How Overeating can Actually Rewire Your Brain

Did you know that your belly is connected to your brain – no, it actually is as when you splurge the likeliness is that you will continue bingeing? You follow the strict rules of dieting and reaching your health goals, but when you cheat, you feel guilty. According to a new study by Thomas Jefferson University, they have shown there is a truth about overeating making you binge on fries to overindulging late at night. So how can overeating actually rewire your brain? The Overeating Study The Thomas Jefferson University did a study on mice, but still needs to reproduce it on humans. They looked at how overeating influences the feeling of fullness in people and how your belly actually communicates with your brain. According to them when you eat (used on mice) your body produces the uroguanylin hormone that signals your brain telling it that you have eaten and that you’re full. However, when you overeat this path actually is blocked. According to the researchers, they found when using this study on mice when overfed, the small intestines of the mice stopped producing this hormone completely. This caused a shutdown in the mice whether they were overweight or not. This proves that overindulging actually has nothing to do with how healthy you are and all about the calories you’re consuming in one session of eating. How the Belly-Brain Conduit Becomes Blocked is Interesting For the researchers to find out how the belly-brain conduits blocked when we take in calories, they had to look at the cells producing the uroguanylin in the mouse intestines. Although the complete summarization of the studies not outlined, they contemplated that the ER (endoplasmic reticulum) that regulates the body hormones is very sensitive to stress and may be to blame. Once the researchers gave the overeaten mice, a stress-relieving chemical the conduit became unblocked. The only problem is that with this study, we still don’t know how much food is too much. Furthermore, at what point this conduit promoting fullness actually becomes blocked is still unknown and varies from one person to another. The important thing that we can learn from this study is that even overeating occasionally places a risk on treating yourself to a cheat meal and leads to long weekend binging. The fact remains that when you are planning to live a healthier lifestyle while trying to lose weight the best path to follow is the flexible diet. With the flexible diet, you can still eat the foods you enjoy by eating them moderately and in the correct way. Feel free to read our Kick Your All-Or-Nothing Approach to Fitness and Nutrition the next time you are planning to follow a diet and kick the overindulging habit at the same time.