Questions Answered: What Does Overeating Do To Your Body?

by Betsy Green

Of course, the most obvious sign of overeating is gaining weight. With excess calorie intake, comes excess weight gain. But overeating can also cause an array of symptoms such as excessive sweating, aching joints, mood swings, amongst many health disorders. While overeating might appear to only affect physical health, it can cause high emotional distres.

With this is mind, do we really understand what happens internally as a result of overeating? Overeating can cause various levels of damage to all different parts of the body.

Starting from your mouth, let’s break down how overeating affects your organs.

Step 1: In goes the food…

Eating too much causes a malfunctioning stomach

After you have swallowed your food, your stomach is where the effects of overeating begin. Regular overeating can cause your stomach to send mixed signals to your brain about when it is full. The neurological tissue at the top of the stomach, which signals to your brain that the stomach is in fact full, begins to malfunction. The danger here lies in the fact that you might not even realize you are full, causing you to unknowingly keep eating.

Step 2: A malfunctioning stomach can cause your pancreas to go into overdrive

If you are one to overeat on a regular basis, unfortunately, this can dramatically affect the way your pancreas works. Consuming excess food triggers your pancreas to go into overdrive and produce extra insulin to process the larger sugar load and remove it from your bloodstream. Your pancreas wont stop producing insulin until your brain senses that blood sugar levels are safe again. The catch here is that by the time the brain stops the production of insulin, too much sugar has been removed from your blood stream. Having low blood sugar as a result of overeating can make you feel an array of inhibiting effects such as tiredness, dizziness, nausea and even depression.

Step 3: Too many calories can cause a fatty liver

Overeating overworks your liver, causing it to store excess fat. How is this so? Your liver’s job is to stop your blood sugar from getting too low. The pancreas’s job is to stop it from getting too high. So both the liver and the pancreas are involved in keeping your blood sugars stable. When you consume more food than you are capable of burning, then any excess calories are stored in your liver. When fat is stored within liver cells, the liver becomes inflamed and possibly, insulin-resistant. As the levels of insulin and blood sugar increase within the cells, this can result in the onset of diabetes.

Step 4: Your heart becomes affected

Overeating on a recurrent basis can of course, lead to obesity. The bigger you are, the harder your heart has to work to supply your whole body with oxygen. Another by product of having excess fat is that it accumulates inside your arteries, which in turn makes those arteries harder. Thicker artery walls don’t give your blood much space to flow through, so to maintain the same pressure your heart must work harder and faster. Atherosclerosis, the hardening of the artery walls, is 10 times more common in obese people than in healthy people.

Is it time to clean up your act and your eating? As well as the obvious visual effects overeating can cause such as bloating and obesity, overeating can have a detrimental effect on your internal organs as well.