Overeating causes the stomach to expand beyond its normal size to adjust to the large amount of food. The expanded stomach pushes against other organs, making you uncomfortable. This discomfort can take the form of feeling tired, sluggish or drowsy.
Remember, your stomach is like a balloon – it can expand and contract, so the larger the meal you eat, the more it expands to hold what you consume.
Eating a couple of big meals in a row will not leave you walking around with a loose, baggy oversized stomach. In that sense, you don't “stretch out your stomach” by eating more food. Rather, eating patterns change the amount of food the stomach can expand to hold.
Myth or Fact: If you cut down on your food intake, you'll eventually shrink your stomach so you won't be as hungry. Answer: Myth. Once you are an adult, your stomach pretty much remains the same size -- unless you have surgery to intentionally make it smaller.
Because it is a distensible organ, it normally expands to hold about one litre of food. The stomach of a newborn human baby will only be able to retain about 30 millilitres. The maximum stomach volume in adults is between 2 and 4 litres.
Gaining weight solely in your stomach may be the result of specific lifestyle choices. The two S's — stress and sugar — play a significant role in the size of your midsection. Certain medical conditions and hormonal changes can contribute to abdominal weight gain.
Bloating occurs in the abdominal area. It happens when large amounts of air or gas build up in the gastrointestinal tract. Eating is a common cause of bloating because when the body digests food, it produces gas. People also swallow air when eating or drinking, which then enters the gastrointestinal tract.
If you have a big meal, your stomach doesn't magically get bigger and stay that way—it shrinks back down to its previous size in about four hours or less as your food is pushed along to the small intestine, Staller says.
The gastric folds (or gastric rugae) are coiled sections of tissue that exist in the mucosal and submucosal layers of the stomach. They provide elasticity by allowing the stomach to expand when a bolus enters it.
Overeating causes the stomach to expand beyond its normal size to adjust to the large amount of food. The expanded stomach pushes against other organs, making you uncomfortable. This discomfort can take the form of feeling tired, sluggish or drowsy.
Our stomachs have a reflex called receptive relaxation: As food enters your stomach, the muscles relax and expand out to accommodate more volume. In fact, your stomach can expand up to five times its volume after a meal as compared to before.
Although you may feel hungry when you are trying to lose weight, and restrict your energy intake, being hungry doesn't mean that you're burning fat, because you can shed pounds without always feeling hungry. The main factor that affects this is the means of how you are losing weight.
Common reasons for someone to have belly fat even when they're skinny is: Being too sedentary (inactive), which builds visceral fat around the organs and abdominal fat. Eating too many processed foods, which stores at the belly.
"We wake up in the morning with a flatter stomach, because we don't have all of the food and drink we consume in the day going through. Normally we wake up, empty our bladder and bowel, and then as the day goes on, we increase the fluids and what we eat, and this builds up and looks like bloat throughout the day."
Would you believe that eating less can result in more belly fat? It's true. While intuitively it makes sense that eating fewer calories will lead to a flat stomach, the reality is that because of the effects undereating can have on certain hormones, not eating enough can lead to fat accumulation on your midsection.
Theoretically, eating 10,000 calories in a single day can make you gain up to 3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) of weight. That's quite a lot, and depending on your age, height, weight, etc., you'd need around 10 hours of intense exercise to burn it off.