Advice on weight gains...

K

kakutzi

New member
Am just needing to have something clarified regarding weight gain.
Say your energy input/output for the day was the same, that would have normally resulted in no gain, or a small loss.
What if then you had a cheat night, and consumed roughly 0.5lbs of naughty food. Would the MOST you could gain overnight then be 0.5lbs, or is weight gain made up of other things?

Just curious because i had a cheat day the other day, and what i gained that night far outweighed the exact weight of food i had the night before.
 
If your cheat meal contained a lot of salt or even just a moderate amount of salt if your salt intake is usually low the your overnight gain is most likely to be water retention.
 
Thanks for that... If the cheat meal was say 0.5lbs, would the most fat you could gain be 0.5lbs (if the meal was 100% fat?). This is just hypothetical...
 
You're oversimplifying things. Vastly.

As has been mentioned... weight is comprised of many, many things - Muscle, fat, connective tissue, fecal matter, glycogen, water, etc, etc. These things can fluctuate, to a degree, regardless of what you're eating.

Secondly, you're assuming weight is controlled by how much the food you put into your mouth actually weighs. To a degree, you're right. If you put 1 lb of food down your gullet, you're going to immediately gain 1 lb of weight on the scale. That's b/c the food is still in whole form. Sure, it's chewed up but it hasn't been metabolized yet.

Once it enters the process of digestion, energy is transformed. Some of it is given off as heat, some of it is used immediately for bodily functions, etc. What's left over after all the checks and balances are done is what gets stored as tissue.
 
As far as I know, the most energy dense food you can eat is fat, and the most you could gain (permanently) from eating half a pound of fat is half a pound. Actually, you wouldn't gain quite that much because it takes a few calories to digest it.
 
Harold14370 said:
As far as I know, the most energy dense food you can eat is fat, and the most you could gain (permanently) from eating half a pound of fat is half a pound. Actually, you wouldn't gain quite that much because it takes a few calories to digest it.
Click to expand...

This is not how things work. See my post above.

To put it simply, what weighs more - fat or heat?

Answer - You can't answer that question. Therefore you can't really answer the original question. And assuming that the weight of the food before you eat it has direct correlation to the weight you gain from said food (assuming a caloric surplus to begin with) is wrong, short of the brief time the food is in our system before serious digestion.
 
just to check with you, are you someone who does not gain weight no matter how much food you eat? if yes, then i'd say what you are eating now will not be absorbed by your body fully.

so the first thing to do i'll advice is...
to cleanse your villi(:)
these are finger-like tools that can be found in your intestines.
these guys are responsible in absorbing fats and nutrients.
 
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Cheat night

Be very careful with 'cheat night'. Having cheat meals/days is the way most diets keep people somewhat motivated, because telling them they just can't eat something they love isn't usually going to work. Be aware, however, that you can destroy the entire week's work by going too far on your cheat night. Having a piece of pie once in a while is ok, or a soda or some alcohol. Having an entire meal or day dedicated to eating the things you have to stay away from is a near guarantee that you're going to miss out on your goals. It's not just calories. You'll be filling your blood with sugars. Alcohol is really bad for you because of the amount of blood sugar you get from it. This in turn shocks your organs, etc. When you load up on blood sugar, it's difficult for you to burn fat, since your body has so much fuel there in your blood. The the excess fuel that doesn't get used? It gets stored as fat.

I like to have cheat moments, where I'll drink a soda or grab a cookie, rather than cheat days, nights or meals. I only do this every week to two weeks, because if I do it more often soon I'll be eating all kinds of crappy foods.
 
Very well said Ironwill. I know I cheated some and the next day's weight shot up cause of what I ate. It balanced out but it can be real easy to make a cheat day > good week.
 
What food is

Steve is very right about the food and its weight. The weight of what you eat isn't a very good indication of what weight is going to stick to you long-term. The effect of the food is what you want to watch out for. Foods that have a lot of processed sugar or that contribute highly to blood sugar both hurt your kidneys and make weight loss difficult, because burning fat becomes difficult with too much blood sugar.
 
Glucose and blood sugar levels don't matter as much as many people like to pretend. Energetic state is the final arbiter when it comes to tissue loss. If you're blood sugar is jacked up yet you're in a net caloric deficit, you're still going to lose tissue.

That's not to say controlling blood sugar, to a degree, isn't a good idea. It's simply not foundational to fat loss.
 
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