Is it a matter of in/out? In other words, eat a pound of food, eliminate 8oz of waste, gain 8oz? If not, why not?
In: 1
It’s a matter of energy. When we eat, we absorb most of the nutrients and calories (a unit of energy) to use up and keep us functional. When we eat past how money calories our body needs to use in a day, those calories get saved as fat. Fat serves a few purposes. 1. It insulates us and helps regulate our temperature so we don’t burn through our energy faster. 2. If we under eat in a day, our bodies will use those stored calories as energy instead
In the short term of course it is a simple matter of in and out. It doesn’t matter if you are holding a pound of food in your hand or your stomach, they both contribute to your overall weight.
But it gets more complicated once you factor in digestion and its incorporation into your body. Your food is digested into its component parts and some of those are used to make cells or stored away in cells for future use. Cells can be thought of as bags of water, and the water content of your tissue is likely to be different than the food you eat. Chocolate for example is going to have much less water in it than the fat your body makes out of it.
By retaining water you could end up gaining more weight than the food you ate.
Not quite. Depends on how much breathing you do before you weigh yourself. Regardless of what that food you just ate is doing, you’re burning the energy gathered from the food you’ve eaten before. That process releases water which you may also urinate, sweat, or breathe out and carbon dioxide when you’re pretty consistently exhaling.
You lose weight breathing as you sleep.
I have found very poor weight gain and loss information on forum sites. Rarely does a qualified individual comment and you mostly get people repeating diets ultimately marketed to them. Weight gain is a biologically process that involves the entire body! You are constantly breathing out liquids and gases, exerting waste that is very old, most of the coloring in the poop is from blood cells, which take a long time to make maybe 6 months, meaning a lot of your poop is from mass you ate long over 6 months ago. So, It is very difficult to track the hormones and fat/sugar/protein physics and chemicals both at macro and then micro and back to macro levels. Mix in a little bit of everyone’s body is different and it no longer is a simple 8 oz in 8 oz out.
I recommend you turn your attention to Harvard and other free college resources like MIT that you can find latest up to date studies on.
[https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/carbohydrates-and-blood-sugar/](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/carbohydrates-and-blood-sugar/)
[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-05-general-biochemistry-spring-2020/resources/lecture-19-introduction-metabolism-polysaccharides-bioenergetics-intro-pathways/](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-05-general-biochemistry-spring-2020/resources/lecture-19-introduction-metabolism-polysaccharides-bioenergetics-intro-pathways/)
These are the kinds of websites that will have good information but it will take you a couple years maybe Kahns academy has good nutrition classes.
To be honest, there is no way to explain weight gain and loss to a five year old. There are just too many things going on and to simplify it enough for a 5 year old would be lying. There aren’t any metaphors or simple one or two sentence answers for nutrition, those are always wrong. The chemistry, physics and biology behind it all are complex and often boring.
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