How is that possible???

Maddysmum

Gold Member
I keep reading that to loose 1lb your body needs to use 3500 cals more than you eat. (7 Zumba classes)

BUT... if thats the case, how can a couple of pieces of cake or a treat cause you to gain a 1lb.

Surely you have to eat 3500 extra cals to gain a 1lb.
 
Lol!!
first can i aplogise as my keyboard is stuck as i put coffe on it so i cannot do any punctuation or capital letters and it now appears that i can not go back either to correct the misspelling of coffee!! im amazed i can to an exclamation mark

i am an engineer so im always trying to work things out and understand how things work but after many years i have now finally come to the conclusion that i dont understand sw i dont get how calories work but i do know that sw works! i have stopped questioning it and just stick to it and the weight seems to drop!

i will be very interested to see if anyone else reponse with a more scientific explanation than me! x
 
I think SW is great so will stay behave, but i like to know how things work and this ones really puzzling me lol
 
Weight isn't just calories. Loads goes into it - cals consumed, water consumed and retained, bowel movements, salt levels, glycogen levels, muscle growth etc. The foods we eat affect our bodies in a lot if ways. Two bags of ready salted crisps a day may be within syns, but if they have loads of salt they will make us retain water. So that won't help weightloss in 2 ways. Just a rough example lol.
 
I think the 'new' way of thinking is that it's not quite as simple as 1lb = 3500 cals.

All foods are made up in different ways, so 3500 cals worth of chocolate is not the same as 3500 worth of chicken. Yes the calories are the same but that's where it ends! There is protein, carbs and fat to consider too. Our bodies process all these things in different ways....so it's really not all about calories in, calories out.
 
You'd actually be surprised at cake calories too lol the other week I was checking out cake recipes for my bonfire night cake and the one which obviously looked the most yummy and oozing gooeyness and chocolate, yet was sliced into 18 and was just a regular 8 inch cake tin used, had 2100 calories a slice!!! Needless to say I gave it a miss :-/
 
I think the 3500 cal = 1lb is too generic and has far too may assumptions!

I also wouldn't expect a few slices of cake to lead to a 1lb gain!
 
Nikki<3 said:
You'd actually be surprised at cake calories too lol the other week I was checking out cake recipes for my bonfire night cake and the one which obviously looked the most yummy and oozing gooeyness and chocolate, yet was sliced into 18 and was just a regular 8 inch cake tin used, had 2100 calories a slice!!! Needless to say I gave it a miss :-/

So you're saying an 8" cake has 37,800 cals in-I think there's an incorrect calculation somewhere there!!!! Lol
Just out of curiosity-what did the cake have in it to make it 'so high' in cals??

http://www.minimins.com/slimming-world-weight-loss-diary/187905-jos-journey-infinity-beyond.html
 
Last edited:
Welshtigger said:
So you're saying an 8" cake has 37,800 cals in-I think there's an incorrect calculation somewhere there!!!! Lol

http://www.minimins.com/slimming-world-weight-loss-diary/187905-jos-journey-infinity-beyond.html

Nope, I have the magazine here in front of me, and I didn't believe it either but when you add up all the calories in every ingredient it's very accurate. It's a 4 later cake with butter icing, caramel icing, chocolate layers, chocolate buttons, flakes, 1kg of butter, 1 pint of double cream, 500g chocolate, 600g sugar, flour, 200g ground almonds, cocoa powder. It's a huge cake. Mmm drooling..... Goo job I have amazing will power!
 
And it's finished with spun sugar! Crickey it's full of rubbish!
 
OMG it is! Just the caramel has 250g butter 450g sugar and 1/2 pint cream! Mmmmm...
 
Hi there

Its complex. Same with exercise.

So while 3500 cal will create 1lb fat, 3500 calolies of food can come in differing constitutions. The basis on which SlimmingWorld works is a good example. Slimming world is about satiety - feeling full - so if you are feeling full you wont be so tempted and as a result will eat fewer calories. So to do this they use, inter alia, Energy Density (ED) which is the energy per unit weight of a food and is usually expressed as kcal per gram. So a highly satiating, low energy density foods is what they refer to as ‘Free Foods’.

ED foods range from 0 to 9 kcal/g. water is at one end on and 100% fat is at the other. Fruit and vegetables are low ED, while some snacks like crisps are around 5kcal/g. Ive got a top 10 good and bad ED somwhere from the science team at Slimming World, I know mushy peas do well on ED ratings.

