The girlfriend has been off the road for the last month, so among other things, the conversation has occasionally turned to our recent effort to eat healthier, exercise more and our efforts to lose the 1.4 pounds she is STRUGGLING to lose and the 83.4 pounds I’m skipping along losing. Specifically, I was commenting… ok, complaining…ok, whinging (one of my all time favorite British words), ok, whining that while I’ve lost 30 pounds since last June, it’s been at a rate of about 1/2 pound a week instead of the 2 pounds a week I was striving for.
“Count your loss in atoms”, she said. “That’s gotta be a million or billion a week”. So, if you’re struggling to lose those last few pounds, and just to let you know, it actually does feel better to say, if only to yourself, that “I lost 6,245,000 atoms of fat this week”, I thought Id show you the way. Now, I actually have no patience, interest, or desire to actually figure out how to do this, and much to my surprise, no science nerd on the entire internet has actually computed the amount of atoms in a pound of fat, which suggests to me that science nerds are doing more drinking and dating then we are led to believe, but that aside, they have left a trail of breadcrumbs, so for those of you handier with both a calculator and patience than I, here’s the path.
First, you must become familiar with “Avogadro’s number” and the “mole” which, if you have a weight problem, you probably LOVE Avocado’s and Mole sauce, especially Chicken Mole, but I regress. Actually Avogadro’s number and the concept of the “Mole” come from chemistry and give’s you some idea how to work your way into how many atoms in an amount of something, (which is an amazingly big number, which makes you feel extraordinarily great about teeny tiny amounts of weight loss, which is why we are here, right?) Here’s science nerd article no 1. http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/avogardos-number-using-the-mole-to-count-atoms.html#lesson
Second, now that we know we actually have to convert that blob of fat into something representing an element on the periodic table, voila, your fat is actually 77% carbon atoms? Who Knew? http://mb-soft.com/public3/weight.html
Third, we now need to know how many atoms are in a gram of carbon atoms so here you go http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_atoms_of_carbon_are_in_10.0_grams_of_carbon?#slide=3
Annnd, lastly, there are 435 grams, (roughly) in one pound, so you multiply 435 times 5,133.7209 from step three to get 2,325,575.567 atoms in a pound of fat.
So, next time you’re out with your skinny bitch friend, and she smirks, “How’s that diet going, and you know you only lost 1/4 pound that week, and you almost slit your wrists on the scale last week, but the only thing that saved you was the finale of the Game on Thrones was on that night, you can look back at her and say, “I lost 581,393 atoms of fat last week”. And say it smugly. With Pride.
Categories