What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Eating Junk Food?

Everyone craves junk food from time to time but after learning what it does to your body you might think twice before biting into a piece of fried chips. Let’s start off with what junk food actually is.

What actually is junk food?

Usually, when you think of junk foods, the first thing that comes to mind is candy chips and fast food and we can’t rule out liquids like soda and energy drinks. The fast food options have diversified recently, and even at places like Burger King and McDonald’s you’re able to get plant-based meat substitutes and sell it for pretty much all the things you crave, those types of food are considered junk food. No one’s going to KFC and asking for a salad with no dressing or croutoJustns. They’re there to that sell the fatty fried chicken.

Therefore, when we’re talking about junk food, what we’re referring to is anything that has high amounts of added sugar, salt or saturated fat in it. and if you think about what you’ve eaten today, you could probably identify at least one item as being junk food.

Also every year on July 21, people celebrate National Junk Food Day. This isn’t your typical cheat day; it’s devoted to the things we enjoy munching on.

So what are all these delicious yet unhealthy foods doing to your body?

The short answer is nothing good. We’re going to start with the short-term effects of eating only junk food before moving to the long-term health risks. Although the long term is relative because if all you eat is junk food, you won’t be alive long enough to even notice long-term effects. It’s scary just how quickly junk food can change your body and cause serious health problems.

What are the bad effects of eating junk food?

Studies have shown that eating one meal made up of junk food can be detrimental to your health if you’re not an active person. So you can imagine that only eating junk food every day will cause mayhem to all the systems in your body in a very short amount of time.

The immediate effects of junk food are based on what you’re consuming and how active you are. If you binge eat an entire bag of chips or a whole fried chicken, you’re consuming a massive amount of sodium or salt. And after a very salty meal, your blood pressure might become elevated. This can cause all sorts of problems in the body from fatigue to heart attacks. Obviously, a heart attack would be an extreme unlikelihood and you would have to be very unhealthy for that to be a concern but it is possible.

This is especially true if you have a pre-existing heart condition or a non-active lifestyle. When you consume very salty junk food. It causes your blood vessels to constrict as the salt extracts water from them. There’s a reason that over half of your body’s made up of water. It plays a vital role in the circulation of all nutrients, cell function and chemical reactions in the body. Eating extremely salty foods all the time can mess with your body’s ability to maintain homeostasis or its internal balance.

When your blood vessels get straight to your body need to work harder to get oxygen and nutrients circulated to all your vital organs on top of that your arteries narrow which then slows the flow of blood exacerbating the situation even further. When all of these things happen as a result of eating too much so you begin to feel fatigued since your body is working harder than it should keep you going.

Now you’re probably going to want a soda to go with that salty food because you’ll start to feel dehydrated. Plus, it’d be ridiculous not to have a dessert to finish off your meal, which leads to the next dangerous ingredient in junk food. You’re eating sugar.

Your body craves this stuff because it’s what your cells use to make energy. Therefore you are biologically programmed to like the taste of things with sugar and junk food companies understand that at some level and take advantage of your biological programming by increasing the amount of sugar in their products so they taste good to us. These types of foods might be delicious, but they have terrible side effects almost immediately after you consume them.

The problem with bombarding your body with sugars from junk food is that it forces your body to try and balance the sudden influx of glucose. Your pancreas begins dumping insulin into your bloodstream to signal to yourself that sugar is available to make energy. Your cells then allow the sugar into them, and the mitochondria convert it to energy, hence why it’s considered a powerhouse of the cell.

This leads to a sugar rush, which makes you feel like you have an abundance of energy. However, we all know what happens next crash any junk food that’s high in added sugars will give you this rush and then leave you feeling tired because your body panics and you quickly use up the influx of sugar depleting it in a relatively short amount of time.

When there’s only a little sugar left in your bloodstream. Your cells slow their energy production and it leads to you feeling fatigued and groggy. It can also lead to irritability and cravings for more sugary foods. These are some of the most notable short-term side effects of eating junk food.

