What Overeating Does To Your Body

Wall Street is an easy place to pick up the habit of overeating.

Think about it: It's a place that embraces taking clients out to lavish dinners, working long days and sometimes splurging on meals to make up for those miserable hours.

And then there's the time honored tradition of the Wall Street eating contest.

Eating contests are the product of bankers — competitive by nature — having down time during their long days at the office. All of the sudden, someone decides to bet someone else that they can't eat the entire contents of a vending machine... or 60 hamburgers... or 500 Starbursts.

So you can see how bankers may start thinking it's okay to stuff themselves to the brim. It's not. Overeating can be addicting, and that addiction can make you depressed and spur disease.

It changes your body clock.

That means you start to crave good more, and at times when you normally wouldn't have.

From NPR:

"If mice eat a high-fat diet, they actually wake up during what is nighttime for them and eat," says Dr. Joe Bass, a Northwestern University endocrinologist and molecular biologist who has published numerous studies about the body clock and mice. "It would be as if you were waking up every night during holiday season and eating all the sweets in your refrigerator."

It can make you addicted to eating.

From Scientific American:

Like many pleasurable behaviors—including sex and drug use—eating can trigger the release of dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain. This internal chemical reward, in turn, increases the likelihood that the associated action will eventually become habitual through positive reinforcement conditioning. If activated by overeating, these neurochemical patterns can make the behavior tough to shake—a result seen in many human cases, notes Paul Kenny, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Therapeutics at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., and co-author of the new study. "Most people who are overweight would say, 'I would like to control my weight and my eating,' but they find it very hard to control their feeding behavior," he says.

...and that addiction can make you feel depressed.

"Food highs" that come from over eating can actually cause the same vicious cycles in the brain that highs from addictive drugs can cause, according to research from the University of Montreal.

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