"Starvation mode", exercise calories, dillema?

How does calorie cycling work? I'm curious.

that's a long story, but the short of it would be, you have a schedule for the week, where you have a day of "high" calories (near your TDEE or at it, and subsequent days of gradually lower calories, usually ending on day 3 or 4 with a deficit of 1000 to 1400 calories, and then back up. This strategy works for some, as it keeps your body from entering that long term deficit and thus keeps it from changing up the hormones. Make no mistake though, it's difficult, and requires a lot of dedication to do, but for some people, it's a viable alternative to a constant deficit.
There are a lot of variations to calorie cycling, so what I described is just one, you should research it, and make sure any thing you use for info is from a reputable source and verified by medical research though as there's a lot of bad info out there.

-Banks

bump

but surely it varies from person if i eat 500 calories and i drink lots of water i don't feel starving yet other days im the oppsoite

hunger has little to do with actual starvation mode. Hunger is controlled by hormones. Hormones can be altered based on body chemistry. The human body will manipulate hormone levels based on what it considers normal.

Bump to read later. I'm sooo frustrated. I lost 8 pounds last month from eating 1700 a day, MFP recommended I drop to 1680 and I did and now I'm up .4 from last month. What the hell? Granted I haven't been eating all the way to 1680 some days because I feel that it takes me eating junk to be able to meet my calories so I end up eating healthy and phooey on if I make the calorie goal or not. Clearly it isn't working. Maybe I should have eaten more candy like I did last month.

first things first, any calorie amount under the 10 pound bubble isn't really relevant because the human body fluctuates up to about 5 lbs up or down on a daily basis. Drink an extra glass of water 2 days earlier and eat a few hundred mg of salt the next day and you could be up 2 lbs without ever knowing why. So forget about numbers under a pound, they're irrelevant.

Second, a 20 calorie increase or decrease is not going to make a difference one way or another.
Here's why.
lets say that eating 20 extra calories per day did put you over the point of gaining weight. OK, so how much would you gain.
Here's how much. 20 X 365 = 7300 (I.E. just shy of 2 lbs)
that means in about 1 year you'd gain 2 lbs. if the world was just and everything happened in the human body the way formulas predict (which they don't).
So in 1 month, with a 20 calorie increase, you'd have added 600 extra calories approximately, to your frame. Or in terms of lbs of fat.... 1 SEVENTH of a pound.

Now, that being said, most bathroom scales (even the really good ones) have a 1 lb margin for error, which means even the ones that give you two places to the right of the decimal point aren't being very accurate about it. So forget about the.4 it's not relevant.

What I really think you're getting at is... why did I not lose? Which is a good question. It's one you should examine. But examine it by using reason, not emotion. Ask yourself, did I measure my food quantity right? Did I really exercise the amount I thought I did and burn the number of calories I thought I did? Is my deficit set to the right amount? Am I taking into account the error factor for calories (a lot higher than 20 on a day's worth of food, even if the labels were 100% accurate, which they're not).

In other words, I'm saying, check your methods before you question the theory. And look at this as a long haul process, don't sweat the small stuff, and try to be healthier, if you do that, the weight will eventually come off.

-Banks