Hi, I am trying to gain weight so i eat a lot. But i always wondered, when exactly does excess food turn into muscle, fat or other stuff in the body? Where and how does that happen? All I could find on the web is just “you eat stuff and ya da ya da it turns to fat!” Lol.
thanks for answers.
In: 1
>When exactly does food turn into weight?
As the top answer says: When you eat it. If you pick up and eat a 1lbs watermelon slice, you weigh 1 bls more, immediately. It’s 90% water, so 0.9 lbs of that gets pulled out by the intestines, take a ride through the bloodstream, gets used for all sorts of stuff, collects some junk, and most of it will eventually get pulled out by the kidneys and pissed away. Some water is kept in cells. You’re mostly water.
The other 0.1 lbs which is food has a different lifecycle.
> when exactly does excess food turn into muscle, fat or other stuff in the body?
The intestines pull out the food bits as all the separate components of food: sugar, starch, protein, yadda yadda yadda. It all goes into the bloodstream. Bunch of stuff, each with a slightly different fate. The sugar can get sucked up by cells, tossed into the furnace, used to make ATP energy, which is used to do stuff. Out of the furnace the burnt remains are CO2 which go back into the blood and eventually out to the lungs. Starch has a fun cycle to get turned into sugar. All that has a fun cycle of sythethesising (creating from scratch) protein, or you can just take the raw protein straight to go build structures like muscles or messages in the horrifically complicated protein expression system.
There’s pathways to make (synthesize) a lot of the stuff you need out of the stuff you have. If you have a lot of excess energy in the bloodstream (starch, sugar, ATP) then long-term energy storage is made: Lipids. Fat cells store these guys for when you need energy for later.
All in all all these pathways are horrifically complicated and summed up into: Metabolism. The body’s chemical refinery. Breaking down stuff and building it back up. There’s a lot of hand-waving and generalization like you noticed because the details are really bloody complicated. Really, [nothing about this page is simple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolism) enough for a 5 year old. So the story we tell at elementary school levels is “the body makes fat from excess calories”. Which is true, but skips over a lot of detail.
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