Question About "Starvation Mode"

laughingfox

I recently read an article that said that the calories that FitnessPal has cut me down to, for a loss of 1.4 pounds a week, is "starvation mode"! That scared me! I am a 199lb, 21 year old, relatively sedentary individual, and it has me eating a little over 1,390 calories a day. Is this really starvation mode? Starvation mode means that my metabolism will lose efficiency, right? So...what should I do? Should I change my goal so that I am losing only 1 pound a week? I dunno what to think...anyone have some advice? Thank you in advance!

:flowerforyou:

twilight1542

Every body is different. The general rule for adult women is no less than 1200 a day to avoid starvation mode. If you are eating healthy & staying within calorie limits and aren't losing weight then your body may have entered starvation mode. If that happens just up your calorie intake by 100-200 calories per day & see what happens.

BrendaLee

1390 isn't starvation mode- you can easily fit a full day's worth of nutrition into 1390 calories. I think you'll be fine.

kimss

If your worried I would just start out at 1 pound a week.
Try not to let things freak you out too much, there is no real set number that you will "go into starvation mode" if your under hundreds of cals a day for a weeks and months, then you might be more lilkely to have a problem with it.
try to read alot of the threads from Banks/Boss. he is our resident guru of health. look him up in the search .
just try to relax and enjoy yourself.
eat healthy and exercise regularly and you won't have any problems.
good luck

klaflamme

From what I've learned, you won't go into starvation mode unless you are skipping meals. I try to keep eating through out the day... small snacks to get me until lunch or dinner. If you are consistantly skipping breakfast, then having a large lunch, and a small dinner or no dinner then I'd think that might not be good. As long as you spread out the calorie intake through out the whole day then you should be fine. I've been trying to stay within the 1200 calorie range and it's been working. I'm saying this based of what I have done in the past.

klaflamme

I am wondering if it is very important to eat more when you exercise though. If I am sticking to 1200 calories and I burn 600 doing an aerobic class, do I have to eat another 600 calories? I've been wondering about that. I didn't increase my calorie intake yesterday after I did a hard core class. I dropped from 208 to 207 in one day. Does anyone know if this is bad?

klaflamme

Banks wrote:

I still see many people that are confused or "question" the idea of eating your exercise calories. I wanted to try (as futile as this may turn out to be) to explain the concept in no uncertain terms. I'll save the question of "eating your exercise calories" for the end because I want people to understand WHY we say to do this.

NOTE: I'm not going to use a lot of citation in this, but I don't want people thinking this is my opinion, I have put much careful research into it, most of which is very complicated and took a long time for me to sift through and summarize, and thanks to my chemical engineering backgroud I have the tools to read clinical studies and translate them (somewhat) into more human terms. Some of this information comes from sources I can't forward because they are from pay sites (like New England Journal of Medicine), so you can ask for anything, but I may or may not be able to readilly provide it for you (I can always tell you where to go if you want to though).

I'll break it down into 3 sections.
Section 1 will be our metabolic lifecycle or what happens when we eat and how our body burns fuel.
Section 2 will be what happens when we receive too much, too little, or the wrong kind of fuel.
Section 3 will be the steps needed to bring the body to a healthy state and how the body "thinks" on a sympathetic level (the automatic things our body does like digestion, and energy distribution).

Section 1:
Metabolism, in "layman's" terms, is the process of taking in food, breaking it down into it's components, using the food as fuel and building blocks, and the disposal of the poisons and waste that we ingest as part of it. Metabolism has three overall factors, genetics, nutrition, and environment. So who we are, what we eat, and how we live all contribute to how our metabolism works. You can control 2 of these 3 factors (nutrition, environment).
When you eat food, it is broken down into it's component parts. Protein, vitamins and minerals are transported to the cells that need them to build new cells or repair existing cells. Fats(fatty acid molecules) and carbohydrates are processed (by 2 different means) and either immediately burned or stored for energy. Because the body doesn't store food in a pre-digested state, if you eat more carbs and fat then you need immediately, the body will save them for later in human fat cells (adipose tissue). This is important to realize because even if you eat the correct number of calories in a 24 hour period, if you eat in large quantities infrequently (more then you can burn during the digestion process), your body will still store the extra as fat and eliminate some of the nutrients. (Side note: this is why simple or processed carbs are worse for you compared with complex carbs)

