First hand experience with Starvation Mode.

It's not real. End of story. There is metabolic adaptation to dieting, but not starvation mode.

I lost over 50 lbs over a period of 2 years and I've never experienced it and I was pretty restrictive in the beginning. Any time I wasn't losing it was because I was eating at maintenance due to not logging correctly and underestimating my food intake. Every time I cut back to 1200 calories I started losing again. From my experience I have no reason to believe that it exists.

Maybe you should just eat veggies as snacks that way you don't take in too many cals but still keep your metabolise running.

But exercise and eating often will boosts your metabolism. Your metabolise is always running. I know that. But it will increase it.

Well I took a kinesiology course and they taught over a thousand student that your body will store fat if you don't eat properly. You need to constantly eat something so you can boosts your metabolism. and lose cals. I don't think they would teach students wrong info. But who knows?

They do a LOT, actually. I can think of several instances (such as what they teach vets about animal nutrition, or what they teach psych students about certain disorders) but that's another subject entirely.

I've battled disordered eating off and on. I won't go into detail. But I've never experienced 'starvation mode'.

Maybe you should just eat veggies as snacks that way you don't take in too many cals ...

Often times when people say they are experiencing "starvation mode" they are oblivious to how many calories they are eating in total, and often under report their intake. By saying "eat more veggies" you are essentially agreeing that they are not in starvation mode, but rather, are eating too many calories in total.

Well I took a kinesiology course and they taught over a thousand student that your body will store fat if you don't eat properly. You need to constantly eat something so you can boosts your metabolism. and lose cals. I don't think they would teach students wrong info. But who knows?

Because the study of movement is the same as the study of human nutrition.

Ok.

It IS possible that some posters have experienced starvation mode - if they had such an extreme eating disorder that they almost starved themselves or if they are survivors of a regime like Pol Pot in Cambodia.

But it would take much longer than 2 weeks and would not be the experience of 99.9 % of posters on this site.

you say you're approaching disordered eating... take that as a red flag. What do you hope to achieve from this thread? Justifcation to carry on eating way too little?

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"Starvation mode" is a stupid term people use to refer to several changes that can occur in the human body (including behavioural changes) in response to eating too little. There's no "on/off" switch in your head called "starvation mode" - the longer you eat too little for, the more of these things change in ways that make it difficult to stick to a diet long term, or if you're determined enough to carry on eating way too little, will compromise your health

short term changes may include:
- obsessing about food
- increased appetite (sometimes extremely increased)
- appetite shutting down then coming back with avengence leading to binge eating
- binge eating
- feeling tired and run down/lacking energy

medium term changes:
- your body using lean mass as fuel to make up the deficit to preserve fat stores for longer, which results in the metabolism slowing because the muscle cells you've lost no longer require the energy they were using to stay alive
- adaptive thermogenesis - this is further slowing of the metabolism that's not explained by body composition changes. This happens because your body tries to deal with the food shortage by directing less energy into non-essential functions, so you end up feeling cold all the time (less energy is spent heating you), your hair and skin look dull and your hair may fall out (less energy is being invested in keeping your skin and hair healthy), you have menstrual disturbances and your menstrual cycle may stop altogether (less energy being invested in reproduction, or even the reproductive system shutting down altogether), and similar, throughout the body. The result is the body saves energy, but your health deteriorates.
-rebound fat gain if you binge (likely) or start eating normally again, due to a combination of your metabolism slowing and increased hunger (which may come out of nowhere while your hunger signals are switched off for much of the time)

long term changes:
- if the food shortage is really extreme, when your skeletal muscles and fat stores have all been used up keeping you alive, your body then metabolises your organs for energy. Death from multiple organ failure usually follows this.
- if the food shortage isn't extreme enough for you to starve to death, your body may get to the point where it's burned off enough muscle tissue and done adaptive thermogenesis enough that your low number of calories is now maintenance. At which point you have poor health and all the health risks associated with being underweight and eating too little, yet eating more will result in fat gain. Note that it is possible to get your body out of this state through eating loads and doing exercise to rebuild your muscles,
- it's hit and miss whether your body reaches this equilibrium first or starves to death first. Usually the calories taken in from binge eating or phases of overeating between the starve cycles to prevent people from starving to death, however this is all going to be stored as fat, and the result is "normal weight obesity" where the person's weight is in the healthy BMI range but their body fat percentage is in the obese range, and their skeletal muscle is wasted away and their bone density is low. With this you have both the health risks of a high body fat percentage combined with the health risks of being underweight (e.g. osteoporosis)

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My advice is get help for your disordered eating and stop looking for justification to carry on with it. "starvation mode" is a stupid term, but your body does adapt in ways that are counterproductive for long term success at dieting and bad for your health if you eat too little, especially if you eat too little for prolonged periods or intersperse starvation cycles with overeating or binge eating. So please just stop eating too little and get help for your disordered eating if you need to.

you say you're approaching disordered eating... take that as a red flag. What do you hope to achieve from this thread? Justifcation to carry on eating way too little?

