Weight gain and starvation myth

AnnPT77

jjalbertt wrote: »

I think its important to understand time frame and how often one is eating at an unsafe caloric intake. There's also the whole "you're probably not getting enough nutrients to sustain your body" aspect of this. Eventually your organs just stop working or your hair falls out.
The body does try to hold onto energy when it realizes its not getting as much, although obviously this doesn't last forever and you're probably not going to notice it happening. Unless you're obsessively weighing yourself and even then, hard to tell.
As for your body just knowing, yes... sometimes this works but for a lot of people the hormone that release that trigger just doesn't work. Especially in the modern world when food is everywhere all the time. It's definitely not as reliable.

1200 calories is for a woman at average height I believe or the range of average height. It's lower if you're shorter or higher is you're tall and also depends on how active your daily life is. Generally the 1200 it is just a guideline till you know your specifics.

I'd also Iike to point out that just because people survived off little or still survive off very little, doesn't mean they're healthy...it merely meant they're alive, they could be very malnourished.

This app literally has a built-in research-based calculator (one designed with the assumption that exercise will be logged separately and eaten back), and there are research-based calculators in many other places (most of which average in exercise, unlike MFP) - one of the better thought-out ones is https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/.

There's no need to resort to old folklore about women needing to eat 1200 (which is too low for a lot of women's best health; slightly better odds of a number that low being necessary if shorter, less active, older (but maybe not even then). A calculator estimate, with a moderate deficit for weight loss included, is a better place to start than 1200 (even though the calculators should really be called "estimators", because they can be wrong, too. Any estimate needs to be validated by experience.)

Good writeup on the 1200 calorie diet:

https://www.aworkoutroutine.com/1200-calorie-diet/

wilson10102018

An average woman will require around 800 calories per day just to maintain 98.6 F body temperature in a temperate climate with ambient temperature around 65F. That is before locomotion, cell repair, digestion, and cognition (yes, the brain does something with all that blood circulating into the cranium). Colder temperatures, larger body weight, poor digestion, all increase that baseline. That is not a metabolic rate, it is pure physics on the amount of energy needed to raise a body of mostly water 30 degrees for 24 hours.