Overeating | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 13, 1865

Overeating.

ALL men agree that a glutton and a drunkard are opprobrious and ignominious. All men join in decrying them and inveighing against them; and we are perhaps not in danger of becoming drunkards and gluttons. But there are excesses from overeating this side of gluttony, and excesses from overdrinking this side of drunkenness. There are many men who eat beyond the necessities of nature. They obscure their minds. You must take your choice between your brain and your stomach. The two together cannot be copulous. If you fill the one, you must relieve the other. If you will work your head, you must carry temperance into your diet. Full-feeding and full-thinking never go hand in hand. There are hundreds of men, who, being of a vigorous physical frame, and of an active appetite, unconsciously eat to repletion, and then, through fevers, and indigestion, and the disturbed functions of their whole system, they labor through the day to discharge their duties, toiling, fretting and troubled, and do not know that the cause of the mischief is a slight excess in eating. There are many men who, by this simple act of taking too much food, twice or thrice a day repeated, keep all their feelings upon an edge, so that they are irritable and quick, or make themselves stupid and slow. There are many persons who, by mere overeating, take from sleep its refreshment, and from their waking hours, their peace, by the gnawing of the worm of appetite.

This is a little thing. Your physician does not say much about it. Your parents hardly ever speak of it. It is a thing for every man to consider for himself. But it is a serious fact that two-thirds of the men who live a sedentary life, impair their strength by the simple act of injudicious feeding—overeating.