How To Repair A Damaged Metabolism - Stavation Mode

coconutbuNZ · April 2012

Men lose weight a lot quicker, their metabs are naturally higher or they burn it up faster. For women it is a constant frkn battle, no fair! Maybe that's why we try to eat like birds in order to lose weight. My partner just doesn't understand that if I eat the same amount as him, I will gain weight and yet he will steadily lose, with exercise. I exercise as well. Throughout the week he can have a few beers, eat a roast dinner, throw in some junk food and still lose weight. Me? I look at a chocolate bar and I gain a pound! So jealous of men lol

wxchaser · April 2012

Wonderful post!! Very helpful for someone like me who's having a hard time losing weight. Thank you!

KeriA · April 2012

Sorry I didn't see this till now and must not only thank you but those who keep bumping this so I finally saw it. I have recently decided that I need to repair my metabolism by taking a break from a calorie deficit. I have never been a yoyo dieter and tried first to lose weight just by upping exercise. I didn't see results and found MFP and have been relatively conservative. I tried 1 pound a week but wasn't losing so lowered my calories. I never got as low as the 1200 net calories. I lost slowly 30 pounds and then stalled. I was losing and gaining the same 5 pounds over half a year. I started weight training and tried everything. Nothing worked. Then I started seeing posts that recommended losing with a deficit that was over your BMR. I checked my BMR, TDEE, etc. It turned out I had been eating under my BMR for a year and a half. I am now taking a break from a deficit. I upped my calories a few times and am now at MFP's maintenance for me. Not sure it is high enough and I am having trouble eating it everyday. I have my higher days and my lower days. Once I start back again I will stay above my BMR and have a smaller deficit. My guess is that since I had been exercising regularly before coming on here what MFP recommended for me for a 1 pound loss was too low not too high. Others have gone up from the 1 pound loss recommended here and lost faster than I. I am still weight training and have eased up a bit on my cardio. Fortunately I haven't gained except for a few days and still at the high of my 5 pound fluctuation not above that. I am staying within those 5 pounds. If I had realized sooner I think I may have lost just by upping my calories etc. I will also take breaks from now on from losing as well. So I don't think it merely takes eating below 1200 for a woman to reach this situation. I think a long period of a deficit below her BMR with insufficient breaks and higher exercise will cause the problem as well. So called cheat days with low deficits may help but also can add to the problem if the overall deficit over time is too low. Frankly I think that being in school last year saved me from stalling out sooner and had more to do with my weight loss than the low deficit.

19danno77 · April 2012

I'm not sure your metabolism can be broken unless you've found a way to maintain a body temperature below 98Â°F. That is a mammal's first and only job: stay at that temperature. Everything else is a byproduct...movement & noise. The only sources of inefficiency are heat lost to the outside world and how much caloric content you pass in your stools or urine. The heat you shed, like a house is relative to your surface area and your insulation: clothing, adipose tissue, hair, & ambient temperature. The nutritional content of urine should be close to or at zero (I understand diabetics can have sugar in their urine) and stools would depend on the length and efficiency of your digestive system as well as the speed of the bowels and content of your microflora.

Some bodies make better use out of nutrients...while some eat like horses and gain no weight others eat like birds and find themselves gaining or unable to lose. While it seems unfair, from a survival standpoint, it'd be better to be the latter as you'll outlive the former if caloric availability, globally, were to suddenly decline dramatically; that is, if the former is unable to improve efficiency when the caloric rug's pulled out from under their eating. The former tend to be men and lose weight quickly and the latter tend to be their frustrated wives...rest assured this is for your survival and that of humankind...face it, men are disposable genetic experimenting grounds for mother nature, the dependence of our survival is on women which is why your bodies are more efficient than ours. Among women, the higher nominal bodyfat, more efficient digestive tracts (less frequent poops) are all the evidence one needs to see that a body held at 98Â°F can seemingly take such differing amounts of food/energy.

If you believe in what Einstein said about conservation/interchangeability of energy/mass then there's no miracles going on inside our bodies...it comes down to heat and efficiency. To believe a metabolism can break I think is to believe in a perpetual motion device...it's a unicorn. Just remember all energy in our food decays down to heat from friction in one form or another or the evaporation of water in sweat/respiration.

AeolianHarp · April 2012

It's really sad how clueless people are. This isn't a good article at all.

coconutbuNZ · April 2012

While you are restricting calories and losing weight - or "dieting" - your BMR rate slows down. That's the rate at which your body burns calories to perform normal functions like breathing and staying warm. Very low calorie diets (around 800 calories a day) can reduce your metabolic rate by as much as 30 percent. Your body perceives itself to be "starving", so it reduces the calories it burns. It was once thought that this reduction in calorie burning would affect your resting metabolic rate indefinitely, but research does not support that idea. A more recent study showed that women who diet frequently do not have significantly lower metabolic rates than women who have not been chronic dieters. You will sometimes hear dieters say "I've ruined my metabolism", but this is not true or possible. It may seem like you are burning fewer calories than you did at one time and that is true. But the reason is because you have lost muscle through past weight loss efforts and you are not as active as you should be, especially with strength training.