Starvation Mode..blah blah blah lol

@stroutman81 great post that is very informative. I heard a lot of 'starvation mode' and did a little research on my own. It's nice to hear from someone that is well grounded and backs up their positions with scientific evidence and research. You filled in a lot of holes in my knowledge.

I have trouble with this starvation mode theory because when people are really starving....... they lose weight. I think people hit plateaus which is different then actual starvation. I know I am new to this site but not to losing weight. In the past when I stalled I mixed things around. Changed my breakfast, rotated my calories, tried different foods and usually broke out of it fairly quickly. JMHO. I am no expert. Sometimes I would just eat the same thing day after day as I already knew what the nutritional value was and I got lazy, maybe the body does also. Keep it guessing is my theory.

megamom, I would respectfully suggest that you read Stroutman's blog on starvation mode. It really does explain the facts from a scientific, yet understandable slant.

I LOVED Stroutmans Mythbusting blog! Thank you thank you thank you! I am on a starvation diet right now. Ahhhhh,.... I am in heaven. Thank God I am on it. I have lost 30 lbs. in 2 months.

This is AFTER 2 years of healthy, low glycemic, high phytonutrient, whole food eating with strength training and cardio 6x per week. It unfortunately didn't work for me (I have thyroid issues). The problem is, being on even a small calorie deficit for 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, etc. is really, really detrimental to the MIND. I am aware of the Great Starvation Experiment. It helped me realize that dieting without results is pretty harmful to my relationship with food. I admit, I had things going on medically that explained my inability to lose weight (hypothyroid), but because I was undiagnosed, I just thought I had to work harder, and I thought that because I'm a woman, I'm 40, of course I have to do p90x and be perfect on food, etc. Man, that did more damage to me.... this LONG TERM LIFESTYLE OF DIETING is for the birds. I think it's bad for us/me.

I'm so happy for everyone here that is doing it slowly and healthfully, and I am happy for those seeing results, but to diet as a lifestyle, so constantly, so no-stoppingly is, for me, really bad. That's why I'm trying to make the amount of time that I am dieting as short as possible. I, too, was scared of all that starvation mode stuff. But, heck, I know how to strength train and eat well -- I can certainly ramp up my metabolism once I'm done starving. It will feel wonderful to eat and work out.

But for now, I'm getting the dieting over as fast as possible. I'm on 420 calories per day. When I'm done, I'm going on a MAINTENANCE program and stop this never-ending cycle of a daily deficit, always feeling unsatiated. I'm going to just walk or jog for health, and maintain my weight. Ah... the extra 500 calories per day will be amazing (adjusting for the new body weight, of course. I use getdunked.com to meausre my RMR and my body fat)

Okay, anyhow, you can see I'm kind of in a mood! Thanks yall for your posts. I just love reading them!


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Funny how anorexics never have problems consistently losing weight while they're in a prolonged, serious energy-intake shortage.

Moral of the story.

Overburdening your bodies ability to manage stress and prolonged dieting can cause adaptation to metabolism leading to slowdown that supersedes what would be expected based solely on the tissue loss. However, it's not going to make weight loss impossible. And it's certainly not going to bend thermodynamics where people are gaining weight in an energy deficit.

Even though I was quoting someone above, I stress everyone reads what I typed above as well as the link I provided.

funny. thast what i was just talking to my dad about last week. people get too freaked out about stuff.

so lets see if i'm understanding this. Being on a starvation diet is ok? That's what i'm getting from this whole post and that blog. I was eating 600 cals for 2 months then STOPED losing weight. I'm trying to understand why I stopped.

no, that's not it.

First lets differentiate, starvation mode, is a "cloudy" concept that involves the body slowing down it's metabolic functions in order to conserve energy for the "upcoming" famine, which is something the body is genetically predisposed to do because of our ancient past. A starvation diet is a diet of less than 50% of your maintenance calories, they are 2 completely different things, with 2 completely different outcomes.

Second, entering "starvation mode" is not like flipping a switch, it's a process the body is constantly evaluating. If you have too few calories coming in to satisfy energy needs, the body will begin slowing down unneeded metabolic functions, there is a tipping point in this VERY complex equation where if you eat too few calories weight loss is dramatically reduced, and calcium leeching and protein leeching is encouraged by the body. Note that this ALWAYS happens anyway to a degree in a caloric deficit, but when you keep your calories at a reasonable level, it's a small issue, and doesn't really play that much into your weight loss. When you start increasing the deficit, with no way to account for it, thats where problems happen.

The reason why it's so complicated is that people with lots of fat (remember, fat is an energy source) can afford these larger deficits because the body will use them to compensate. When the fat comes off, the surface area of that fat goes down, which means less energy available to compensate for the calorie deficit, which means greater ACTUAL deficit, which means the body slows down more metabolic process, which means it's harder to lose real weight.

Moral of this story.

Keep your deficit reasonable, and eat back your exercise calories, at least to start, see where that goes for you, if you feel like you can do more with less, fine, but do it in small increments so that when the weight loss plateaus, you aren't required to make wholesale changes to fix things (which can take months).