Some Q's about calories and starvation,

pretty_ribbons

I think im a little bit confused, is this right? to loose weight you must burn off more calories than you are eating

if so, why should you eat back the calories you've burned? wouldn't that mean that you are just maintaining your current weight?

and if i ate 1200 cals in a day would that mean that i would have to burn of more than that and by the end of the day eat double my calorie goal?

and another thing, i dont get starvation mode, this is supposedly when you dont eat enough and your body holds onto whatever calories it gets, right?

i didnt think overweight people could go into starvation mode, i thought only skinny people went into starvation mode because when you have fat on you and stop eating your body eats the fat
if i ate less than my calorie goal each day would i really go into starvation mode, if so how come anorexic people are skinny?

i am abit concerned because i find that i dont eat to my calorie goal and hardly eat back my cals. i dont do it on purpose, its just that i am finding it hard to pick healthy foods that i want to eat, so end up eating nothing instead of going for the unhealthy food that i want to eat and going over on my cals,(which is what i used to do and how i got fat!) also i feel ok like this, hardly hungry i dont really want to force myself to eat if i feel its unnessassery, and some days i dont have the time in the day to eat and when i get the time it is too late in the evening, thats when i exercise and i dont want to exercise on a full stomach and when im done i go to bed so i dont want to eat then too

will i not lose weight because of this?

LabRat529

You're over-thinking. Trust MFP. MFP estimates your total calorie burn for the entire day. It's just an estimate, but it's a reasonable place to start. MFP then subtracts 500 calories from that total calorie burn if you're trying to lose 1 pound a week. If you're trying to lose 2 pounds a week, it subtracts 1000 calories from your total burn. It provides this number to you as your daily calorie intake goal. If you eat at your intake goal, you will lose weight.

What about exercise? If you exercise and burn 500 calories, MFP adds those 500 calories to your daily intake goal. You will still have a deficit!!!! It adds the calories back to keep your deficit from being too big.

What about starvation mode? Well, for starters, I wish MFP would stop using that term. It causes too much confusion. Your body does not actually go into a true starvation mode unless you're actually starving. It does, however, adapt to lower your metabolism. If you are chronically under-eating, your metabolism will hit rock bottom and you'll find it nearly impossible to lose weight.

To keep your metabolism high, you should eat at a small deficit- I'd personally recommend no more than a 500 calorie deficit, but the choice is yours. You should also exercise. Weight lifting especially is helpful because it helps retain muscle mass which helps keep your calorie burn high.

I hope that helps, and welcome to MFP.

Gshields42

When you plug your data into MFP and set a goal, it should give you daily calorie budget. If you are trying to lose 2 lbs of weight a week (which is what is considered healthy), then it will generally place you with a deficit 1000 calories below the TOTAL calories burned today (this includes BMR and calories burned by activities, including exercise).

Yes, it is possible for an obese person to go into starvation mode, though they are more resistant to it by an order of magnitude. At the end of the day, it's not about how much energy your body has left to it in the reserves, it is how comfortable your body feels with the throughput. If it suddenly starts to see a deficit of thousands of calories that it is losing a day, it doesn't matter to it that it can sustain that loss from its reserves for 6 months. It makes a knee-jerk reaction and decides bad things are happening, and it preemptively takes action to mitigate this loss. That reaction is to do whatever it can to minimize energy loss and prevent itself from sieving energy, so it sabotages your metabolism by shutting down or eating the parts of your body that use energy. That is why steady, slow, and consistent diets are more successful in the long run, you don't panic your body.

The body is less reactionary the bigger the reserves are, but if you go too far your body will react. Every body is different, and difficult to predict, which is why these guidelines are probably a bit conservative. I wouldn't break those guidelines without medical (doctor, nutritionist, etc) supervision and okay. The risks are just not worth it. It's probably a good idea to talk to your doctor regardless.

Anorexic people may be skinny, but they are not healthy. They are usually chronically unhealthy because of malnutrition. At the end of the day, the body can't add what it doesn't get, so they won't gain weight if they aren't eating anything. That said, they subsist on extremely low calorie diets (seriously, strictly portion amounts of lettuce or whatnot), and they are prone to sickness and disease, not to mention chronically weak. Not exactly role models here.

You need to eat enough to fuel your body. Find things that you like. It doesn't have to be the perfect diet of super healthy food, and there are very few people that can seriously maintain that for any significant length of time. It's about keeping to reasonable goals and being smart about it. The path you seem to be trying to talk yourself into is an eating disorder, and that is not a good way to go.

Please be safe and careful.

pretty_ribbons

thank you for this information

yes i think i am probably over-thinking, i just have this mind set now about losing weight and i want to try and get the most out of how im doing it and also understand how it all works

Gshieds42 you are very right anorexic people are very unhealthy and its really not nor never has been the way i want to go, tbh i dont think it is possible for me to be anorexic or have any eating disorder for that matter, i love food too much lol :laugh:

Even though i am not eating much atm I would never get to a point where i am starving and weak, if i get hungry i will eat, everyday i feel relatively satisfied with what im eating, maybe not as satisfied as if i had fried chicken and chips but now that i have changed my way of eating i have realised thats more a matter of just wanting the taste rather than being truely hungry, basically i put on weight becos i ate way more than i needed to, but it just caught my attention that maybe i am not eating enough to loose weight which then brought on alot of other thoughts :noway: