The Sims 4: Weight Gain
Calorie System, Fat and Muscles Explained
Cake has a lot of calories. Prepare to work out or your Sim is going to pack on a couple pounds from the indulgence.
Players frequently report their Sims gaining weight over time, so I looked into why this happens. It's known the game uses a calorie system to pile on weight whenever Sims overeat, but it isn't very well explained. Additionally Sims who bulk up with lots of muscle may find their size decreasing over time. Let's look into how these two systems work.
Video Guide to the Fit/Fat System and Calories
Calories Lead to Body Fat
Muscle-building activities rarely burn calories, and when they do are not as effective as direct cardio.
Most dishes in The Sims 4 have calories, ranging from 50 for dishes like a salad to 500-800 for dishes like gourmet treats such as lobster thermidor. There is a problem with this system, however. People gain pounds based on calorie consumption but burn calories throughout the day whether they exercise or not. Sims do not burn calories without exercising. This means you can gradually gain weight and need to keep it down by doing cardio exercise specifically. Sims also gain 1 pound for every 150 calories consumed, meaning a dish like spaghetti will make your Sim 2 pounds heavier.
The bar within Create-a-Sim moves from 0 to +100 pounds, so do this about 5x eating spaghetti leftovers and you're 10% of the way up the bar and on the way to a bigger figure.
Most muscle-building workouts don't burn calories but rather add muscle, which can add to the bulky look. Keep this in mind if you want your Sims to be slender. You won't keep their size down without getting on a treadmill or going for a jog.
Losing Weight
For every minute spent doing cardio activity, Sims' body fat decreases a tiny amount. Working out just a few hours each week - using a similar strategy for prevening muscle deterioration - can let you avoid the weight gain associated with high quality foods like lobster thermidor.
Muscle Building
Want to keep your Sim's muscles? You'll have to work out once in a while or they may decay.
Muscles are built gradually for every few minutes you're on a workout machine. You don't need to complete the workout to get benefits. If you do gain muscle and want to keep it, you should know that muscle decays over time down to a minimum. Muscle has a floor. If you make a Sim with 50% muscle, it won't decay beneath that point. If you make a Sim with next to no muscle, they could go all the way to full bulk with a good deal of work. If that Sim then stops doing muscle-building activities, it could decay back to the floor of 0 set when they were created. I suppose this is so that player and pre-made Sims do not gradually all get skinny!
Calories List - Calorie Amounts and Hunger Regeneration
Here's a list of most dishes cooked with level 1-10 cooking/gourmet cooking. Dishes learned in other ways may not be listed here. Also, a bug is present with dishes from Outdoor Retreat and a couple of other packs that causes them to have 0 calories. You can abuse this, at least for now as it has an open bug report. I recommended that Maxis consider giving Sims a basal metabolic rate to compensate for making all dishes have calories, as fixing this bug will only make the weight gain worse.
Foods have an efficiency score - that is how well they replenish hunger vs the calories they pack on. It's not a big deal nor was it hard to create. It's simply dividing the hunger regen by the calories and adding a couple decimal places to make it look better. The table is incomplete below a point because I could not find the calories for those dishes, mostly vegetarian. It's likely they share the same calories as the normal variant of the dish but not guaranteed. The purpose here is not to show you the unlock levels etc. For that see the Cooking Guide.
