New Year's overeating: why we feel hungry again and again

What do many associate the New Year holidays with? With plentiful meals. These days we eat a lot and often. What is interesting: no matter how much we eat, the next day (or even the same) we want to eat again. Why? Is it our distended stomach? The publication sought answers to all questions. with the BBC.

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If you think about it, it looks rather strange: the next day after a grandiose feast, we can again eat as much. And after all, we again want to eat, as if we forgot how hard it was for our stomach.

Why do we feel hungry even after such feasts as Christmas and New Year's feasts? Is overeating so stretching our stomach so that the next day there is more space for food?

The answer is simple: we do not experience hunger in spite of the huge amount of food we consumed the day before, but because of it.

What is it all - a feeling of hunger? The urge that prompts you to eat is the result of a certain amount of physiological changes in your body.

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Yes, it is true: the stomach changes in size depending on whether it is full or empty.

The stomach contracts as food is digested to help it pass further into the intestines. It hums as the air and food in it moves as it passes below. After that, the stomach expands again, it is ready to eat - and this is the work of hormones.

But the fact that food makes our stomach bigger, stretches it, is not entirely true. Our stomach is very elastic, and even after a hearty meal, it returns to its original volume (1 to 2 liters).

In fact, in most people, the stomach has about the same volume - regardless of our height or weight.

What we may not realize is the work of the hunger hormones NPY (neuropeptide Y) and AgRP synthesized in the hypothalamus and ghrelin in the stomach.

Ghrelin is produced when the stomach is empty, and this stimulates the synthesis of NPY and AgRP in our brain. The last two hormones are responsible for creating a feeling of hunger, which interrupts the work of those hormones that are responsible for the feeling of satiety.

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Perhaps it is strange that the level of ghrelin can be higher in thin people and lower in full ones. It would seem that the hormone of hunger should be present in greater numbers in those who eat more. But such a contradiction reflects how complex our endocrine system is.

So, for the feeling of hunger, mainly only three hormones are responsible, while for the feeling of fullness - more than ten. Two of them - GIP and GLP-1 - stimulate the production of insulin to control carbohydrate metabolism.

A few more hormones are responsible for reducing the speed of food movement through the digestive tract, which gives our body time to digest food. Two of them play a major role in reducing hunger: CKK and PYY.

But even if our stomach has a hormonal warning system that it is empty, acquired knowledge often intervenes - developed associations tied to the time of day when we “should” feel hungry.

Thus, even if you ate very densely at lunch, by the time you have dinner, you want to eat again.

“If you constantly take a chocolate bar or chips with you when you sit on the sofa to watch TV, your body gets used to associating sitting on the sofa with tasty food. As a result, as soon as you sit down in front of the TV, you feel hungry, explains Carolien van den Akker, a researcher at Centerdata (Netherlands). “This happens even when you’re full.”

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Overeating itself isn't so bad, says van den Akker. Unlike the clinical diagnosis of binge eating (psychogenic overeating), in which a person often experiences feelings of guilt or shame, normal overeating is simply a habit that can be overcome.

But “acquired hunger” can make overcoming this a very difficult task.

When we get into the habit of enjoying food (especially sugar-rich foods) at certain times of the day, coupled with certain smells, situations and behaviors, every memory of these things awakens our appetite.

This is not only a psychological, but also a physiological response - salivation, like the notorious Pavlov's dogs. Homo sapiens in this sense is not very different from these four-legged.

An experiment was conducted where people were shown simple images - circles and squares. When they saw the squares, they were given chocolate, and then every time they saw the square, they wanted chocolate.

Moreover, to develop such “hunger”, chocolate could be given very little - 1-2 grams for four days. It’s easy to get used to, notes van den Akker, but getting out of the habit is harder.

Sometimes even our mood, our emotions can become a trigger, a psychological trigger. People often say that they lose control over how much they eat when they are in a bad mood or tired.

In principle, any mood, even the best, can be a trigger that triggers an automatic behavioral response in the form of hunger, if you constantly eat something in that mood.

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During the experiments, it was repeatedly demonstrated that in the company we eat more. Perhaps because the pleasure of a company of friends lowers our focus on controlling how much we eat.

Even in the laboratory, when people were given a plate of pasta, they ate more in the presence of a friend with whom they could chat.

Knowing all this helps to fight such habits. “When we try to help people eat less, we focus on breaking habits,” says van den Akker. “We explain to them: having eaten something tasty once, it is absolutely not necessary to repeat this experience in subsequent days, so as not to reinforce the habit.”

And this is important: other studies have shown that just once breaking the habit of eating right, we quickly slide into the habit of eating wrong.

So, probably, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the very next day after a hearty family dinner with relatives and friends, we again feel hunger. And even on the same day, for dinner.

This is not because our stomach is stretched, but because we have cultivated the habit of eating a lot on holidays.

When our brain receives the appropriate signals - smells, images, sounds, with which it associates Christmas or New Year - it is again ready for battle, for a great meal on any of the holidays.

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