Wrong...

allaboutme

It just seems wrong that you can add a pound in two days by eating 1700 extra calories per day, yet it takes seven days to take .6 of a pound off because you can only cut 300 calories per day. Logic would tell you it would work both days. Unfortunately our bodies don't think logically. Yes, I am only losing .6 per week, which I know is the right way and I am not giving up, but it is soooo slow. We always want everything yesterday. Three months and seven pounds. Blah. Got to get my positive thinking cap on.

allaboutme

It just seems wrong that you can add a pound in two days by eating 1700 extra calories per day, yet it takes seven days to take .6 of a pound off because you can only cut 300 calories per day. Logic would tell you it would work both days. Unfortunately our bodies don't think logically. Yes, I am only losing .6 per week, which I know is the right way and I am not giving up, but it is soooo slow. We always want everything yesterday. Three months and seven pounds. Blah. Got to get my positive thinking cap on.

clewliss

I know what you mean! I stepped on the scales this morning and was down from 189. 0 to 188.6. That is good, but not enough to change the ticker from 4lbs to 5!! Oh well, lets celebrate that .6 that's been lost...YAY YOU:flowerforyou:

songbyrdsweet

That's actually not exactly how it works. It's just as hard to gain a whole lb of fat in two days as it is to lose a lb of fat in two days.

If I were to eat 1700 calories above maintenance, I'd have to eat about 4,000 calories. Even if I did divide that into 5 meals, that'd be five 800 calorie meals...that'd be a huge bolus of food. It'd be physically difficult to fit that into my body, but even if I did, I wouldn't absorb all of those calories....

When food is in the gut, the intestines segment it, mixing the food to squish the stuff in the middle of the bolus to the outside to sort of increase the contact between the food and the lumen. However, this isn't a perfect system, and with a very large bolus of food, you simply can't absorb all the nutrients available. So we'd lose some calories there. We don't have enough time to keep the food in there long enough to absorb everything because intestinal movement doesn't stop until the intestines are empty.

Then we have to take the thermic effect of food into account, which uses10-15% of the calories we consume. So that's 170-245 calories of the 1700 extra lost to digestion. So we'd actually have to eat about an extra 1900-2000 calories a day and absorb all of it (which isn't physiologically possible) to gain a lb in two days. I honestly don't think I can eat 5,000 calories a day. :laugh:

It takes time for anything in the body to happen. The only thing we do quickly is sneeze and blink.

allaboutme

For me I know it isn't hard to eat 15 battered chickenwings weighing in at 100 calories per wing (nasty calories) at 11 p.m. after 5 beer (more nasty calories). So really not hard to eat 4-5000 calories per day if you aren't watching what you eat. Throw in a piece of cheesecake for dessert at 4-500 calories and there you go I know you won't absorb all the calories, but you will store more in one day than you can lose in one day. So in my mind still not even. Nothing good is ever easy. I know.