Occasional Overeating

• The occasional oversized meal or snack will not cause too much harm, but, over time, overeating can lead to serious health conditions. These include type 2 diabetes, heart and blood vessel.
• New clients often come to us feeling guilty and weak after a holiday season, a vacation, or a long weekend of overeating. Our response often surprises them. Because we know that there are some surprising benefits of overindulgence and key lessons that eating too much can teach.

Occasional overeating is normal, and not all people who overeat have a binge eating disorder. Binge eating is described as: The consumption of large amounts of food in a limited period of time, such as a.

Food is one of many ways to cope with the stress and anxiety associated with the pressures of life, especially when physical interaction with people is next to impossible. With so many tasty food options and a wide variety of snacks available, it is easy for you to become prone to overeating. However, without knowing that portion sizing exists, overeating can go out of control and lead to adverse health effects over time.

One way of keeping this unhealthy habit under control is to understand how it affects your body. Here are the side effects of overeating that you should be wary of, courtesy of Healthline:

Promotes Excess Body Fat

How much calories you consume versus how you much you burn determines your daily calorie balance. When you eat more than what you burn, this is known as a calorie surplus. As a result, they are stored as fat by your body. Because you are consuming more calories than needed, overeating may result in increased body fat levels or obesity.

Unlike excess calories from protein, which takes longer to metabolize, those from carbohydrates and fat are more prone to boosting body fat. Lean proteins and non-starchy vegetables should help you avoid excess fat gain before eating higher-carb and higher-fat food.

Disrupt Hunger Regulation

Ghrelin is a hormone that stimulates appetite. Leptin, by contrast, suppresses appetite. Both hormones affect hunger regulation. When you haven't eaten for some time, ghrelin levels increase. After eating, your leptin levels tell your body that it is full.

Overeating can disrupt this balance. Salty, fatty and sugary foods release feel-good hormones such as dopamine, which activates your brain's pleasure centers. This causes your body to associate pleasure with certain foods that are high in fat and calories over time and eventually override hunger regulation, encouraging you to eat out of pleasure rather than hunger. The disruption of these hormones, thus triggers a perpetual cycle of overeating.

Portioning out certain feel-good food and eating them at a slower pace allow your body to register its fullness, helping you counteract the effects of overeating.

Increases Disease Risk

Occasional overeating is not likely to affect your health in the long term. Chronic overeating, however, can lead to obesity, increasing your risk of diabetes in turn.

Defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 and above, obesity is a main risk factor for metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that raises your chances of heart disease and other health problems such as diabetes and stroke. High blood fat levels, elevated blood pressure, inflammation and insulin resistance are among the major indicators of metabolic syndrome.

Insulin resistance, in particular, is closely linked to chronic overeating. It develops when excess sugar in your blood reduces insulin's ability to store blood sugar in your cells. If left uncontrolled, insulin resistance may lead to type 2 diabetes.

By avoiding high-calorie and processed foods, increasing your intake of fiber-rich vegetables and moderating carb portion sizes, you can reduce your risk of obesity and its related health conditions.

Impair Brain Function

Continual overeating and obesity are tied by several studies to mental decline in older adults, compared to those who do not. One study found that being overweight negatively affects memory in older adults, compared with those having a normal weight. However, more studies are needed to identify the extent and mechanisms of mental decline in relation to overeating and obesity.

Since your brain comprises approximately 60 percent fat, avocados, nut butters, fatty fish, olive oil and other healthy fats may help prevent mental decline.

May Make You Nauseous

Frequent overeating can cause feelings of nausea and indigestion. Having approximately the size of a clenched fist, the adult stomach can hold about 2.5 ounces when empty, though it can expand to hold around a quart. Do note that these numbers vary based on size and how much you regularly eat.

Occasional Overeating

Nausea occurs when you eat a big meal, and you start to reach the upper limit of your stomach's capacity. In severe cases, this may lead to vomiting -- your body's way of relieving acute stomach pressure. Though there are over-the-counter medications that may help treat nausea conditions, the best approach is by regulating your portion sizes and eating slowly to prevent these symptoms.

May Cause Excessive Gas And Bloating

By eating large amounts of food, your digestive system becomes strained, triggering gas and bloating.

Spicy and fatty food as well as fizzy drinks such as soda, are gas-producing food items that many of us tend to overeat. Beans and whole grains as well as certain vegetables also produce gas, but are not overeaten as often.

Furthermore, because large amounts of food rapidly enter your stomach, eating too fast may promote gas and bloating. To avoid excess gas and bloating, start by eating slowly, waiting until after meals before taking fluids and reducing portion sizes of gassy foods.

May Make You Sleepy

You may feel sluggish or tired when you overeat. This is caused by reactive hypoglycemia, a phenomenon where your blood sugars drop shortly after eating a big meal. Low blood sugar is commonly linked to sleepiness, sluggishness, rapid heart rate and headaches, among other symptoms. While not fully understood, it is thought to be related to excess insulin production. Although reactive hypoglycemia is most common in those with diabetes who administer too much insulin, it may also occur in some individuals as a result of overeating.