What are the long-term effects of eating junk food?

However, the high sugar content of junk food has even worse long-term effects on your body. Each day that you consume junk food, you’re at risk of developing a disease that could change your life forever. Let’s get into the long-term health effects of consuming junk food so that you can learn the risks to your body and hopefully modify your diet.

Over time, the high amounts of sugar and junk food wreak havoc on your organs, the sudden surge of sugar and the automatic response to the pancreas dumping insulin into the bloodstream. Because of all types of long-term problems. Studies have shown that people who eat junk food a few times a week dramatically increase their chances of developing Type two diabetes.

And since you’re only eating a junk food diet, you’re all but guaranteed to develop this disease at some point type two diabetes occurs when your body doesn’t produce enough insulin or the insulin no longer signals your cells to take in sugar and use it to make energy this leads to a buildup of sugar in the bloodstream while simultaneously causing a dramatic drop in energy production.

Type Two Diabetes can develop during a person’s lifetime isn’t something you have to be born with this ultimately leads to a pancreas being overworked or damaged due to an unhealthy diet or lifestyle the high amounts of added sugar and junk food are one of the things that can cause this to occur the crazy thing is that with every meal All you need that’s made up of junk food you’re rolling the dice with developing Type Two Diabetes.

Research has shown that consistently eating junk food can greatly reduce your muscle’s ability to take in sugars and create an urge given enough time you’re set well and can develop a resist stick to this process altogether, which results in type two diabetes and the need for medical intervention.

Left untreated diabetes can be life-threatening. Too much of a good thing can definitely be detrimental to your health. And there is no clear example of this than the overconsumption of sugars from junk food. But there are so many other components of junk food that can lead to long-term health problems. In fact, there’s a connection between eating junk food and depression.

How could consuming unhealthy junk food lead to depression?

It actually has more to do with what junk food is lacking than what’s contained in it. 2021 study hadn’t been into the University found a connection between eating healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables, nuts and fish, and an increase in positive mood and brain function. This begs the question

What happens to someone’s brain who lacks the nutrients these foods contain ?

Another way to put it is this If all you eat is junk food, low in nutrients, what will happen to your brain? Nothing good. It turns out.

It has been determined that junk food satisfies hunger in the short term, which seems to make the brain happy. But this is just an illusion. The brain might be tricked into thinking you’ve gotten the nutrients you need from the junk food due to the increase in available energy, but over time, your brain and body cells will begin to degrade as they don’t have access to the vitamins and minerals and antioxidants they need to stay healthy.

Your body can only last so long on sugar and fat alone and your brain eventually realizes this it’s not clear what exactly the trigger is but some studies suggest that people who consistently eat junk food are around 51% more likely to develop depression than people unhealthy diet.

This is a staggering number. It really makes you think if the short-term pleasures of eating junk food aren’t worth the risk of developing long-term depression, the most likely reason this occurs is due to a mix of diet and lifestyle. If you’re eating junk food all day, every day, you’re probably not very active.

This has a cascading effect on the brain. The more junk food you eat, the worse you begin to feel. The chemistry of the brain is affected by these mood swings and might be one of the triggers that lead to depression. A healthy and active lifestyle has been shown to go a long way in maintaining happiness.

Can junk food cause heart disease or heart attack?

But junk food doesn’t only have long-term effects on your brain, it can also cause irreparable damage to your heart. In fact, the most shocking part about eating a lot of junk food is that it can kill you. So if you’re on the junk food diet, what we’re about to tell you could save your life.

One of the long-term effects of all that salt and fats and junk food is that they can increase the number of low-density lipoproteins also known as bad cholesterol in your body. At the same time, the same substances can lower your high-density lipoproteins or good cholesterol.

The result of these two shifts and cholesterol can lead to heart disease and even heart attack. It’s the increase in bad cholesterol along with the increase in blood pressure associated with eating junk food that can put an enormous strain on your heart.

