So, I’ve been told so many different things and I’m confused as hell about this. My doctor said if I eat less food (than I’m already eating) my stomach will shrink naturally. However, I was told by a another doctor that the stomach can’t expand?
I assume your stomach is one size, but for an obese person (or morbidly obese, whatever) it’s a lot bigger since obese people eat a lot more than average-sized people.
Someone please explain this, I need an answer!
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I’m a person on the internet and not a medical professional, so take what I say with a grain of salt
If you eat a lot, yes your stomach does expand. I think you just had a misunderstanding when the other doctor said it couldn’t.
Your stomach will never expand based on it’s volume. Literally filling your stomach won’t make it inflate like a balloon. If it’s filled up too much, you will throw up. Eating a bunch of food in one sitting won’t cause your stomach to grow.
But if you have multiple sittings where you eat a lot of food, your stomach will grow to adapt to the amount of stuff you’re eating. It will respond to your eating habits by allowing more food to be digested. Like how living in a hot climate for a long time will make you more tolerant to heat.
Your stomach will not expand because of the amount of food you eat, it will expand as a response to how you eat. And if you don’t eat as much, it will adapt by shrinking because it no longer needs to retain a lot of food. I don’t know exactly what the other doctor meant, but it is proven that stomachs can grow.
Answer: it depends on how obese you are and how large your organ, the “stomach” has become. It depends on whether you mean the stomach as the organ that food goes into or the area of the body known as the abdomen that people generally call the stomach. It also depends on what is meant by “obese,” are we talking BMI obese (25-50 lbs over average for height?) or are we talking into the morbid and super morbidly obese at 100-600plus pounds over average?
If you’re just “obese” both your organ the stomach and your abdomen will shrink some during weight loss. Even back to normal size.
If you’re super morbidly obese and have been for many years, it’s less likely that the organ can shrink back to “normal.”
The tissues of the stomach itself can be stretched to the point of being damaged. Once damaged they can’t shrink back to normal. Similar for the abdomen where the skin layer gets stretched so much that it’s damaged beyond its ability to shrink back into shape. This is especially true of weight loss happens rapidly bc I’d surgery. There’s no time for the skin to repair itself.
Some folks who advocate intermittent fasting believe that with enough time and hours fasting, the body will repair some of the stretched skin via “autophagy.” There’s no good science on this yet.
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