Submitted by Smart-Veterinarian11 t3_zxkgji in explainlikeimfive
I've been grown with the mindset that the more food you get into your body, the more energy you get in. Recently I've started questioning this belief and read that excess food gets turned into "useless" fat. But this explanation was not convincing enough. Can you explain the consequences of overeating more deeply?
Well, the problem is not so much the fat itself as it is the consequences of the fat for your body.
For instance, at some point it may start and collect in your arteries, which is bad news if they ever get clogged to the point that no blood is flowing. This is called an infarction (which can happen anywhere in your body, not just the heart) and can cause tissue damage.
If this happens in, say, your leg, that may cause permanent pain as well as motor issues (as some of the muscle tissue that would be supplied by the blood vessel in question may die off as a result, thus restricting your movement), but if it happens in the heart, this can easily kill you.
Being overweight also causes all sorts of other complications, such as high blood pressure, shortness of breath, and increased risk of cancer, just to name a few. In general, there are all sorts of health risks associated with being overweight.
Let's say you heat your house with a wood fireplace. Every day, you get a wood delivery that is just enough to feed the fire to warm your house. One day you decide to buy more wood than you need. First you make the fire a bit bigger to use more wood, but it's not enough. So you start storing the extra wood in your living room, then kitchen, and then you start adding more rooms to your house to fit all the unused wood.
That's kind of what your body is doing. It's not "useless" fat. The fat acts as an energy store so you can survive longer in times of famine. If you don't diminish your energy intake or use more energy through exercise (make a bigger fire), you will keep storing more and more fat.
I’m not an expert but like you said, excess calories are turned into fat (assuming you aren’t lifting weights and turning it into muscle).
Excess weight carries all sorts of issues such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer etc…
It will also be harder on many of your joints such as knees and ankles.
It can also cause self esteem issues if you are bothered by the way you look.
Eating a healthy, balanced diet, coupled with exercise has many, many benefits, both physical and mental.
Being a product of evolution, all mammals have developed a safeguard against times of famine. When food is abundant, we store excess energy in the form of fat. When food if scarce, our bodies can use the stored fat to make up the extra energy that is needed.
In this day and age, in first world countries, food is rarely scarce. So any excessive fat that we have is a bit "useless" (note: we all need a bit of body fat to function, especially women, so this is talking about fat beyond a healthy normal amount).
This means that:
The excess fat needs to have a blood supply, which puts undue pressure on your heart
The fat disrupts the way your body produces and uses insulin, leading to higher risk of diabetes
The extra weight also puts more stress on your body in general, leading to more wear and tear: joint problems, feet problems etc
Ann additional thing to think about is where the extra energy is coming from. Foods that are high in saturated fats, salt, or sugar can have additional health detriments on top of the weight gain itself
> The consequences are as vast as your waistline
Lol
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I am not exactly sure what you question is: Is it how your body turns carbohydrates into fats and how it is stored or is the question what are the harmful side effects of being overweight ?
Technically both are correct. The more food you eat, the more energy you get. Professional athletes eat a lot of food because they have high intensity work outs every day and they need a lot of energy. If however someone eats a lot but doesn't use the energy the food offers, then our bodies create adipose tissue, fat, which essentially stores this energy to be used at a later time. The problem is that if you live a sedentary lifestyle and you eat a lot you never use up this fat, since the body will always prioritise freshly consumed food over fat deposits, so in order to lose the fat you either need to require more energy than your food provides, as in working out but at the same time regulating how much you eat, or not eating at all, which is dangerous to do since aside from energy we also get nutrients and vitamins from our food.
Moreover how much fat your body creates and how much it burns is also affected by other factors since everyone's body and metabolism may work differently. Some people get fatter easier than others. In general it's good to have an active life style and walk often, work out at least a few times a week. Not everyone has to be a ripped demigod but a sedentary lifestyle can be really damaging to health, and becoming obese on top of that makes it even worse since it contributes to a host of health problems, mainly heart problems but also joint problems, respiratory problems, dermatological problems and many others.
this is perhaps the best analogy so far.
the body naturally converts energy to fat for storage. some body fat is necessary to stay healthy, the bodybuilders that cut to 1% for competitions don't look like that year round, it's actually not healthy to be at that percentage at all. that said, less than .0001% of the population can do this, which means we are not in danger of this at all.
the opposite is also true. excess body fat leads to all sorts of health problems.
In addition increases in body fat increase your blood pressure, in turn increasing your risk of strokes and TIAs if you add in drinking and smoking the risks dramatically increase.
You will gain fat if you eat a calorie
If you work out quite a bit but still eat an excess- consider as an example the novice sumo wrestler, eating 5000 kcals a day and expending 4000- you will gain mostly subcutaneous fat, or fat under your skin. This isn't completely harmless, but generally the effects detrimental to you are limited to a little bit of inflammation and a strain on your joints like knees and hips, which are only "engineered" to take a certain amount of weight.
If you are not working off a lot of those calories constantly, you will start to accrue fat around your organs, which is much worse for you. Your organs will have to work much harder to do their jobs in the middle of all that fat, and you will start to edge towards lipotoxicity as your body struggles to deal with free fatty acids, which seems to play at least partially a causative role in all sorts of nasty diseases, including the insulin resistance that leads to diabetes.
A wolf can eat as much as it can and go on hunting the next prey. The day it is too fat to catch the prey he will skip the lunch, and this keeps a wolf as fat as possible while being always fit enough to hunt.
If you take that wolf and give it unlimited food it will eat until it dies.
You are the same. Problems are:
1 your heart can’t pump blood to feed the gigantic muscles you need to move your fat around. Your heart will soon or later collapse for fatigue.
2 fat piles up in your blood too, and can clog your arteries. This can give enormous pain when a clogged artery stops feeding some tissue, and that tissue dies. But this can happen to organs too. It can happen to your brain or heart with fatal results.
3 kidney & liver are sized to keep your body clean, if you increase your body size too much they won’t keep up properly. Long term diseases will come.
4 you rot. Yea your tissue needs blood to live and if you are fat enough to not move enough, some parts will simply be compressed onto the sofa, receive too little blood, die and rot. Skin is one of the most likely early part that will die and rot.
5 you can’t run. There may be a fire or some other hazard and you can’t simply escape.
6 good news, fat floats better than bones so you won’t drawn easily at least. Also you can resist cold a bit longer.
Lithuim t1_j20sabp wrote
You burn a certain amount of chemical energy in a day. If you eat more than that, it gets converted into fat for long term storage.
Do this repeatedly for months or years and you’ll end up obese. The consequences are as vast as your waistline - premature heart wear, joint damage, circulatory problems, hormonal issues… nearly every health issue in the book is caused or exacerbated by excessive body fat. It’s catastrophically bad for you, and strongly contributes to heart disease being the leading cause of death in the US.