Starving mode

Yaxomoxay

We all know the Calorie in/Calorie out mantra, which is a good guideline for dieting. However most of all fall prey of the so-called starving mode, which is counterintuitive.

When asked about starving mode – mind I am not a trainer/nutritionist – this is how I explain that it actually makes sense.

Suppose we have a nice garage in which we keep our reserve of bottled water. Currently we have 100 bottles. Since we are responsible homeowners we try to maintain more or less the same amount of bottles. Knowing that we need 5 bottles/day to survive well, we asked a company to deliver 5 bottles a day. Someday we drink five, some other day we drink four or six. On average our stock remains the same (100 bottles).

However, the zombie apocalypse arrives (after the usual nuclear strike and right before vampires decided that it’s time to conquer the world) so we can’t get out to buy more water and, suddenly, there is a lack in water availability.

Since we don’t know how much the apocalypse will last, we drink five bottles the first day and four the second day. Only one bottle is delivered so our stock decreases to 92 bottles. Unfortunately we just disconnected DirecTV so there is no way to get CNN. In other words, we don’t know how bad the situation is out there and we don’t know how long it’s going to last. Here, starving mode kicks in.

Knowing that half a bottle is good enough for survival and realizing that our goal is to survive as long as possible we start drinking half a bottle of water a day. Every two days or so some delivery kicks in and even if two bottles are delivered at once, we are going to stock the additional water in order to survive for an ever longer period of time. We are going to keep using just half a bottle; even if three bottles are delivered. That is because we want our stock to increase as much as possible to even more than 100 bottles so that we can survive longer and longer. In starving mode we focus on keeping that stock up, at any cost. Even at the cost of suffering thirst. We just want to stay alive for a long time. If we would do this, why wouldn’t our body?

Now, how do I decrease the stocked water? Simple (well, not THAT simple). If we KNOW that five bottles are delivered each day, and we don’t have any trauma/apocalypse zombie going on, than we start drink 6 bottles of water every day. We don’t care if the stock decreases to 75 bottles simply because we know that there is availability and we just need to pick up the phone and request a delivery for a total of 25 bottles. In other words, we are not worried so even if it takes longer to reduce the stock to 75, we BELIEVE it’s easy to go back up.

What happens if our stock is right at 100 and we get TEN bottles each day? Simple, we use five first. So our stock goes to 105. The next day we try to use 6. Our stock goes to 109. Then we use 7! Our stock goes to 112. However we can’t drink more than 7, so we have to stock EVERY day the excess water, with the result that pretty soon we will have 150 bottles. Unfortunately, at 150 (which is the storage limit; read the blueprints!) we have to start enlarging the container, with obvious consequences.

This is the stupid description I use… just my 2c in the hope that someone elaborate on this