Thread: can you ever gain weight from free foods?

In the book it says you just simply enjoy free foods, and there is no need to measure. I know that eating absolutely tones of free food will not be good for your health, but can it make you gain weight? I sometimes eat loads of free food and get worried if it might affect my weight loss.

Thanks for reading x

Short answer: yes, but its harder than gaining from synned foods.

Longer answer: I've only just joined slimming world but have been dieting for years and have done quite a bit of reading around the topic. If you eat excess calories, you can store them as fat, so ultimately, calories do matter. However, we very much oversimplify the calories in calories out model, because the are lots of things that affect whether calories are actually stored as fat, not just the amount of calories - hormones, nutrient profile etc. all play an important role e.g. Protein is generally used for growth and repair, and is less likely to be stored as fat unless eaten in large quantities. Sugar, however, causes insulin spikes and insulin is a hormone that promotes fat storage, so it is generally stored very readily.
In addition, our calorie calculations are very very rough - just because a food releases so many calories when burned in a lab doesn't mean it will do so in our body (researchers recently discovered, for example, that we can't access at least 20% of calories from almonds, so they're over valued). So there is quite a lot of leeway, if you are eating healthy food.

Finally, the body likes homeostasis (maintaining the status quo), so will reach set points with weight, where it will resist losing or gaining weight - for a while at least. so if you over consume at first, more calories will be "wasted" as heat or if you under consume more calories will be stored. We can change our set points but its why we tend to see weight loss in fits and starts and reach plateaus.

Basically, the healthier we eat, the more we can eat without gaining weight, which is why I prefer this to weight watchers where you can eat junk all day. but grossly overeating, even on healthy stuff will result in a gain.

Does that make sense? Sorry if I've oversimplified - anyone else feel free to correct!

Oh, forgot to say, there's a lot of research going in to nutrient quality at the moment because its believed that hunger signals are stronger if you are not getting appropriate nutrients from your diet. So you could eat thousands of calories and still be hungry because you have eaten nutrient poor food.

Slimming world makes you eat nutrient dense food which will curb hunger signals more readily, making it harder to overeat. Hopefully...

I think sometimes it takes a little while to get truly used to eating what you want rather than holding back because you're conscious of possible gains or stuffing your face because its free and you're not used to listening to hunger signals.

Hope this helps
Good luck!

You can, yes. The main thing is you should eat until you are satisfied, not until you are completely stuffed to the gills. For the interests of my health and wellbeing, I like to try to stick to the one third superfree rule regardless of whether I am on an EE day or not. The plus side of this is that I am filling up on very low calorie foods and still eating until completely satisfied.

Just to give an example, if I want a plate of pasta, I will make my own pasta sauce by roasting peppers and onions in the oven, and then adding to a tin of chopped tomatoes heated with a little herbs. This gives me a full plateful of food and all I need is a small handful of pasta to bulk it out instead of masses

Thankyou guys! Much appreciated for your time, i guess free foods are still sources of energy - too much energy that is unused can be stored as fat.

Trust the plan.
It's the very latest research.
You are filling up on very low calorie foods, and if you cook and prepare them without any added fat, you will not gain weight from them.
They are low in energy density, which means they will give that satiation.
They should be the majority of your foods, and by the time you add in the healthy extra's and the syns, you should be too full up to over indulge on the foods that WILL make you put on weight,
such as choc, crisps, cheese, wine and pastries!

SW would never say free food would make you gain weight. There is no small print to say eat until satisfied and don't eat if you are not hungry.

Free food is free - the only restriction is your appetite.

Healthy extra and syns make you gain, free and superfree do not.

Well all of the free foods in our books contain very little fat, so I think it would take a lot to make us gain weight.

like what everyone else has said though, eat til full and don't stuff yourself til you feel sick. Free food doesn't mean eat til you burst!

ive lost 5st 2lbs with slimming world and have never reduced my portion sizes, always eating til I'm full and satisfied and not overfilling my plate out of greed. I try to eat more proper food (the foods listed in our books) than convenience foods (like mugshots, pasta in sauce etc) as I think they satisfy the appetite more. Although a quick mugshot is a must on busy days. So I eat lots of free foods and only ever gain when I go massively off plan, about 4 times in the last year I've gained.

Originally Posted by jaylou

SW would never say free food would make you gain weight. There is no small print to say eat until satisfied and don't eat if you are not hungry.

Free food is free - the only restriction is your appetite.

Healthy extra and syns make you gain, free and superfree do not.

SW do say everything in moderation though and I think it would be naive to assume that you just because something is free then it cannot result in a gain if eaten to excess. I know that I could not eat loads of, say, mullerlights or half a bag of pasta with each meal and still lose weight. After all it is still calories being consumed and if you take in more than you expend then you will not lose weight xx