how long does it take the body to process calories?

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greengold
greengold Posts: 34 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I've been wondering - does anyone know the answer to this? If I eat over my calorie limit today, will it really show up in my body tomorrow (all other things being equal - amount of water drunk, workouts, etc), or does that process take more than say 8 or 12 or 24 hours?

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  • Krizzle4Rizzle
    Krizzle4Rizzle Posts: 2,704 Member
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    I would seriously love to know the answer to this as well!
  • MarkHarrisonUK
    MarkHarrisonUK Posts: 13
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    Simple answer: 3-6 hours depending on the food, unless you have diabetes.

    ... so, yes, it will show up on your body tomorrow...


    But it's worth understanding that there are are two parts to this.

    1: Turning the food into glucose in the bloodstream.

    2: Either burning it there and then (say, because you are excercising), or turning it into triglycerides and storing it as fat.

    Let's look at part 1 first:

    It depends where the calories come from.

    At one extreme, you could eat raw sugar on an empty stomach. This would whizz through your stomach and into the small intenstine so fast that the enzymes there would start converting it to glucose in your bloodstream inside 30 minutes.

    At the other extreme, peanuts take about 6 times as long, so 3-4 hours.


    Once it's in your blood, we turn to part 2:

    Either you burn it (hurrah!), or it gets stored, as fat (boo!), or hangs around in your blood (eek!)

    How long this takes rather depends on whether you have diabetes or not (and some people believe that as many as 6 million Americans may have undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.)

    If you are not diabetic (or pre-diabetic, which might be as many as another 50m Americans!) then everything should be stored as fat within a few hours.

    However, if you are, things take longer, and you end up with this rubbish hanging around in your bloodstream, NOT yet as fat, for potentially "so long your blood never gets rid of the backlog."
  • carl1738
    carl1738 Posts: 444 Member
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    Your body starts breaking down and digesting food as soon as you eat it. Some things, like sugar and simple starchs, are easily broken down and digested immediately, while other things like fats and protein, take longer to digest. If your body needs what is being digested, it will use them right away, like carbs and protein after a workout. If you have eaten more than your body needs at the moment, it will store it as fat. As a general rule, sugar and simple starchs are absorbed first, then complex carbohydrates, then fats and finally proteins. There are some exceptions to this, as whey protein is very quickly digested (which is why whey is the protein of choice for after workouts), but other proteins such as casein can take up to 8 hours for your body to break down, which makes it an excellent choice as a late night snack. So I guess the short answer would be yes, what you eat today will show up in your body by tomorrow.
  • greengold
    greengold Posts: 34 Member
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    this is fascinating - thanks! Now I am beginning to wonder about eating specific things in order to have particular effects - I have no doubt there is a whole science of eating for physical effect out there.
    the diabetes connection is also interesting to me; my parents were both diabetic and a high daytime sugar (with no other signs of metabolic syndrome) is what set me on this journey of weight loss
  • Laceylala
    Laceylala Posts: 3,094 Member
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    Look up the glycemic index online....this is a chart of how fast foods digest in your system essentially and will give you ether insight as to which foods to eat.

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