ED is heavily influenced by H2O so that drier foods, e.g. biscuits are more energy dense than wetter foods such as fruit and vegetables and lean meat and fish. Furthermore ED low density foods tend to have quality macronutrients. It also helps that low ED foods like protein tend to need more chewing which triggers satiety in the appestat in your brain - I think there was some stuff on this on the BBC last week.

Slimming world take low satiety, high fat, sugary, high ED foods and give them 'syn' values. I think they accept that they are tempting but also that they are not beneficial in terms of weight control.

Its still more complex with insulin effect, and other factors such as oxidation of fatty acids which means fat produces 25% more energy than carobhydrates, tehn theres carbohydrates Vs cellulose/hemicelluose carbohydrates (think fibre - they are carbohydrates that we dont have the enzymes to break down). There's more but I thought Id frame my reply around Slimming World.

Hope this explains a little bit of it.
 
Hi there

Its complex. Same with exercise.

So while 3500 cal will create 1lb fat, 3500 calolies of food can come in differing constitutions. The basis on which SlimmingWorld works is a good example. Slimming world is about satiety - feeling full - so if you are feeling full you wont be so tempted and as a result will eat fewer calories. So to do this they use, inter alia, Energy Density (ED) which is the energy per unit weight of a food and is usually expressed as kcal per gram. So a highly satiating, low energy density foods is what they refer to as ‘Free Foods’.

ED foods range from 0 to 9 kcal/g. water is at one end on and 100% fat is at the other. Fruit and vegetables are low ED, while some snacks like crisps are around 5kcal/g. Ive got a top 10 good and bad ED somwhere from the science team at Slimming World, I know mushy peas do well on ED ratings.

ED is heavily influenced by H2O so that drier foods, e.g. biscuits are more energy dense than wetter foods such as fruit and vegetables and lean meat and fish. Furthermore ED low density foods tend to have quality macronutrients. It also helps that low ED foods like protein tend to need more chewing which triggers satiety in the appestat in your brain - I think there was some stuff on this on the BBC last week.

Slimming world take low satiety, high fat, sugary, high ED foods and give them 'syn' values. I think they accept that they are tempting but also that they are not beneficial in terms of weight control.

Its still more complex with insulin effect, and other factors such as oxidation of fatty acids which means fat produces 25% more energy than carobhydrates, tehn theres carbohydrates Vs cellulose/hemicelluose carbohydrates (think fibre - they are carbohydrates that we dont have the enzymes to break down). There's more but I thought Id frame my reply around Slimming World.

Hope this explains a little bit of it.

Yeah, I was totally going to say that!! :flirt2:
 
HelsAngel said:
Yeah, I was totally going to say that!! :flirt2:

That's just cracked me up!

I really appreciate everything that the detailed response gave, it was very insightful but I got lost reading it! Sorry, it was brilliant though and thanks so much for telling us all about it as I really didn't understand how it worked but I'm not very bright when I comes to things like that hence the getting lost whilst reading it x
 
Nikki<3 said:
Nope, I have the magazine here in front of me, and I didn't believe it either but when you add up all the calories in every ingredient it's very accurate. It's a 4 later cake with butter icing, caramel icing, chocolate layers, chocolate buttons, flakes, 1kg of butter, 1 pint of double cream, 500g chocolate, 600g sugar, flour, 200g ground almonds, cocoa powder. It's a huge cake. Mmm drooling..... Goo job I have amazing will power!

I am sitting here drooling....... X
 
Nope, I have the magazine here in front of me, and I didn't believe it either but when you add up all the calories in every ingredient it's very accurate. It's a 4 later cake with butter icing, caramel icing, chocolate layers, chocolate buttons, flakes, 1kg of butter, 1 pint of double cream, 500g chocolate, 600g sugar, flour, 200g ground almonds, cocoa powder. It's a huge cake. Mmm drooling..... Goo job I have amazing will power!

Surely that can't be only 8 inches? The ingredients on their own would take up more space than that before you even whisked and baked it! :confused:
 
It's 4 layers though, it's going to be about 2 foot high. Meaning, if I made it it'd be a sideways cake or very representative of the leaning tower of Pisa!
 
It's cooked in 2 deep tins and then each tin is cut in half so it is 8inch but it's technically 2 cakes on top of each other.
 
Back
Top