BMR!! who eats under that like me?!

CoderGal

Imagine needing $5 a day to operate your body.
Without the $5 you dont get the proper gas for the engine or the oil.
You are in essence, running on empty.

Now if you have a body fat level that puts you in the obese II or obese III category then this is okay for a while.
If you are just overweight then you are doing it wrong.

The body is a complex system and many factors come into play with losing weight.
Unfortunately cutting cals to bare bones isnt going to work forever and the catabolic effects on lean tissue can be extreme.

This is crap. Whether or not eating at less than your BMR is a bad thing, the explanations for it need to be based on actual science, not just this "imagine a fuel tank" nonsense. It's like the people who insist that you need to eat a bunch of small meals during the day, because your metabolism "is like a fire that you don't want to let go out."

Using metaphors is fine for helping someone to understand a concept, but they should never be the actual explanation.

Heres the explanation.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12

And if that wasnt enough to read:
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/637094-cinderella-s-weight-loss-knowledge

dlwyatt82

Heres the explanation.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12

And if that wasnt enough to read:
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/637094-cinderella-s-weight-loss-knowledge

I'm not sure which data in either of those posts you are referring to. There is one table in dan's post showing comparisons of "overfed" to "underfed", though I would assume that these terms refer to a comparison of caloric intake and TDEE. It does make sense that a larger caloric deficit would have a larger effect on your metabolism; however, that's still based on comparing intake to TDEE, not BMR. For a very inactive person, TDEE and BMR will be fairly close together, and eating "below BMR" would still be a potentially reasonable (500-1000) deficit. For those of us getting a lot of exercise or who have very active jobs, you obviously wouldn't want to eat that few calories, as the deficit would be huge.

Before I'd accept the statement of "you should never eat less than your BMR because it will screw up your metabolism", I'd want to see studies that took this into account, trying to determine whether it's an excessive deficit (from TDEE) that causes these consequences, or whether the BMR number really is some magic boundary that shouldn't be crossed.