Shouldn’t your body just give you the stop signal and make you not overeat? Then why do people get fat at all?
In: Biology
Many things can mess up the hormonal feedback loop that is supposed to tell you to stop eating. For one thing, at least one trigger is based on volume, not calories. The actual stretching of your stomach as it fills. But things that in the bariatric surgery world are called “slider foods” don’t ever stretch the stomach enough to trigger that. This includes liquid calories like soda, sweet/fatty coffee drinks, ice cream, etc that “slide” right through as well as things that crunch up to much smaller sizes but are still high calorie – think potato chips. If you crush a full bag of potato chips it won’t take up much room at all, but still has all the calories of multiple servings. When we chew, we are crushing it up, so we can fit a CRAP TON of chips or crackers in our stomach without it ever getting full to the point of stretching. Dense proteins do not crush down as much, and stay in the stomach longer, so more likely to trigger the “full” feeling and tell the brain we are done eating. It’s why you feel so full after a steak dinner, and not after a bag of chips. We didn’t evolve to have easy calories that don’t stretch/fill the stomach.
Another issue is that things like stress and lack of proper sleep can mess with the hormones that trigger fullness. And most of us do not get enough sleep.
Also, many people have insulin resistance. Insulin it what gets the energy from the food you eat into the cells where it can be used. If your cells are not letting insulin in with that energy, your cells are starved, which triggers you to want to eat more to get energy to the cells. It’s a feedback loop gone haywire, and all that energy that isn’t getting into the cells gets stored as fat. So yo are eating and eating, but your actually cells are still starving. Sucks.
There are also issues related to epigenetics – what and how much food your mother ate while pregnant with you, and even what and how much food your GRANDMOTHER ate while pregnat with your mother will influence the expression of certain genes – some of which are linked to obesity.
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