The heart is a strong and resilient muscle which is a good thing because it literally keeps blood nutrients and oxygen flowing around your body. Without a heavy heart, you can survive. However, like any of your muscles, it can become overworked and tired.

The problem with this is that if your biceps get tired from lifting too much weight, it just means your workout it’s over.

But if your heart becomes tired due to you gaining too much weight, a buildup of colour cholesterol and an increase in blood pressure means that you die. So you can see why it’s so important to maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet instead of loading up on junk food every day.

It cannot be stressed enough how bad it is for your heart. If all you eat is junk food, you’ll likely be able to last a month or two on a junk food-only diet before your heart gives out completely. However, if you decide to change your ways and save your life, the damage has already been done. There’ll be a long uphill battle to get back to healthy living.

That being said It most certainly can be done and the sooner the better the rest of your life will likely be spent monitoring your blood pressure and sodium levels you probably have to choose everything that you put into your body carefully but this will go a long way toward keeping your heart healthy.

The American Heart Association recommends that adults consume less than 2300 milligrams of sodium per day and this number is for someone who’s relatively healthy and making good choices as to what they put into their body. If you’re eating only junk food you’re likely not making good choices and consuming many times more sodium than recommended by the AHA.

In fact, one full meal of junk food wouldn’t be enough to put you over the threshold as a bag of chips and a cheeseburger gets you around 2000 milligrams of sodium between the two of them. if you’re eating three meals a day filled with junk you’re consuming three times as much so we can recommend him this is a recipe for disaster After all that salt will make you feel bloated and tired which is your body’s way of saying and knock it off with the junk food or there will be some serious consequences.

So your junk food diet has now negatively affected your pancreas brain and heart This should be enough to make you want to put down the candy bar and pick up the carrot but if not there is Eve And worse damage to come What if you couldn’t pop?

Not only would you be uncomfortable, but you’d have a buildup of waste in your system that could cause some really nasty problems.

The main reason why junk food isn’t great for your digestive system is that it lacks fibre, and fibre is a key component of a healthy bowel movement high amounts The fibre is found in foods like fruits veggies beans and oats none of those ingredients is in your typical junk food diet. What that means is that All those fats salts and sugars you consume get backed up your digestive tract, where they sit until they become too much for your body to handle they have to be evacuated unfortunately they might not come At the end you want.

Can eating junk food cause constipation?

The real problems with junk food begin with constipation, which results from only eating junk food. Being constipated puts a lot of strain on your body, especially the digestive system, which can lead to haemorrhoids and hernias.

It also has been found that junk food can be harmful to the micro-biome in your body as well. you have trillions of little bacteria that do important jobs inside your guts especially when it comes to digestion, this means you want to keep those microorganisms happy because if they’re in If they can begin to cause you some serious problems.

For example, if There are a lot of sugars and carbohydrates available certain bacteria might begin to grow uncontrollably Most often the ones that do this are not that helpful microorganisms is can lead to fewer resources for your helpful microbes.

We’re just beginning to understand how important a person’s microbiome is but according to some scientists in place A major role in several processes throughout the body. If your microbiome becomes damaged due to a poor diet you could initially lead to a buildup of gases and incredibly painful cramps as harmful bacteria begin to reproduce inside of you as to time progresses you might find yourself in need of a faecal transplant or any number of other unpleasant procedures to try to regrow that hell The microbiome once again.

One of the most frightening risks to your digestive system as a result of consuming too much junk food is the development of diverticulitis. Diverticulitis disease happens when there’s an infection or inflammation in your intestines, and it can end up being incredibly painful and includes symptoms such as fever and nausea as your body tries to fix the damage that’s been done to it. The worst part is the paint doesn’t go away over Like there’s no quick fix.

In extreme circumstances peritonitis can occur, which is when an inflamed pouch in the digestive attract ruptures and spills its contents into your midsection, this requires immediate medical attention.

