Weights of foods versus weight gained

I ahve been wondering this for a long time, forgive me if it is a stupid question -

Can you gain more weight from a food than the food actually weighs? So if I have a 350gram bag of caramels, and I eat them all, can I gain more than 350grams? (don't worry, definitely not planning to eat all my caramel today.)

Well, for a moment you would weigh 350 grams more.....but all that really matters is the calories.

If you eat 3500 calories (over the amount you burned) you will weight 1lb more.....7000 calories, 2lbs more and so on.

The actual weight of the food itself will go away once your body digests the food and, well, you know....

I have wondered that too.. my theory is no. This is only my opinion, but here is why:

Your theoretical caramels have a lot of carbs. If you took all those carbs at 4 cal/gram and converted all those cals to fat, you would have fewer grams (since fat has 9 cals/gram). But even if your theoretical food was, say, butter, it still takes energy to process and convert those calories into body fat and you would still end up with less weight than you ate. And in reality, most food has a lot of water anyway. On the other hand, you store water along with the food also.. but still I think the answer is no, you can't gain more weight than the food weighs.

 

Actually, the answer is 'yes'... But it depends on the food.  The caramels are a good example of something that could potentially make you gain more than you eat because they're mostly sugar.  When you eat sugars they are turned to glucose in the blood-stream and then to glycogen in the body.  Each gramme of glycogen has 3 or 4 grammes of fluid attached to it.  That's part of the temporary 'water weight' or 'fluid retention' everyone talks about.   Salty foods and alcoholic drinks will do something similar for slightly different reasons.  Which is why (and people will know this from experience) if you eat a relatively modest-sized but salty, sugary chinese meal and wash it down with a few glasses of wine the scales can show you several pounds heavier the next day. 

Luckily the effect is temporary.... :-)

I don't think so, scientifically that's not possible o.O

Original Post by gi-jane:

Actually, the answer is 'yes'... But it depends on the food.  The caramels are a good example of something that could potentially make you gain more than you eat because they're mostly sugar.  When you eat sugars they are turned to glucose in the blood-stream and then to glycogen in the body.  Each gramme of glycogen has 3 or 4 grammes of fluid attached to it.  That's part of the temporary 'water weight' or 'fluid retention' everyone talks about.   Salty foods and alcoholic drinks will do something similar for slightly different reasons.  Which is why (and people will know this from experience) if you eat a relatively modest-sized but salty, sugary chinese meal and wash it down with a few glasses of wine the scales can show you several pounds heavier the next day. 

Luckily the effect is temporary.... :-)

 Oh that's cool.. I thought about glycogen but I was thinking of liver glycogen and about it being depleted and then replenished.. so I thought if the stores were replenished up to whatever level they are supposed to be at, then that is not really weight gain unless there is excess. I did not know that all glucose initially gets converted to glycogen, that is interesting.

Do you know if there is any significant amount of water weight stored when we put on fat? I assume we would have maybe a little just for circulatory purposes?

 

I'm no scientist but there are a lot of web-based articles on how/where the body stores glycogen... how much... what it does.... where it ends up.  It's quite interesting. 

I'm pretty certain you can gain fat and not necessarily gain fluid with it.  I also think you can gain fluid but not fat.  Hydration levels are changing all the time depending on environment, activity, fluid intake and food choices e.g amount of salt consumed....

A calorie is a unit of energy, specifically, HEAT energy.  One calorie, as it's used here, is defined as the amount of heat (energy) needed to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water by 1° centigrade.  For the Americans here, this is approximately 1.8° fahrenheit increase in temperature for about one quart of water.

To lose one pound of body weight requires a 3500 calorie deficit.  Things like sugar and butter are calorie dense and small amounts can add lots of calories fast. 

Nonetheless, the real mystery to me is how a 1 pound box of chocolates (only about 2400 calories), can add 5 pounds to my hips (about 17,500 calories)! 

   (I'm joking...)