Section 2:
The human body has a set metabolic rate (based on the criteria stated above), this rate can be changed by overall nutritional intake over a period of time, or by increasing activity levels also over a period of time (the exact amount of time for sustained increase in metabolic rates is the subject of some debate, but all studies agree that any increase in activity level will increse the metabolism).
It is important to note that obesity does not drasticly change the level of metabolic process, that means that if you become obese, you don't burn a higher fat percentage just because you have more to burn.
The balance of incomming fuel vs the amount of fuel the body uses is called maintenance calories, or the amount of calories it takes to run your body during a normal day (not including exercise or an extremely lethargic day). The metabolism is a sympathetic process, this means it will utilize lower brain function to control it's level, it also means it can actively "learn" how a body is fitness wise, and knows approximately how much energy it needs to function correctly. It also means automatic reactions will happen when too much or too little fuel is taken in. Too much fuel triggers fat storage, adipose tissue expands and fat is deposited, also free "fat" cells (triglycerides) will circulate in the blood stream (HDL and LDL cholesterol). Too little fuel (again, over an extended period) triggers a survival mode instinct, where the body recognizes the lack of fuel comming in and attempts to minimize body function (slowing down of non-essential organ function) and the maximization of fat storage. It's important to note that this isn't a "switch", the body does this as an ongoing analysis and will adjust the levels of this as needed (there is no "line" between normal and survival mode.).
When you're activity level increases, the human body will perform multiple functions, first, readily available carbohydrates and fats are broken down into fuel, oxydized, and sent directly to the areas that need fuel, next adipose (body) fat is retreived, oxydized, and transported to the areas it is needed for additional fuel, 3rd (and this is important), if fat stores are not easilly reachable (as in people with a healthy BMI where adipose fat is much more scarce), muscle is broken down and used for energy. What people must realize is that the metabolism is an efficiency engine, it will take the best available source of energy, if fat stores are too far away from the systems that need them or too dense to break down quickly, then it won't wait for the slower transfer, it will start breaking down muscle (while still breaking down some of that dense fat as well).

Section 3:
The wonderful part of the human metabolic system is it's ability to adapt and change. Just because your body has entered a certain state, doesn't mean it will stay that way. The downfall to this is that if organs go unused over a long period, they can lose functionality and can take years to fully recover(and sometimes never).
As long as there is no permenant damage to organ function, most people can "re-train" their metabolism to be more efficient by essentially showing it (with the intake of the proper levels and nutritional elements) that it will always have the right amount and types of fuel. This is also known as a healthy nutritional intake.
Going to the extreme one way or the other with fuel consumption will cause the metabolism to react, the more drastic the swing, the more drastic the metabolism reacts to this (for example, a diet that limits fat or cabohydrate intake to very low levels). In general terms, the metabolism will react with predictable results if fuel levels remain in a range it associates with normal fuel levels. If you raise these fuel levels it will react by storing more fat, if you lower these fuel levels, it will react by shutting down processes and storing fat for the "upcomming" famine levels. The most prominent immediate issues (in no particular order) with caloric levels below normal are reduced muscle function, reduction of muscle size and density, liver and kidney failures, increase in LDL (bad) cholesterol levels, and gallstones .


Now onto the question of "Eating your exercise calories"

As I have hinted to throughout this summary of metabolic process, the body has a "range" in which it feels it is receiving the right amount of fuel. The range (as most doctors and research scientists agree) is somewhere between 500 calories above your maintenance calories and 1000 calories below your maintenance calories. This means that the metabolism won't drastically change it's functionality in this range, with that said, this is not exact, it is a range based on averages, you may have a larger or smaller range based on the 3 factors of metabolism stated at the top.
On our website (MyFitnessPal), when you enter your goals, there is a prebuilt deficit designed to keep you in the "normal" metabolic functionality while still burning more calories then you take in. This goal DOES NOT INCLUDE exercise until you enter it. If you enter exercise into your daily plan, the site automatically adjusts your total caloric needs to stay within that normal range (in other words, just put your exercise in, don't worry about doing any additional calculations). Not eating exercise calories can bring you outside that range and (if done over an extended period of days or weeks) will gradually send your body into survival mode, making it harder (but not impossible) to continue to lose weight. The important thing to understand is (and this is REALLY important) the closer you are to your overall healthy weight (again, your metabolism views this a a range, not a specific number) the more prominant the survival mode becomes (remember, we talked about efficiency). This is because as fat becomes scarce, muscle is easier to break down and transport. And thus, the reason why it's harder to lose that "Last 10 pounds".

I really hope this puts a lot of questions to bed. I know people struggle with this issue and I want to make sure they have the straight facts of why we all harp on eating your exercise calories.

