When you consume a pound of food, do you immediately gain exactly a pound in weight?

Question

Assuming that you do not take a bathroom break right after you eat or drink something, does your body gain exactly the same weight as what you just consumed? For example,

- A person weighed 100 lbs before eating
- Person eats a 1 lb steak
- Person gets on the scale and weighs him/herself (assuming no bathroom break in between)
- Will person weigh exactly 101 lbs (original 100, plus 1 lb of food) or will the body decompose that food and weigh less than 101 lbs?

No... I don't worry about my weight. I'm just trying to satisfy my curiosity and understand how our bodies process food and if foods weigh less once it's in your body after the body starts to process and decompose the food. Not sure if this fits into health or molecular biology or medicine, but I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts!

Answer 1

Immediately after eating, the person will weigh 101lb at the end of the meal. The steak will be broken down and the process requires energy. That energy is obtained from burning stored energy, and that will cause weight to decrease as carbon dioxide is released from the lungs. The energy aquired from the steak exceeds the energy to digest it, so the weight loss will be trivial. If the energy in the steak exceeds the energy consumed by the next meal, some will be stored and there will be a net weight gain. If the energy consumed equals energy used -- no weigh change, back to 100. If energy consumed is less than energy used, then there will be weight loss.

Answer 2

Yes and no.

If you weigh yourself on a scale, and are given a pound of food to eat, you will weigh a pound more.

But, much of what you eat contains water, and some of the food when it is consumed as fuel will turn into water and carbon dioxide. But even without burning it, some of that weight is lost through the kidneys as water and other soluble things like salt.

Also, putting food in, triggers eventually solid expulsion out the other end so unless you are plugged up and dead you are not going to keep that 1lb of wt.

Answer 3

No, but close.
During the time you are eating the steak you are turning calories
into heat energy. So as fast as you eat your are losing a slight amount of weight. But it would be real close. If you were on a scale that could weigh to the nearest 1/2 ounce maybe you'd be missing a 1/2 ounce.

Answer 4

Since you said immediately, the answer would be yes, you gain a pound in weight. It gets more interesting when you start to process the food. All of that mass (related to weight) must be either retained or eliminated (solid waste, liquid waste, gaseous waste, surgery or the like). None of the mass is likely to be converted to energy, since that is a nuclear reaction (E=mc^2), definitely hazardous to your health! The food energy is stored and released via chemical reactions and perhaps physical reactions, not consumption of weight. The weight loss is just shedding of the byproducts once the fuel is "burned" or otherwise processed.

Answer 5

No.

You have to consume 3,500 more calories than you burn to permanently gain 1 pound.

1 lb of lettuce wouldn't even be close.

Your weight may temporarily go up after eating a meal, but the gain will not last unless the calories are sufficient to outmatch those that you burn. Much will soon be excreted.

Imagine drinking 1 lb of water (very quickly). Your weight would go up 1 lb, but only until you urinated, soon after.

Answer 6

For a brief period of time, but as soon as you urinated, defecated or sweat much, you would weight that much less.
Also, the carbon dioxide you breathe out is a product of metabolism, and is a trickle of loss.

When they are teaching moms to breastfeed their babies, that is how they know how much the kid got into them, by weighing them before and after.

Answer 7

Yes, I believe you will be 1 pound heavier.

Just imagine yourself holding a giant 1 pound burger and standing on a scale. It would read as 101 pounds. So if you ate it while still standing on the scale it would still read 101 pounds.

Answer 8

Surely not.Because our body is costantly working and seperates out the non-hygienic waste matters from foods we consume and let it go out of our body as excretions.

Answer 9

It has to do with the number of calories consumed.

Answer 10

No.