| Recipe Name | Calories | Hunger Regeneration | Efficiency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden Salad | 50 | 125 | 250.0 |
| Fruit Salad | 70 | 125 | 178.6 |
| Salt and Pepper Shrimp Cocktail | 75 | 100 | 133.3 |
| Prosciutto-Wrapped Asparagus | 100 | 125 | 125.0 |
| Scrambled Eggs | 155 | 175 | 112.9 |
| Fruit and Yogurt Parfait | 79 | 75 | 94.9 |
| Mac and Cheese | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| Franks and Beans | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| Taco Casserole | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| Pancakes | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| Silly Gummy Bear Pancakes | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| French Toast | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| Tuna Casserole | 200 | 175 | 87.5 |
| High Energy Protein Plate | 250 | 175 | 70.0 |
| Chicken Stir Fry | 250 | 175 | 70.0 |
| Pasta Primavera | 251 | 175 | 69.7 |
| Herb-Crusted Salmon | 260 | 175 | 67.3 |
| Spaghetti | 300 | 175 | 58.3 |
| Angry Flaming Spaghetti | 300 | 175 | 58.3 |
| Chicken Saltimbocca | 300 | 175 | 58.3 |
| Rack of Lamb | 306 | 175 | 57.2 |
| Mud Carp | 311 | 175 | 56.3 |
| Chili | 325 | 175 | 53.8 |
| Garlic Noodles | 330 | 175 | 53.0 |
| Caprese Salad | 330 | 175 | 53.0 |
| Eggs and Toast | 333 | 175 | 52.6 |
| Cioppino | 341 | 175 | 51.3 |
| Grilled Cheese | 300 | 150 | 50.0 |
| BLT | 300 | 150 | 50.0 |
| Fish Tacos | 300 | 150 | 50.0 |
| BLT | 300 | 150 | 50.0 |
| Vegetable Dumplings | 311 | 150 | 48.2 |
| Omelet | 425 | 175 | 41.2 |
| Chips and Salsa | 200 | 75 | 37.5 |
| Spinach Frittata | 480 | 175 | 36.5 |
| Spinach Frittata | 480 | 175 | 36.5 |
| Trout Meuniere | 565 | 175 | 31.0 |
| Chocolate Chip Cookies | 250 | 75 | 30.0 |
| Monte Cristo Sandwich | 600 | 175 | 29.2 |
| Meatless Monte Cristo | 600 | 175 | 29.2 |
| Black and White Cookies | 200 | 50 | 25.0 |
| Cheese Eyeballs | 200 | 50 | 25.0 |
| Lobster Thermidor | 800 | 175 | 21.9 |
| Flirty Heart Cookie | 250 | 50 | 20.0 |
| Apple Pie | 450 | 75 | 16.7 |
| Chocolate Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| Hamburger Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| Strawberry Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| Signature Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| Black and White Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| White and Black Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| Tiered Cake | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| Baked Alaska | 500 | 75 | 15.0 |
| White Cake | 500 | 25 | 5.0 |
| Pan De Muerto | 0 | 50 | |
| Almond Macarons | 0 | 50 | |
| Spooky Cookies | 200 | 50 | 25.0 |
| Fruit Cobbler | 0 | 75 | |
| Italian Meatballs | 0 | 125 | |
| MineStrone | 0 | 125 | |
| Clam Chowder | 0 | 125 | |
| Ceviche and Chips | 0 | 125 | |
| Caesar Salad | 0 | 125 | |
| Butternut Squash Soup | 0 | 125 | |
| Tiramisu | 0 | 125 | |
| Eggs Benedict | 0 | 125 | |
| Pan Fried Tilapia | 0 | 175 | |
| Fried Fish | 0 | 175 | |
| Fish and Chips | 0 | 175 | |
| Breakfast Scramble | 0 | 175 | |
| Camper's Stew | 0 | 175 | |
| Blackened Bass | 0 | 175 | |
| Gumbo | 0 | 175 | |
| Walleye Surprise | 0 | 175 | |
| Roast Chicken | 0 | 175 | |
| Camper' Stew | 0 | 175 | |
| Ambrosia | 0 | 175 | |
| Vegetable Tempura | 0 | 175 | |
| Blue Confetti Cake | |||
| Tofu Tacos | |||
| Faux BLT | |||
| Zombie cake | |||
| Vegetable Chili | |||
| Butternut Gnocci | |||
| SimCity Cheesecake | |||
| Lobster Tortellini | |||
| Gourmet Fruitcake | |||
| Faux Bacon-Wrapped Asparagus | |||
| Faux Lobster Tortellini |
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Comments (19)
Something to note, though: I have a very thin, "Lazy" trait Sim who never gains weight, no matter what he eats, but his partner's thighs are going to turn into balloons if they get any bigger! I'm wondering if the "Lazy" trait does anything here.
I have a rocketship and tried the zero-g workout, came out of the spaceship very skinny!!!
Kept working out and she's all muscles now :P
It would be awesome if there was a way to "check" a sims weight, just to gauge how much workout would be needed to maintain a healthy weight. I tend to forget about wieght gain during gameplay, until its too late.
There sort of is. Enter the cheat cas.fulleditmode and then view your sim in CAS, if you click somewhere on them the fit/fat sliders will pop up. Even if you don't want to cheat and move them, you can see where they are. You might be surprised how high the fat slider is, especially if your sim has low muscle. Your sim will be VERY skinny if you bottom out both sliders.
