IIFYM/Reverse Dieting Question - Advanced

RosieRose7673

I love this thread so much! Tuesday evening entertainment!

FWIW, 10 years ago, I was admitted to inpatient treatment for anorexia. I ate less than 500 calories daily. I always consistently lost weight. I lost all my muscle mass. I was a walking skeleton. Looking back, it was terrifying. What I'm wondering, if you are correct, wouldn't I have started gaining weight at some point? Right?

No. I wouldn't have. But wait! Didn't you say that poor sleep was a factor and can make you gain in a deficit? Well, I should have been morbidly obese! I was manic much of the time that I was suffering from anorexia (diagnosed bipolar). There were times I would sleep only a few hours every few days.

Well. I'm just confused now. I must be a very special snowflake!

Christine_72

I don't know the science behind poor sleep and weight gain. But for me, if i have had a crappy nights sleep I am like a ravenous bottomless pit the next day. My body needs energy and it's gonna get it from food dammit!!

ETA: Add in the lack of energy to move, on top of the hunger and it's a perfect storm for weight gain.

MarkusDarwath

vismal wrote: »

It's very hard to gain body fat percentages while in a deficit especially if you are doing any kind of resistance training. You would need to be very lean to begin with and have a good deal of lean mass in order for the amount of muscle catabolized to exceed the amount of fat burned enough so to cause an increase in body fat percentage. This is mostly because muscle providers considerably less energy than fat and that body doesn't readily give it up especially when adequate fat stores are present.

If I correctly remember what she posted, she started at 18% and was trying to hit 16%? That's extremely lean for a woman (heck, it's pretty darn lean for most men). And to look at her pics, she does have a lot of lean mass for her size. What I was proposing is that her body did not view her existing fat stores as adequate, therefore gave up muscle more easily instead of fat. (seems to happen a lot in distance runners and cyclists. Their bodies want to drop everything except the minimum needed to perform what is asked of it.) There's also the point that she seems to be using BIA for her body fat percentage. They tend to interpret daily water and food fluctuations as fat, at least my BIA scale does. If I weigh in the morning with BIA, then a few hours later check again at a couple pounds more, the scale will tell me that my fat increased by a few tenths of a percent and that muscle decreased by the same. Obviously this does not actually happen that quickly.

While under maybe the most extreme conditions it's certainly possible to gain body fat percentages due to lean tissue losses, it is in no way at all the same as the OP's claim that fat can be stored while in a deficit.

Certainly it's not the same as what she's claiming is happening, but on the assumption that she's being truthful about the conditions surrounding the pics she posted, she obviously had some processes going on that at least give the impression of gaining fat while in calorie deficit. Her lower calorie pics look to my amateur eye like water retention and muscular atrophy, but if one had read a bunch of misleading info I can see where it might be concluded, "look, this stuff must be right because it fits what seems to be happening to me."

In terms of overall results, it doesn't really matter if she was miraculously gaining fat in deficit due to 'starvation mode' or just putting on water weight and losing muscle mass and tone due to inadequate nutrition. Either way, she fixed it by eating more and changing her macros a little. I suspect she's simply at a size where more than a couple hundred calories per day deficit is going to come with negative health consequences.