Eating Junk food can cause cancer

If everything mentioned so far hasn’t made you change your mind about eating only junk food maybe cancer will. New research suggests that a diet full of junk food can actually increase your risk of cancer.

In 2019 A study determined that a diet consisting of only junk food resulted in a weaker immune system higher rates of inflammation, more risk of developing allergies and higher cancer rates.

Researchers think the low nutritional value of only eating junk food every day is What causes these problems to occur. if you only eat junk food your risk for causing olan rectal respiratory tract and stomach cancers all increase obviously These are all extremely serious and life-threatening which should give you another incentive to refine your eating habits.

Eating junk food can cause acne

Some of the negative side effects of only eating junk food happen outside your body Eating high cholesterol foods with lots of carbs can increase acne, this doesn’t just happen to teenagers going through puberty but to anyone who constantly eats junk food at a young child are at risk of skin diseases if they consume too much junk food.

One study found that adolescents who eat junk food three times a week or more likely to develop eczema than children on a healthy diet. These skin conditions are not life-threatening like many of the other effects of junk food on your body but they can also become irritating and uncomfortable.

Eating junk food can cause weight Gain

Every mentioned so far is an unpleasant consequence of a junk food diet but There is something else that is unavoidable with this lifestyle with high amounts of fat, sugar and salts come high amounts of weight gain.

Obesity is a major problem that results from consuming too much junk food. If you gain too much weight your heart has to be more frequently to circulate blood around your body, your lungs need to suck in more air to get you the oxygen you need, and your muscles need more energy to support your weight. Any of these factors can eventually become too much for the body to handle and cause it to shut down.

Eating junk food can cause asthma

Eating junk food has also been connected to an increase in respiratory illnesses, including asthma. This goes hand in hand with obesity as the airways and channels of your circulatory and respiratory systems become constricted or blocked. All of these factors increase your chances of having a heart attack, suffering a stroke or developing diabetes.

And the larger you become, the more calories your body will need to keep itself going. This means that you’ll need to eat more and if you continue to eat only junk food, there’s only one inevitable outcome, an organ in your body will fail and you will die.

What can I do to prevent the bad effect of eating junk food?

In other the avoid the negative effect of junk food, what you have to do is that you need to relinquish your junk food diet immediately and switch to a healthy alternative. We’re not saying you can’t eat any junk food. In fact, some research suggests that indulging in junk food occasionally might help you with weight loss and can be a morale booster.

However, there is absolutely no benefit to eating only junk food. So the recommendation by some nutritionists is to allow yourself a junk food meal once every week or two and savour it. But once you’ve had your fix, you should go back to eating healthy alternatives. That being said, there are definitely some junk food options that are worse for you than others.

What is some junk food that can cause health problems?

There are a few different junk food that you probably didn’t know were causing your body distress.

1. Pizza

The pizza is delicious. There’s no denying it. However, not all pizza is created equal. An average slice can contain 680 milligrams of sodium and 12 grams of fat and 300k calories when was the last time you had just one slice when you ordered pizza to be fair there are some pizzas that are made with more fresh ingredients and less grease than others which adds nutritional value while reducing the junk part of the food.

2. Burger and fries

On the other hand, fast food meal of burgers and fries has very little upside to it, one of those meals can consist of 1200 calories and up to 1700 milligrams of sodium And that’s not even counting drinks or dessert that you probably will have with me.

Basically, one fast food burger puts you very close to your recommended daily dose of sodium and saturated fats. so hopefully everything else you eat A day is made up of plants and fruit.

3. Home-made sandwich

You might think having a whole Homemade sandwich might be a healthy alternative to eating out at effects fast food restaurant but this might not necessarily be the case, cold cut meat skin contains large amounts of sodium three ounces of processed meat can have up to 1300 milligrams of sodium, which means that if you’re getting Do me a large deli sells every day for lunch though sodium levels might lead to your blood pressure potentially skyrocketing.