I guess this is good for realistic game play and all, but in real life I am always counting calories or points, weighing portions, and avoiding anything like Black and White Cake, so in my escape from reality world of the Sims, I always got a lot of happiness ( my personal happiness) by having my Sims make and eat all sorts of foods, actually choosing for them things I would like, such as spaghetti. I guess that’s over now, unless I don’t mind Sims all big around the middle, which I do. Salads it is then. But thank you Carl for another awesome guide.
All vegetarian options have zero calories, probably because the devs forgot to add them. But if you make your Sim do one work out on the treadmill a couple times a week their body shape will stay the same. Or if you give your Sim the Body Builder Aspiration in CAS to get the bonus trait High Metabolism then they will almost never change body weight from eating normally. You can immediately change the aspiration in Live Mode so your Sim does not have to complete or even start the Body Builder aspiration to get the benefits from this bonus trait your Sim gets from choosing this aspiration in CAS.
Technically: You need the body builder aspiration at the outset of Sim Creation for it to show up in the traits window. Changing Aspiration mid-game doesn't update your traits afaik.
i have an ed & i relate so much </3 i also wanted this game to be an escape from calorie-counting hell but i guess i cant escape :( hopefully one day we'll be free from feeling like we have to restrict all the time <3
I guess I had the wrong idea of what's in a frittata! Here I thought it would be one of the better choices, and instead it's one of the heaviest foods on the list. Ok, breakfast scramble or eggs benedict for breakfast for a while...
Do quick meals have calories?
It is not correct that muscle has a floor where it won't decay beneath what you set during CAS. I created my male Sim at maximum Muscle and if I don't do any muscle-building workout like strength machine, my Sim loses muscle rapidly until there is almost none left.
By "Floor" he means it's a floored equation, as in there's a float (aka decimal) and it's rounded DOWN instead of UP. Hope this helps!
how to install this modification
It's not a mod, it is in the base game. All Sims gain/lose fat and muscle with BG foods.
I started a challenge today in the Sims: to see if Sims can live on drinks alone (and I'm not including quick meal drinks like milk and orange juice), only drinks made from a bar. I started my Sim out as skinny, emaciated looking drunk. I soon found a good pattern to keep my Sims Hunger bar up (once I got them the Steel bladder trait): I would make my Sim two of their favorite drinks, Wutaheftabir, and have them double fist them. For money I would make the more expensive drinks and sell them. About two Sim weeks in, while my Sim made their trip to the bathroom, I noticed they leaned back more and had a bit of a wobble...I zoomed in... my Sim had gotten FAT! you've made a list of calories for food in the Sims, but do you have one for the drinks? I guess it's yoga and jogging for my Sim, to get them back into their emaciated state that they started at.
Does anyone have an up-to-date calorie chart? The only ones I can find leave out a lot. Or I'd be happy knowing how to find out myself, if someone can tell me the method.
still sim can no get as fat as your mom
Hi Carl, I love your guides and refer to them and your videos every time I play! Could you update this guide to represent some of the newer foods? I’m tired of feeding my Sims the same 4 zero calorie items when they’ve as too much cake!
Hello! Does anyone know if riding a bike count as cardio in Sims 4? Can the sims get thinner doing that?
It does count as increasing the fitness skill, not sure if it is cardio or weights tho
Geez, no Natural Calorie Burn? How is it anyone keeps fit in this game...seriously even Kenshi had a better weightloss system (which is saying a lot since Kenshi is one of those games most people either love or hate). I do have a question though: What counts as "Cardio" Excercises, in essence, what's the most effective excercises to lose as much Weight as possible? (I'm currently working on a weightloss resolution and I doubt I'll see the reply by the time I've failed it but it would still like some clarification on these things (i've never worked out a day in my real life))
Ok This is a bit advanced, but...how does this apply to children? I have an overweight boy, which is incapable of fitness because he is a child. Does his Motor-activities take the place of fitness in this case, or does he simply have to live with being overweight? Would be nice to know, not that his age is changing any time soon, I play with auto-aging disabled...
If you make a child Sim exercise a lot, lots of jungle gym bars etc then they will lose weight, so yes, Motor skill = Fitness skill