Messed up Metabolism?

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stephaniemarie2
stephaniemarie2 Posts: 39 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I know I know.... CICO. But my question is does anyone think that it is possible to mess with your metabolism? For example if you crash diet on some days, but then eat heavily others. I feel like I screwed my metabolism up in the past couple years by not being healthy, some days eating 500 calories other days 2000.
I am now doing 1200 a day and barely seeing weight loss. Only been 3 weeks but just thought I'd ask.

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  • DeguelloTex
    DeguelloTex Posts: 6,652 Member
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    No, that wouldn't do it.
  • DemoraFairy
    DemoraFairy Posts: 1,806 Member
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    Eating different amounts on different days is how we evolved - it's kinda what we were designed for. And it's the central idea behind certain diets like intermittent fasting and calorie cycling.

    If you're not seeing much weight loss you're either being impatient (as you say, only 3 weeks), not counting accurately and eating more than you think (do you weigh everything?), or you've got unrealistic ideas about how much you should be losing (about 1lb/week is a good rate of loss).
  • senecarr
    senecarr Posts: 5,377 Member
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    If you averaged enough to gain weight, no. Any kind of adaptive thermogensis that comes from being in a calorie deficit requires long, sustained deficits, and probably requires going beneath a certain body fat thresh-hold.
  • kristen6350
    kristen6350 Posts: 1,094 Member
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    Unless you have been diagnosed by a doctor (by blood tests) with a metabolic disorder, your metabolism isn't messed up.

    You are eating too much, some way or another.

    Do you weigh everything you eat?
  • mccindy72
    mccindy72 Posts: 7,001 Member
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    stephaniemarie2 wrote: »
    I know I know.... CICO. But my question is does anyone think that it is possible to mess with your metabolism? For example if you crash diet on some days, but then eat heavily others. I feel like I screwed my metabolism up in the past couple years by not being healthy, some days eating 500 calories other days 2000.
    I am now doing 1200 a day and barely seeing weight loss. Only been 3 weeks but just thought I'd ask.

    Not really. You can't "crash diet" in a single day - that's just fasting, and people do it all the time. If it were going to damage your metabolism, there would be repercussion for fasting prior to and after surgeries in the hospital. It's perfectly fine not to eat for a day or two, and it doesn't do any lasting harm. In fact, since in the cave days our ancestors would have to hunt and gather food, our bodies were built to go without food for a day or two - that's why we have that capacity to store so much fat without limits. Long seasons of famine created that need. Back then there was no way to know when food might become readily available again. We can't tell our instinctive brains and bodies that technology has provided us the means to bypass that need to store.
  • ndj1979
    ndj1979 Posts: 29,136 Member
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    stephaniemarie2 wrote: »
    I know I know.... CICO. But my question is does anyone think that it is possible to mess with your metabolism? For example if you crash diet on some days, but then eat heavily others. I feel like I screwed my metabolism up in the past couple years by not being healthy, some days eating 500 calories other days 2000.
    I am now doing 1200 a day and barely seeing weight loss. Only been 3 weeks but just thought I'd ask.

    no, it would have to be chronic under eating for a sustained period of time.

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