Also, Some research suggests that when lunch meets the art process stored properly it can contain nitrates and nitrates which are known carcinogens, to put it plainly processed meat might cause cancer.

4. Hot dog

If you ever watched a hot dog eating contest you’ve probably wondered how the contestants can have so much of the universally loved fast food treat, what you probably didn’t know Was that one hot dog can contain half the amount of saturated fat you’re supposed to consume in one day also hot dogs are fun with sodium to the point where a single hot dog can make up for already 33% of your allotted daily sodium intake.

This means those people who are eating Dozens of hot dogs in the city are literally consuming enough junk food to last them For months this might be an activity that is one of the worst long-term effects on the body out of any competition in the world.

5. Fried Chicken

You can put anything think that’s fried into the junk food category and one of the most common fried foods is chicken, it’s not the calories that make fried chicken so unhealthy but the amount of fat and salt that one piece of fried chicken can contain 34 grand some fat and 1200 plus milligrams of sodium after just two pieces As a fried chicken you’ve probably overshot your recommended fat and sodium intake for the day.

So what is a junk food lover to do?

Where I’m gonna save this again because it’s so important eating a junk food only diet will end up killing you in one way or another, depending on who you are and how active you are lifestyle is you might be able to live a couple of months if you only Junk Food, however, most medical professionals agree that your body would give up some time between one and 10 weeks if all you ate was Junk food.

If you really need to get your junk food fix from Time to time that’s okay just don’t do it every day, most nutritionists agree that having a cheat meal every now and then is all right as long as the majority of your meals consist of healthy food Would in order to protect yourself and the people you care about from succumbing to one of those nasty side effects of eating too much junk food There are a couple of things that can be done.

1. Education is always keen

Make sure to read the food levels of the things you put nearby You might be surprised to find your favourite snack is incredibly high in salt or does occur and it might be time to cut back a bit.

Also, it’s important that kids from a young age begin to think About what’s healthy versus what’s not, many people who rely heavily on junk food for sustenance were never taught about the detrimental effects it can have on their bodies. Therefore cooking meals with lots of vegetable fruits lean meats and fishes A great way to start introducing others to delicious foods that are good for them,

When making decisions about your own diet some nutritionists recommend using the 80:20 rule this means 80% of the food you eat should Be healthy and full of nutrients 20% can be from the junk food realm. ideally, you want to find healthy foods that you enjoy it satisfy your hunger so that more than 80% of your daily intake is from those sources but this is not all It is possible.

Even if you try and eat one healthy meal every day you can have a huge huge impact on your overall health any reduction in junk food is going to be good for you no matter how small.

What is the difference between fast food and junk food?

To know the difference between junk food and fast food let’s start with the meaning of junk food.

Junk food means non-healthy food with very less nutrient value or zero value commercial products including candy, bakery goods, ice cream, salty snacks and soft drinks which have little or no nutritional value but do have plenty of calories, salt and fats.

Junk food and fast food are two different categories of foods. We are always confused between junk food and fast food and use both terms for the same category of food. Not all junk foods or fast food. Fast food refers to food that can be prepared and served quickly.

It can come from many places, sit-down restaurants, counter service, takeout, drive-thru and delivery while not all fast foods or junk foods most fast foods are ready-to-eat food served promptly after ordering.

Some fast foods are high in calories and low in nutritional value, while other fast foods such as salads may be low in calories and high in nutritional value. Fast food is popular because the food is inexpensive, convenient and tastes good.

Junk Food unhealthy food causes it can cause memory and learning problems. increases the risk of dementia and lessens its ability to control appetite. It can cause chemical changes that can lead to depression. It makes you impatient and can cause uncontrollable cravings.

Take away

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to stay away from junk food you should cut out fried food highly processed food and anything with added salt or sugar from your diet and if you’re just not your best options are don’t be afraid to ask your doctor they’ll be able to point you in the right direction