You polished off a second full plate of holiday food, maybe even snuck one more bite of baked mac ‘n cheese. You followed that with a sampler plate of the desserts . And you’ve done your share to deplete the wine supply. The effects are painfully obvious — heartburn, physical discomfort, bloat, maybe even a headache or some nausea. This is overeating at its finest, and nothing brings out the binger in all of us like a holiday meal.

But what’s actually happening to our bodies when we over-fill a stomach that wasn’t made to hold much more than a liter of food? It’s everything already described and as much as “holiday heart,” a very real health phenomenon that can lead to death.

CARBS

Love or loathe, carbohydrates are an essential nutrient when they come in the form of fruits, vegetables, beans/legumes, and whole grains. We love our refined, liquid sugar, and refined “white” starch sources of carbs though — the white bread, crackers, cookies, and pasta — and Dr. Rifai says that’s where much of our excess holiday calories come from. When we consume a significant amount of these “bad” refined carbs in a sudden instance, Dr. Rifai describes the stress the body undergoes.

• The body has a significant increase in blood sugar.
• Insulin’s job is to keep the blood sugar regulated at normal levels, but for non- or pre-diabetic people who are generally inactive or aren’t being active after a meal, an exaggerated insulin surge can occur, then blood sugar may excessively drop.
• The body immediately spikes into a high insulin state.
• This increases the blood pressure.
• For pre-diabetics and diabetics who don’t make enough insulin, the blood sugar can’t be controlled, and rises significantly putting major stress on the eyes, kidneys and nerves. This can also spike blood and vascular pressure, as well as possible respiratory and joint inflammation.

FATS

Now, according to Dr. Rifai, high insulin levels have turned off the body’s fat burning abilities and is storing those fat calories as body fat instead of burning them. The carbs are not being burned very much either; in fact they are also being converted and stored as fat once our body’s limited capacity to store carbohydrates has been saturated. Worse? When carbs convert to fat, much gets converted to saturated fat. You’re both eating and producing saturated fat.

• The saturated fat being out of balance increases cholesterol.
• “While the liver would ideally be making and removing cholesterol in balance, the presence of high blood levels of saturated fat impairs this action leading to high blood levels of cholesterol carrying (LDL) particles, which then burrow their way into our artery walls causing plaques and artery inflammation to occur,” said Dr. Rifai.

What you’ve created within your own body is a “weapon of mass dietary destruction for the sedentary person,” Dr. Rifai grimly described. That WMD is the result of heavy carb + heavy fat + heavy sodium consumption (mostly in the processed foods, not sprinkled on food). He reminded how those concentrated amounts of salt, sugar, starch, and fats act like cocaine on the brain.

PROTEIN

Turning now to how the body processes protein, and Dr. Rifai says many of us are simply not consuming enough (when you hold yourself to the RDA of 46 grams/day for women). He also says, “We don’t eat protein in an optimal way, which should be spread out throughout the day.” Protein doesn’t store in our bodies for future use the same way fat and carbs do. It’s a quickly utilized nutrient, making it ideal for post-workout recovery. And even if the body wanted to store some away, we’ve already stored so much excess carbs that our body is out of room. “So while some of the extra protein in the over-fed state may get converted into muscle, without exercise the quality of that muscle is in question, and much of the rest likely simply gets converted into body fat – and we know the damages of that,” described Dr. Rifai.

When we do eat protein throughout the day it may help stop or slow muscle loss and improve our feelings of satiety or fullness and energy, versus when we try to cram it all in at one meal. Dr. Rifai strongly urges not to skip eating breakfast and small snacks during the day ahead of a big holiday evening meal (or late eating event). You’ll end up overeating more than what you skipped, since you’ll be hungry and low on willpower. Plus, he cautions that a continued pattern of meal skipping followed by big eating results in a depletion of muscle mass in exchange for added body fat. No, it’s not a concern at just one meal, but it’s the legacy effect and ongoing history of this behavior that has detrimental muscle sapping effects.

HOLIDAY HEART

Finally, after bombarding your body with fat, carbs, salt, sugar, and alcohol, your body has a pretty serious way of waving its red flag. “Hospitals staff up their ERs for the statistical likelihood they will get a glut of people the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas,” explained Dr. Rifai. All of that excess leads to:

• Fluid retention,
• Which leads to a heart arrhythmia that can trigger atrial fibrillation in the heart.
• It can also cause a plaque to rupture in a heart artery and then a clot forms around a ruptured plaque, which is what causes most heart attacks and strokes. 

This is the exact scenario that killed James Gandolfini, right after a heavy meal of fatty and fried meats and alcohol in Italy.

Dr. Rifai isn’t trying to scare anyone, only to paint a real picture of what’s occurring inside your body when you get more than your fill at the holiday table.

“Have fun, have your indulgences, just be a better accountant. Pick one thing you really want. When the holiday is over, get rid of the extras. Let’s face it, pie isn’t really food,” recommends Dr. Rifai. Then, he says, there’s no guilt.