If I ate a 17lb cookie... would I gain 17lbs?

No, but you would probably go to jail.

Calories are units of heat measurement. Each calorie provides your body with a certain amount of energy. Any of that energy that is not used is stored as fat. It depends upon how many calories you eat, not how heavy the food is, to make you gain weight.

probably until you pooped xD…. sorry… that was juvenile

Technically yes, until you went to the bathroom (or about five hours when your digestive system starts sorting things out). Then some would have been converted into energy, some stored as fat and some expelled as waste.

Since mass is never created or destroyed, then yes. If 17 lbs goes in, then it stays in until it comes out (sounds redundant, but it’s the simplest way to explain it).

The only way to get rid of some of that weight is when different parts of the cookie are pooped out, peed out, sweated out, or (since this is a 17 lb cookie) thrown up.

So here is a summery: you would gain however much everything your body absorbs from the cookie weighs (which is the weight of the cookie minus all the waste your body produces while processing it).

If you didn’t poop you would.

No – You are constantly using energy and expelling waste therefore you would not weigh 17 pounds more on a scale after eating 17 pounds of food. Everyone that said yes is wrong. I think @dpworkin was the only one that got it right.

I just ran the numbers for 17 pounds of brownies. A 25 gram brownie has 100 kcal. Source
Therefore 17 pounds has 30872 kcal. One pound of fat is 3500 kcal. So after you did the initial poop and pee out you would have gained 8.8 pounds of fat if you did not do any extra exercise and continued to eat your normal foods. Burp!

Initially, yes, if you eat it all at once you’ll have 17 pounds of cookie sitting in your digestive tract. Once it’s digested, some of it is converted to fat. Some of it is converted to energy such as kinetic (movement of muscle) and heat (increase of body temperature). The indigestible parts are excreted. So no, you would not gain a whole 17 pounds from eating a 17 pound cookie.

I’d imagine yes.

I always read “lbs” as “libs”. Even at 26 I have to consciously translate it to pounds.

If this were accurate then it would imply that humans derive no energy from food and as such may (in a bizarre twist) be constantly eating and gaining mass for absolutely no reason i.e. McDonalds

Indeed, as others have explained. Some of the cookie would be converted into energy, some expelled and then the rest transformed into either muscle or fat (the ratio of which is dependant upon the recent activities, lifestyle and genetics of the individual among other variables) and it would be this that would decide your net mass.

@kevbo ; why would I go to jail?