Should I eat more to lose more weight?

zoeysasha37

Carlos_421 wrote: »

My thought exactly ! There's too much woo that I don't know where to begin!

senecarr

AshaVare wrote: »

Starvation mode definitely exists (also known as "starving"). I used to be a professional junior athlete and my mum is an exercise professional so we both have some experience with this. Rather than process your food normally, your body clings onto excess calories if it thinks you're starving. Unfortunately I had to stop training after a serious injury which made me quite depressed and I put on weight. I am still quite fit and I'm finally easing myself back into training but the main thing hindering me at the moment is the weight I put on. I'm probably a bit too keen to lose weight quickly so I have a tendency to eat below my recommended calories which actually causes my weight loss to stall (and makes me tire easily, etc.) 1200 calories for a 5"3 female sounds a bit crazy to me but if you're feeling healthy then maybe it's alright (although I can hear my mum shouting "EAT MORE!"). Your body will probably giving you a few clues if you are inadvertently starving yourself but it won't hurt to up your calories for a while and see how it goes though There's a fine line between optimum weight loss and going into starvation mode so it can take some experimentation to find it.

It's also worth mentioning that calorie counting is a simplified way of looking at weight loss, and if I ate the perfect number of calories I need to lose weight, but had a healthy, balanced diet, then it would come off more quickly. That probably sounds obvious (since your body is better equipped to process some foods more than others) but my diet has been terrible ever since I had to gave up being an athlete and I find it really hard to change my habits If you're nervous about increasing you calories, make sure you're eating really good food! ... Like nuts... (It's my personal opinion that everyone should eat more nuts. Fat is not necessarily bad, you need fat, nuts are full of healthy fat, best place to get your fat, I could go on and on... :P)

Billions of years of life fighting for extracting energy efficiently from chemicals, but humans magically waste calories and only selectlively turn this waste off the first time they hit a famine? Does that sound evolutionarily plausible? That our body has a power saver mode, and it just runs in high power continuously all the time? We initially switched to upright posture because one ancestor had a mutation that save 4 calories or so per km initially, but waited on the first famine to draw down calorie burn?

No. What does exist is adaptive thermogenesis. If you increase your calorie deficit enough, your body will start avoiding fidgeting, unnecessary movement, you'll lose some thermic effect of food, and your body will down regulate a very few metabolic pathways. This means that if you increase your deficit by 100 calories, maybe 5 calories in savings will happen, it doesn't mean your body will find 100 calories not to burn, assuming one keeps the same amount of movement.

This also goes away within weeks of switching from eating at a deficit to eating at maintenance.

singingflutelady

I lost weight in a steady and rapid fashion when I was anorexic and eating 500 calories a day and exercising

singingflutelady

MsBuzzkillington wrote: »

This fight always comes up, this "starvation mode is a myth" thing. Sometimes there ARE anorexics who aren't stick skinny. I've known them. I know a girl personally who struggled with anorexia and bulimia for YEARS and she is overweight. Your body CAN get to the point where you will no longer lose weight no matter how little you eat.

People need to get over it. Like, it DOES happen. Sometimes when you eat too little, your body won't shed the weight. Just because there are really thin people who don't eat anything, doesn't mean it never happens. It doesn't mean that "starvation mode" (or whatever word you want to use) isn't a thing at all.

OP, if you feel like you need to eat more calories, do it. I believe it's about fueling your body and keeping it running smoothly so it can regularly keep burning off those pounds while keeping you healthy and nutritionally stable. Eating simply 1200 calories despite how much you work out is probably too low, try 1350 or so for a few weeks and see what happens. If you gain a little at the end of the month, just cut back again.

Ok totally tmi here but a lot of bulimics and anorexics who binge are normal weight or overweight because they don't get rid of all their binge calories.

Sued0nim

MsBuzzkillington wrote: »

This fight always comes up, this "starvation mode is a myth" thing. Sometimes there ARE anorexics who aren't stick skinny. I've known them. I know a girl personally who struggled with anorexia and bulimia for YEARS and she is overweight. Your body CAN get to the point where you will no longer lose weight no matter how little you eat.

People need to get over it. Like, it DOES happen. Sometimes when you eat too little, your body won't shed the weight. Just because there are really thin people who don't eat anything, doesn't mean it never happens. It doesn't mean that "starvation mode" (or whatever word you want to use) isn't a thing at all.

OP, if you feel like you need to eat more calories, do it. I believe it's about fueling your body and keeping it running smoothly so it can regularly keep burning off those pounds while keeping you healthy and nutritionally stable. Eating simply 1200 calories despite how much you work out is probably too low, try 1350 or so for a few weeks and see what happens. If you gain a little at the end of the month, just cut back again.

Um

You cannot create matter out of nothing

Seriously? Basic physics

Listen to the people in this thread and let go of the woo...you will feel better for it