"Starvation mode", exercise calories, dillema?

If humans went into true starvation mode after only skipping 1 meal or not eating for a day we would not have survived this long fact not fiction.

Hmm, since starvation mode is a process not a condition, not sure what this is referring to. As I said in my post, the first 1 to 2 days, nothing really changes in the first 24 to 48 hours, so while the process of starvation mode begins after your deficit grows to large, hormonal changes don't really start until glycogen reserves get to low. Which takes about 24 hours in the case of fasting, and about 48 hours in the case of underfeeding (enough to deplete the glycogen reserves).

Were you referring to something else?

no I was saying people who think that their bodys will go into starvation mode from not eating in like a couple hrs are silly and have not a clue.

Oh, I see. Well, I don't think I would think them silly, but yes, that would be simple ignorance of how the metabolism works. I don't blame people for that, I blame the out of control diet industry that has played on human insecurity for decades. It's disgusting how morally bankrupt some of these companies are.

The companies that try to get you to "lose 10 to 20 lbs of waste built up in your colon" are the ones that really steam me. For the record. if you have 10 to 20 lbs of waste in your colon, you have serious problems and need to go see a doctor, your colon should be generally empty and pink, not full of (pardon my french) crap.

Good post. Just some constructive criticism. Your formula for calculating TDEE is wrong. If you take your BMR and multiply by 25% you then have to add that figure to BMR to get TDEE. I find when explaining things like this to people that it's helpful to demonstrate the formula in a simple mathematical format. ie. BMR X .25 = x and then BMR + x = TDEE (approximately) You wouldn't believe the problems people have finding percentage sometimes!

I think that some of the reason that people get these issues confused is because when we write about them and try to explain them in accessible terms we leave out key points that we assume are givens. For instance, in the case of your well thought out explanation, answering the questions "Does eating 'X' amount of calories over our BMR keep our body out of 'starvation mode'? or "How far can I calorie restrict before I trigger starvation mode?" would have been very useful.

Thank you for sharing your rational:happy:

I've already addressed the incorrect formula in multiple replies, and have requested from the support staff to change the original post. Nothing more I can do about that as I can't edit the original post any more.

As to your second part, I agree, it would be great if I could answer those definitively. Unfortunately there's really no definitive answer to them (thus the giant post), if there was, this would all be very easy. How much over (or under in the case of large fat volumes) your BMR you can eat is not something that can be generically determined, and must be calculated per person based on their individual statistics. The second question you posited is closely related to the first, and essentially requires the same answer.
That's kind of the point of the whole post, there's no simple, one size fits all answer to these questions, so simply saying "eat XXX calories and you'll stay out of starvation mode" is not helpful to the group. You have put in the research on your own (or find someone you trust to do it for you) in order to figure out where you should be. Just blithely choosing the 2 lbs per week option that MFP has because you like the sound of losing 2 lbs per week won't necessarily work, it may, if your body can support that deficit, but it may not if it can't.