondering the concept of putting a pile of powerbars in my front yard to discourage soliciters… in the heat, hopefully the bars would melt and I could have the next Oudouvi tar pit.
I would think that salt might meet your needs. Only a relatively small amount would cause you to retain a larger amount of fluids.
As you suggest, it causes you to retain other material in addition to its own mass, thus causing you to (temporarily) gain more weight that it has itself.
If the molecules in a lump of any food weigh a pound, how are those same atoms, re-arranged, with some excreted as products of metabolism, going to weigh more than a pound?
Does a pound of clay weigh more than a pound because you reshaped it?
I don’t know if this is true,but new fat cells also contain water.In effect,if you eat a a pound of fat,the cells it takes to store it also contains some water.