what determines whether a calorie you’d eat gets pooped out or put on as weight?

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what determines whether a calorie you’d eat gets pooped out or put on as weight?

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Calories are energy. Poop contains leftovers, fiber, dead cells and stuff. Calories, energy, is stored as fat if it’s not consumed by your activities.

So if you eat something, you will poop out parts of it, no matter if you use the energy you got from it or not.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Just to add to an already good explanation, calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. Just like a second or minute is a unit of measurement for time, and a foot or mile is a unit of measurement for distance. Your body uses energy to keep functioning. Even if you do absolutely nothing all day (like sit on the couch or even sleep all day), your body uses up energy. If you move around then your body would need more energy.

Now the food you eat provides you with a source of energy. When you eat food, your body breaks it down into smaller pieces. It absorbs some of these pieces (which is what is used for energy) and some pieces keeps moving through your guts and becomes poop. So like mentioned, no matter what, there will be poop.

As far as the absorbed pieces, they will be potentially used as energy. So basically if your body uses up less energy than what you absorbed, the extra gets stored as fat. It’s like a piggy bank for energy. You use this storage when you didn’t get to eat enough and your body needs more energy than what you ate for that time. But if you keep giving your body a lot more energy than what it uses up (by eating a lot and not being active) you will keep storing fat and not using it up, so you will keep gaining weight.

But it’s a slightly different story for people who exercise. Muscle is denser than fat meaning if you have the same volume (like 1 cup), muscle would weigh more than fat. So people who work out could still gain weight if they eat more and have more energy than what they use. But some of the weight gain could be because of gaining muscle instead of fat. By the way, muscles could also be broken down by your body as an emergency energy source.