Stomach shrink how long

Yes, your belly does boast rubber band-like properties that allow it to change size, explains gastroenterologist Nitin Kumar, MD. For instance, the elasticity makes it easier to gorge when presented with a giant meal to help us avoid starving in times of famine. But back in our cave-people days, it was helpful.

As for the shrinkage? Your stomach is capable of quickly snapping back to normal size after a feast. If eating less was all it took to shrink your stomach, it would follow that normal-weight people have smaller food pouches than people who are overweight or obese. In fact, most of us tend to feel hungrier when we slash our caloric intake. Kumar says. Your system gets flooded with the hunger hormone ghrelin, making food even harder to resist. But can your stomach actually stretch to allow more food—or shrink when you're cutting back?

Kind of, but the process is a little more complicated than that, says Kyle Staller, M. This explains why you may legitimately be able to always have room for dessert but not another entree—you're actually working with less volume. That explains why you tend to feel fuller faster when you eat a big meal after dieting. So, next time you want to make room when you spot a tasty-looking flan on the dessert menu, know this: Your fundus is probably up for it—and provided you pick up your clean-eating habits in the a.

Their results, which have yet to be published, show similar cellular reductions from severe weight loss. And though food accommodation has not been directly measured in these subjects, experiments have shown a reduction in the number of neurons that release nitric oxide, a chemical that signals the stomach muscles to relax so it can store more food.

This is supported by previous animal studies, which demonstrated that loss of nitric oxide is associated with appetite-dampening effects. While these findings may seem encouraging for the average dieter, researchers are unsure whether patients who lose less than 20 percent of their body weight will see similar cellular changes and declines in appetite.

It is also highly unlikely that short-term fasting is enough to produce long-term changes in the stomach. However, the hunger pangs that often accompany fasting are a result of strong contractions of the stomach, which presumably could temporarily minimize its volume, says David Levinthal , an assistant professor of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh. These findings have not yet been verified in humans.

However, decreasing the ability of the stomach to relax through food restriction can be taken to the extreme, such as in people suffering from anorexia. And in some instances of prolonged starvation, patients can even suffer from re-feeding syndrome, in which the sudden delivery of food overwhelms the depleted body with nutrients, leading to downstream effects like heart arrhythmia.

Soldiers saw the effects of this kind of extreme depravation after World War II, for example. Do these dynamic stomach properties work in reverse, allowing, say, competitive eaters to permanently increase their stomach size?

Numerous imaging studies have shown that the stomachs of obese people are really not that different from those of the rest of the population, indicating that there is little relationship between body size and baseline stomach size, says Levinthal.