The Great Sin of Overeating (3)
The continued strain on the digestive apparatus caused by overeating not only weakens the general digestive powers, but the entire muscular and nervous system as well, as it suffers severely in consequence of this. That “tired feeling” is always present. You never have any energy–all your enthusiasm seems to have disappeared. The impure condition of the blood would naturally cause this, but the fact that all the energies are spent in the endeavor to right the digestive disorders, to rid the stomach of the loads that are continually being forced upon it, no doubt does much to influence this condition.
“Gluttony imposes upon the body a quantity of matter which is underdone; that is, under- prepared; so that only a small portion of it is suitable for nutrition, leaving the greater part to ferment within the channels and strain the intestines until they are contused and weakened.
“Such is the impetuosity of uncultivated or perverted human tendencies that the desire for acquisition, sometimes called greed, impels one to swallow one mouthful of food to take in another, without ever dreaming that the very last contribution of taste to the last remnant of a delicious morsel is like the last flicker of a candle, more brilliant than any of the preceding ones. In eating, the last taste is more perfectly in possession of the solution, is better than all the other stages of the process. It is the choicest and sweetest expression of the incident, as related to each mouthful. Then why not court it and obey, thereby. Nature’s first law of health?”–Horace Fletcher.
The brain, also, suffers intensely. It is al- most impossible to do brain work with any degree of satisfaction. There seems to be no connection between your thoughts. The power of concentrating the mind upon any subject entirely disappears.
Another unfortunate result of overeating is the entire disappearance of a normal appetite. One cannot tell by the appetite what the system mostly needs. He or she simply eats until a feeling of fullness indicates that the stomach is crammed to its capacity, as a packing case, and that it is time to cease, instead of eating until hunger has been appeased. As explained in a previous chapter, eating, without appetite, is an outrage against the stomach. The victim of overeating always eats without appetite. He may have a desire for something–anything to relieve his unsatisfactory feelings–but a normal craving for food needed to nourish the body, he really never experiences.
These victims of overeating are sometimes thin, even to emaciation. They so overcrowd their digestive organs that really every particle of vital energy is used to rid themselves of the never-ending supply. Others assume chronically a bloated appearance, though the skin looks rough and unwholesome in appearance and color. Many victims of this vice will say “I never overeat. Why, I hardly eat anything–I have no appetite. I merely eat enough to keep up my strength.”
The one who loads his stomach to its fullest capacity is not so great a sinner as he who merely eats under the idiotic idea that he is keeping up his strength. When one loads the stomach to repletion he usually eats with appetite, the food is invited, but the “eat-to-keep-up-my-strength ” idiot never allows his stomach to prepare for food, never gives it sufficient rest that it may develop an appetite, and under these circumstances indulgence in the smallest possible quantity of food would be overeating.