© Dustin Tramel/Unsplash

Even the most sanctimonious dieters occasionally succumb to the urge to overeat, which seems to have a deep-seated home in our brains. While overeating to the point of nausea both feels bad in the short term and can have harmful long-term effects, a new study from Deakin University in Australia suggests that the body can adjust to short-term overeating — but only a certain kind.

When scientists look into the effects of binge eating, they focus on a few primary concerns. Weight gain is certainly one of them, but blood glucose level, which the new American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolismstudy is concerned with, is also extremely important. There is past evidence showing that even short periods of overeating can upset the body’s delicate balance of blood glucose, which can lead to metabolic diseases like diabetes over time.

The data presented in the new paper may seem surprising: The scientists found that eating 1,000 extra calories per day didn’t have striking effects on weight gain and, crucially, insulin processing in a small sample of eight men. The team chalks this effect up to tiny changes that helped their body adapt in the short term.

Adaptations to Occasional Overeating:

This small experiment involved eight “lean young men” who were given an additional 1,000 calories per day for either five days (the short-term experiment) or 28 days (the long-term experiment.) Over the long-term period, the men gained an average of 1.3 kilograms (about 2.8 pounds) of body fat.

The team noticed very small changes in the way the participants’ bodies processed insulin, the hormone that tells cells to take in glucose, keeping the amount of glucose in the bloodstream in check. Directly after the big meals, the team noted “modest” insulinemia and glycemia — an increase of those compounds in the blood — which meant that the body was using up the rapid influx of extra glucose a higher rates that it usually would. These spikes, they add, were still within a “normal healthy’ range.”

Over the course of 28 days, measures of glucose flux remained unchanged — that is, they weren’t spiking like crazy the way one might expect after eating massive amounts of food. According to the authors, these increases suggest that when we overeat in the short term, this slight uptick in the glucose and insulin response was useful for “increasing glucose disposal,” which helps keep the level of blood glucose in check.

These findings fly in the face of many previous overeating studies, which showed the short-term, harmful effects of overeating on glucose processing. In the paper, the team posits why their results differ from the rest: The types of calories consumed by their participants were different to those in previous studies on the dangers of overeating.

Overeating Certain Kinds of Calories

The authors painstakingly kept their participants on an “energy maintenance” diet of 55 percent carbohydrates, 30 percent fats and 15 percent proteins, which they say is typical of Australians. Then, they had each person consume an extra 1,000 calories worth of snacks per day, usually chips, chocolate, and meal replacement shakes. Crucially, those extra 1,000 calories could also roughly be broken down into the same proportions as the diet (53 percent carbohydrate, 32 percent fat and 15 percent protein, respectively).

'The overfeeding model used in this study is likely more indicative of the human condition that leads weight gain.'

Earlier overfeeding experiments that showed more drastic changes in glucose regulation and weight in relation to overeating tend to “alter the composition of macronutrients” and greatly increase the amount of fat in the new diet, the authors note. They make the case that this reliance on fat as the external source of calories may have skewed the data in other experiments.

That’s important for two reasons: First, it suggests that the combination of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins that make up all of those extra calories can go a long way to determining how harmful they actually are. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, most humans generally binge in a more balanced way — not solely fat-based foods — and so their study design may be a more accurate way to study overeating in the future.

Benefits Of Occasional Overeating

“In conclusion, the overfeeding model used in this study is likely more indicative of the human condition that leads weight gain, as opposed to the high-fat overfeeding models which produce larger effect size,” they write.

Like many feeding studies, this one is small. But it points to a crucial point: not all overeating is created equal. And now, as future studies look to build upon these results they may have a more realistic overeating model to turn to to illuminate more about how it impacts health.

Occasional Overeating

Abstract: Currently, it is unclear whether short-term overfeeding in healthy people significantly affects postprandial glucose regulation, as most human overfeeding studies have utilized induced experimental conditions such as the euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp technique to assess glucoregulation. The aim of this study was to quantify glucose fluxes (rates of meal glucose appearance (Ra), disposal (Rd) and endogenous glucose production (EGP)) in response to 5 and 28 days of overfeeding (+45% energy) while maintaining the habitual diet’s macronutrient composition (31.0 ± 1.9 % fat; 48.6 ± 2.2 % carbohydrate; 16.7 ± 1.4 % protein). To achieve this, meal tolerance testing was combined with the triple-stable isotope glucose tracer approach. Visceral adipose volume increased by ~15% with 5 days of overfeeding while there was no further change at 28 days. In contrast, body mass (+1.6kg) and fat mass (+1.3kg) were only significantly increased after 28 days of overfeeding. Fasting EGP, Rd and insulin were increased at 5, but unchanged after 28 days. Postprandial glucose and insulin responses were unaltered by 5 days of overfeeding, but were modestly increased after 28 days (P<0.05), while both meal Ra and glucose Rd were significantly increased after both 5 and 28 days (P<0.05). Despite this, overfeeding did not lead to alterations to postprandial EGP suppression. Thus, in contrast to findings from euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp studies, chronic overfeeding did not affect the ability to suppress EGP or stimulate Rd under postprandial conditions. Rather, glucose flux was appropriately maintained following 28 days of overfeeding through modest increases in postprandial glycemia and insulinemia.