---

"Starvation mode" is a stupid term people use to refer to several changes that can occur in the human body (including behavioural changes) in response to eating too little. There's no "on/off" switch in your head called "starvation mode" - the longer you eat too little for, the more of these things change in ways that make it difficult to stick to a diet long term, or if you're determined enough to carry on eating way too little, will compromise your health

short term changes may include:
- obsessing about food
- increased appetite (sometimes extremely increased)
- appetite shutting down then coming back with avengence leading to binge eating
- binge eating
- feeling tired and run down/lacking energy

medium term changes:
- your body using lean mass as fuel to make up the deficit to preserve fat stores for longer, which results in the metabolism slowing because the muscle cells you've lost no longer require the energy they were using to stay alive
- adaptive thermogenesis - this is further slowing of the metabolism that's not explained by body composition changes. This happens because your body tries to deal with the food shortage by directing less energy into non-essential functions, so you end up feeling cold all the time (less energy is spent heating you), your hair and skin look dull and your hair may fall out (less energy is being invested in keeping your skin and hair healthy), you have menstrual disturbances and your menstrual cycle may stop altogether (less energy being invested in reproduction, or even the reproductive system shutting down altogether), and similar, throughout the body. The result is the body saves energy, but your health deteriorates.
-rebound fat gain if you binge (likely) or start eating normally again, due to a combination of your metabolism slowing and increased hunger (which may come out of nowhere while your hunger signals are switched off for much of the time)

long term changes:
- if the food shortage is really extreme, when your skeletal muscles and fat stores have all been used up keeping you alive, your body then metabolises your organs for energy. Death from multiple organ failure usually follows this.
- if the food shortage isn't extreme enough for you to starve to death, your body may get to the point where it's burned off enough muscle tissue and done adaptive thermogenesis enough that your low number of calories is now maintenance. At which point you have poor health and all the health risks associated with being underweight and eating too little, yet eating more will result in fat gain. Note that it is possible to get your body out of this state through eating loads and doing exercise to rebuild your muscles,
- it's hit and miss whether your body reaches this equilibrium first or starves to death first. Usually the calories taken in from binge eating or phases of overeating between the starve cycles to prevent people from starving to death, however this is all going to be stored as fat, and the result is "normal weight obesity" where the person's weight is in the healthy BMI range but their body fat percentage is in the obese range, and their skeletal muscle is wasted away and their bone density is low. With this you have both the health risks of a high body fat percentage combined with the health risks of being underweight (e.g. osteoporosis)

---

My advice is get help for your disordered eating and stop looking for justification to carry on with it. "starvation mode" is a stupid term, but your body does adapt in ways that are counterproductive for long term success at dieting and bad for your health if you eat too little, especially if you eat too little for prolonged periods or intersperse starvation cycles with overeating or binge eating. So please just stop eating too little and get help for your disordered eating if you need to.

This is maybe the most helpful comment i have read on this website. I am normally very restrictive with binge eating tendencies. Actually this weekend i binged so I was going to eat very light until Friday, "to get back to normal" but you made me reconsider. Maybe I should just continue like nothing happened. It makes sense and I've had some of the symptoms before i started with the bingeing episodes. Thank you!!

Thank you! I never really understood what "starvation mode" was. (Not that I thought I was ever near that or anything, just from other people discussing it.)

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The thing that annoys me about starvation mode being bandied around on sites like this is the way it trivialises true starvation mode - you know, people in famine areas in the third world who literally starve to death.
Although very few people ever actually starve to death - what happens is that their emancipated bodies are so malnourished and so weak that they die of things like pneumonia and infective diahrroea ( needless to say, such people do not have access to antibiotics etc)

Unless you have a mental illness causing extreme anorexia, you are not going to face starvation in first world countries.

If you are posting on this site, you have electricity and Internet access - you are not somewhere where people are facing starvation mode.

And these people aren't "stalling" their weight loss because they're not eating enough. I hate that argument. So many people are ignorant of how the body actually works.

That's not what I'm saying.

Yes I agree you could die of starvation or illnesses related to extreme under nourishment in a first world country if you had a mental illness whereby you starved yourself in the presence of food (Karen Carpenter, for example)
I said that in my post.

I do think there are spectrums of eating disorders - its not either you have one or you don't. Fortunately not everyone who has an eating disorder gets to that extreme.

I agree there are health issues related to not eating enough even though food is available in first world countries - I didn't say otherwise.
and I didnt say such issues should not be addressed.

What I object to is the use of the word starvation and starving in non starving contexts - someone who under eats by, say, 500 calories a day may well have health issues - but they are not in starvation mode or starvation anything.

Like when people have had breakfast and then say I'm starving, when is morning tea?
They are not starving.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic and yes, I know everyone knows the word starving in such context is not meant literally - but just annoys me.