Calorie Question

Terry R. McConnell said:

Is it possible to gain a pound from eating less than a pound
of food? Or to put it another way: 3000 calories (roughly)
beyond the amount needed to maintain weight will produce a
one pound weight gain.

Isn't it 3,500 calories per pound?

Quoted message said:

Is there any food so high in calories that less than a pound
of it has more than 3000 calories?

Yes. Butter and lard are both over 3,000 calories per pound.

Phil M.

Terry R. McConnell said:

Is it possible to gain a pound from eating less than a pound of food?

Or

If the food is /dry/ carbohydrate or protein, it will require water in
order to be stored in your body as glycogen or muscle.

But there is this nice principle in chemistry that mass is preserved in
chemical reactions. The mass of the products of a chemical reaction is
the same as the mass of all the reagents that went into it, regardless
of the chemical change. You just have to be sure to identify everything
that is a reagent. If some of the solvent, like water, is being used
up, you have to include that in the stoichiometry.

(In chemical reactions, there is actually a very, very slight change in
mass in accordance with the energy-matter equivalence E = mc^2. The
mass difference is significant in /nuclear/ reactions which involve a
lot of energy).

Quoted message said:

to put it another way: 3000 calories (roughly) beyond the amount

needed

Quoted message said:

to maintain weight will produce a one pound weight gain.

3000 calories correspounds to about 330 grams of fat, a bit less than a
pound. A pound of fat has about 4000 calories, based on 9 calories per
gram of fat.

Eating a pound of fat in one sitting won't necessarily produce a pound
of permanent fat gain. It all has to be absorbed. Chances are that a
lot of it will just pass through your bowels.

Fat gain occurs over time, from a moderate surplus in your daily
intake.

It's not a straightforward matter of calorie accounting, because what
you take in affects your metabolism. The body is a dynamic system that
reacts to all inputs. The composition of what you eat affects your
metabolism, and how it is treated depends on what state you are in
also. If you take in 3000 calories of protein, that's different from
taking in 3000 calories of carbohydrates or 3000 calories of fat.

Terry R. McConnell said:

Is it possible to gain a pound from eating less than a pound of food?

*Snip*

Quoted message said:

--
************************************************************************
Terry R. McConnell Mathematics/215 Carnegie/Syracuse, N.Y. 13244-1150
[email hidden] 229B Physics Bldg http://barnyard.syr.edu/~tmc
************************************************************************

C'mon.... your address is the Physics Building, so you know about the good
old "conservation of mass!" The answer is no. If you eat 8 oz. of food
that has 3500 cals, then the maximum you will gain is 8 oz., assuming a
perfectly efficient human body.

If you invent a food that causes an ingestion of less than one pound to
equal a pound gain (excluding other ingestions, such as water, etc.), then
you will win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

"Terry R. McConnell" <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Is it possible to gain a pound from eating less than a pound of food? Or
to put it another way: 3000 calories (roughly) beyond the amount needed
to maintain weight will produce a one pound weight gain.

I've read that a pound of lean muscle has only ~600 calories. So if your
body is in muscle-building mode (as mine seems to be--last time measured I
was only 8% fat), you can gain (and lose) a lb with only a ~600 calorie
swing in your consumption.

If you're an endomorph who gains/loses fat, then the 3500cal/lb rule
applies.

I suspect that quick weight loss involves ketosis and muscle breakdown, and
that in most folks weight gain is often more fat than muscle. So on the way
down, it's more like 600 cals/lb, but on the way up, it's more like
3500cals/lb.

Quoted message said:

Is there any
food so high in calories that less than a pound of it has more than 3000
calories?

Well, in muscle-building mode, you can eat 600 calories of cheese (enough to
gain 1 lb), and it weighs only ~6 oz. Of course, if you figure in the
necessary water (muscle is much more watery than muscle) from other sources,
mass is conserved (at the macro level).

The body also can play tricks like bumping up the metabolic rate in response
to overeating, or lowering it when fasting. My immediate family are all
slender, and we have elevated heart rates for a few hours after a meal (mine
goes from 50 to 75 after a meal for a couple of hours, for example).

-- Dan