Overeating Does NOT Cause Obesity

There are lots of chemical processes that take place in the human body, and while there's some leeway for things to change, the systems - as a whole - are designed to function with an optimum. Your body temperature, for example, is the perfect temperature under which all the chemical processes that need to take place can take place.

It doesn't matter whether you live in Alaska or you live in Kenya, human body temperature doesn't vary that much. Homeostasis is the balance point your body wants to be at, and when your system changes - let's say you get cold - your body sends out the appropriate hormones and they tell your body what part of the system to change in order to keep the system stable - and you start to shiver.

Similarly, when you take in more energy than your body needs, it tries to compensate. Research has demonstrated that people who eat more calories than they need to burn expend more energy in the form of heat and tend to have more "nervous" motion - foot tapping, finger drumming, etc. In short, people who eat more, burn more. Likewise, people who eat less, burn less.

This shatters the commonly-held notion that overeating causes weight gain. Overeating causes overactivity, because the calories get burned. According to Sir Derrick Dunlop, a clinician at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, "Food in excess of immediate requirements and not needed to replenish stores can easily be disposed of, being burnt up and dissipated as heat. Did this capacity not exist, obesity would be almost universal." (emphasis mine)

Also, according to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, "It is often assumed that the increase in pediatric obesity has occurred because of an increase in caloric intake. However, the data do not substantiate this."

So, if overeating doesn't cause obesity, what does? The answer is once again to be found in the study of homeostasis, but from a different angle: a hormonal one. As a person consumes sugar, flour, and other fast-burning empty carbohydrates, the body releases a hormone called insulin into the blood. Insulin allows the body to burn sugar for energy, but it also prevents the body from burning fat.

Sugar rushes bring sugar crashes, and the body tells you when it needs energy. So a few hours after a high-carb meal, your body is screaming for more - and if it gets more high-carb material, it soars again. More insulin is released, and thus still no fat is burned. Moreover, if the sugar intake is too high for the body to burn it immediately, the body combines three glucose molecules with a glycerol molecule, turning sugar into triglycerides - FAT.

So, sugar creates fat, and sugar causes a homeostatic reaction that prevents you from burning fat, and sugar makes you want to eat more sugar. That is the source of the American obesity epidemic. The cure is right here.