-Regards,

Banks

I just read this entire thread... good information.

pniana

Thanks for re-posting Banks information. I had not seen this previously and was very interested.

stormieweather

The way I look at it is...X (let's say 1200) calories are needed by my body to keep me going and stay out of starvation mode. If I exercise and burn 600 of those calories up just exercising, then I have only 600 calories to keep my body going...simply NOT enough. I try to eat a minimum of half of my exercise calories, leaving a little leeway in case I underestimated some foods or overestimated calories burned.

klaflamme

The way I look at it is...X (let's say 1200) calories are needed by my body to keep me going and stay out of starvation mode. If I exercise and burn 600 of those calories up just exercising, then I have only 600 calories to keep my body going...simply NOT enough. I try to eat a minimum of half of my exercise calories, leaving a little leeway in case I underestimated some foods or overestimated calories burned.

I think I have that fear that all that exercise will be for nothing if I eat all those 600 calories back... I need to stop thinking that way. Perhaps I will leave the leeway too so mentally I don't feel like I replaced it all. I like your explaination.

Saken

besides, starvation mode only happens if you dont eat for a long period of time also, meaning that if you keep eating low calloriie foods you will probably avoid starvation mode by cheating you body telling them that you got plenty of food avaiable and saving callories that way

SHBoss1673

besides, starvation mode only happens if you dont eat for a long period of time also, meaning that if you keep eating low calloriie foods you will probably avoid starvation mode by cheating you body telling them that you got plenty of food avaiable and saving callories that way

this is false. Starvation mode is what happens when your body has insufficient calories over an extended period (a few days), it has nothing to do with whether you eat or not, it's all about eating enough calories AND eating the right kind of calories.

Your body is a machine, it is constantly monitoring (through hormones, chemicals and lower brain function) your food intake. There's no line in the sand that suddenly switches from normal metabolic rate to starvation mode. What makes your body start slowing down organ function and muscle growth is different for everyone, which is why I always say tweaking of the (very generic) program MFP puts out is usually necessary. A lot of the starvation mode question becomes a question of how much body fat you have, as your body fat % goes up, the bigger the deficit is that you can have between maintenance calories and calories consumed. Inevitably no matter what you do, if you create a deficit that is too large, you're organs will start slowing down, and your body will start shifting focus away from building new muscle, this slows down the metabolism making it harder to lose weight, all bad things. What we are aiming for here is to learn to eat healthy for life, which means creating a small, manageable deficit that you can live with and not be tortured by. The weight comes off slower this way, but it's healthy, and it teaches you good habits so when the weight is finally down to where you want, it's quite easy to stay that way.

Azdak

It's worth mentioning again that these are not "static" processes, and there are no permanent off/on switches when it comes to metabolism.

If you are aggressive with a weight loss diet (e.g. 1200-1500 calories), you will almost certainly loose some lean mass along with fat as well as lower your resting metabolism to some extent. You can lessen this effect through exercise (esp strength training), but it will happen and it should not be of great concern. The health benefits of your weight loss are more than worth it. (Note that "lean mass" is NOT equivalent to "muscle mass"--lean mass is basically anything that isn't fat).

The research I have read indicates that this is not a permanent change (and that's where I think some of the misunderstanding comes in). At some point, when you increase your calorie intake, your resting metabolism will increase as well. Exercise can also have a significant impact as well.

From a practical standpoint, I don't think "starvation mode" should be a significant concern. For someone with a lot of weight to lose, significant early "success" can be have an important positive reinforcement effect, even if some of the loss is lean mass. You can always modify the process as you go along, especially as your fitness level improves and you can be more aggressive in your workouts.

Despite TIME magazine, I still am 100% convinced that it is virtually impossible to achieve long-term, permanent weight-loss success without exercise.

pcbta

There are some professionals that wonder if starvation mode is a myth...
just a thought.

Why not try to mix things up a little...eat higher one day, lower the next, then eat up to your maintenance. I always take the weekends OFF...so it's not possible to hit starvation mode...if it exists...

Cindy

stormieweather

I can only go by my own personal experience.

For me, dieting for 4 years after the birth of my daughter, eating 700-800 calories per day, with the occasional splurge once or twice a month (because why not, if I'm only eating 700 cal a day?) did not lose me a single pound. In fact, I ever so slowly gained weight.

Only by INCREASING my calories - by more than double, in fact, have I been able to LOSE weight.

So call it what you want, the fact is, I couldn't lose weight when I was eating too little.

laughingfox

Wow, thanks to everyone for the replies. I still feel a little wary about the whole subject, but I definitely feel a lot more informed and a little less panicky. You guys are great -- thanks for taking the time to share your wisdom with me.