For years I’ve heard that if you overeat, your stomach can stretch and you have more capacity to eat more. I had friends that would purposely stuff themselves the day before Thanksgiving so that they could pig out on turkey.
Is this true? How long does this elasticity last? If done daily for years, can it become permanent? More importantly, is the reverse true? If you deliberately eat tiny meals all the time, will your stomach shrink up, giving you less capacity, and therefore a full feeling on less food?
If this is true (and I sort of doubt it), I imagine that with age the stomach gets less flexible and will never shrink.
IANAD but I believe that the stomach does shrink. This is only anecdotal, but as I have eaten less and less (I am striving to lose weight) I find that I am full more quickly.
I always heard it could shrink, too. I’m trying to figure out where I got that impression and all I’m coming up with is remembering hearing about how when the soldiers liberated the concentration camps most of the victims could only eat an ounce or two at first because their stomachs shrank from having so little food for so long.
My google-fu isn’t quite up to snuff, there are a lot of sites taking it as a given that stomachs can and do shrink, but I’m not finding any real, y’know, science about it.
Seems reasonable to think if it can be stretched out it can be compressed too, right?
But that’s not true. Most of the prisoners would pig out and eat huge amounts when first released if allowed. They had to be forcibly restricted to meals of an ounce or two and gradually reaccustomned to larger meals over several weeks or they would have poisoned themselves. The body just can’t cope with that sudden influx of nutrients. Nothing to do with the stomach strecthing or shrinking there.
That is a hard question to answer. Since I have turned forty 3 1/2 years ago, I have lost in excess of 80lbs. It has mostly been a nice gradual loss. HOWEVER, in the past 6 weeks I have lost 20lbs due to health issues. In general though, I was losing between 10-20 lbs a year by eating and drinking beer less and excercising more. It wasn’t as fast as others I know, but it seemed to me that it would be more permanent because I was making lifetime changes. I gained all that weight in 20 years and so I was content to lose it slowly and steadily.
I guess to answer your question, yes I felt it was working. But I have had some “help” from stomach disfunctions.
I’ve also heard about stomachs enlarging/shrinking due to eating habits.
On a related note, just how is it that the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest has been dominated in recent years by a skinny Japanese guy (“The Tsunami”), who IIRC weighed in the 115-120 lbs. range? The best prep for winning an eating contest is to binge-eat on a regular basis, right? (Many of the other contestants were really big, beefy guys.) So how can a skinny person have the expanded stomach capacity to win one of those things?
Doctors physically stretched his stomach. They made room by removing several other internal organs. He needs dialysis and he’s always attached to a heart-lung machine.
Ok, never mind. My WAG would be that (1) he’s probably got an abnormally large stomach, whether by nature or practice I couldn’t say and (2) his body has probably adapted to pushing food through the stomach and into the intestines quickly. That’s the only things I can think of that would make a difference. It probably comes out essentially undigested.
And, from what I’ve read, consistently over-eating could stretch it back out significantly, correct?
This obesity medical program site states that stomach pouches can be stetched from over-eating. No word on the shrinking though (note: this is in post-bariatric surgery patients).
Anatomy sites will tell you that stomach size is highly variable based on amount in it.
IME, I definitely think the stomach can shrink or expand depending on how much you eat over a period of time. After eating very little solid food during a nasty mono + flu + strep throat episode, I felt full much sooner than before and was unable to entirely eat meals I had been able to eat just fine before. OTOH, the “freshman 15” in early college taught me that pigging out repeatedly also made me be able to eat more at a sitting without uncomfortability and thus inevitably gain weight.
Naw. I was born with an esophagas that is too short. Therefore it has been pulling my stomach into my chest cavity most of my life. My first doc operated on me for a simple hiatal hernia without doing anything for the too-short esophagas. Two days later the sutures burst. He went in and redid the op, but it was never right. The second doc did it better and life has been pretty good, but now I am having trouble with my Gall Bladder. Or at least he says it is my gall bladder. I tend to believe it is more likely gastroparesis since the stomach has been so tramatised, but he is sure it is my gall bladder. Maybe that is diet related, but my doc is not speculating. He says there are too many variables and it is a moot point anyway.