Has anyone broke their plateau by eating more??

Hondo_Man

Let me try this differently.

... Man's body needs 42 calories for proper organ function.
Man burned 600 - 800 calories today.
Man's body has been short-changed.

Man's body not happy.

Actually, man's body may be perfectly happy. Man's body still burns those 42 calories and pulls them from man's fat stores if it can (which it almost certainly can unless this man is incredibly lean). You're spelling out a hypo of "eating under your BMR makes your body unhappy" in more detail but my point is that eating under your BMR has little to do with how well your body functions and whether your body has been shortchanged. In other words, providing hypos that illustrate an idea doesn't make that idea true. Just like your body pulls deficit calories from your fat stores when you eat below your TDEE, your body will look to pull deficit calories from your fat stores when you eat below your BMR. It doesn't suddenly say "Oh no, you've crossed a calculated estimated number of calories and now I will enter 'preservation mode.'" BMR is useful for calculating TDEE, but it's not a threshold amount of calories recognized by your body.

Rather than telling me to go read books and linking fitday, do you have any sort of medical study suggesting that BMR is a threshold that should not be crossed or that BMR is the point at which metabolic damage/slowdown occurs or whatever else "body is not happy" means? While I see people on forums and blogs suggesting that eating below BMR may be problematic, I have yet to see any actual literature suggesting as much. To see where I'm coming from, you might take a look at Alpert SS. "A limit on the energy transfer rate from the human fat store in hypophagia," J Theor Biol. 2005 Mar 7;233(1):1-13. Their research suggests that how much of a deficit you can run without catabolizing muscle depends largely on how much fat you're carrying around and that maximum deficit is way less than your BMR for almost everyone saved for someone who is incredibly lean (perhaps too lean to even be practical). And that research actually tracks pretty well with real-life examples. Incredibly large people get by with losing pounds of fat per week (i.e., running a much more aggressive caloric deficit with a caloric intake well below their calculated BMR) while lean individuals don't really have that option.

You still simply don't understand. And I am wasting no more effort on this, except for this last bit of info.

In order to easily determine your TDEE, knowing your BMR is helpful. For the last time, the MFP member in question has a BMR of 1792. He is active, he exercises and he works. Conservatively, let's add 600 calories to his BMR (1792+600) and we have 2392 as his TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) or his maintenance daily calories. He states he is consuming 1750 per day and burns, via being active, 600 calories. This results in a 1150 balance or a 1242 caloric deficit.

You asked for literature? Here it is.

http://www.mckinley.illinois.edu/handouts/metabolism.htm

Good luck and I'm done.