What is starvation mode exactly?

Heres a section from a post I found on BMR and TDEE

"So, in order to keep you living and breathing, again, body NOT caring about weight loss, the body will slow or stop some other systems (metabolism being the 1st it stops) and hang on to those 1200 calories b/c all it knows is that you are under-feeding it and so it must "hoard" that 1200, store it as fat and keep you alive. You essentially are stopping the metabolic process to a halt when you under eat."

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/931670-bmr-and-tdee-explained-for-those-needing-a-guide

You can net a few hundred calories a day. and some people might even lose weight rather than go into starvation mode. But I would be worried about putting it back on quickly. Losing weight too fast means it will be easier to put it back on. A few hundred calories a day is not sustainable long term and as soon as you reach your goal weight you might be tempted to eat what you want (you reached your goal!) and even maintenance calories could make your body want to store fat because it's been in shock for so long.

1200 calories is like SO FETCH

"Starvation mode" is the creation of A: Healthcare professionals trying to dissuade you from starving yourself because it is in fact bad for your health, and B: People trying to sell diet and weight loss products who don't want you doing something free, like eating less, but instead buying their crap.

A more interesting side to the starvation story is Refeeding Syndrome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome

Eating a bunch of food after extended periods of starvation can actually be fatal. Lots of concentration camp prisoners after WW2 died when allied troops freed them and starting feeding them. Bodies couldn't handle it.

Moral of the story...don't scarf a pizza after extended caloric restriction. Might screw yourself up.

The question, "what is starvation mode exactly" is incredibly astute.

It is not "exactly" anything - as used in this community, anyway. It refers to adaptive thermogenesis, maybe, or lethargy; declining TDEE led by declining nutritional intake. Or something. Without a firm definition, it is very easy to trivialize.

Can anyone explain to me why when I watch the charity programs about African Children, they have protruding stomach, while Holocaust victims do not? Both are in starvation mode but look different. Here is a url, I don't know how to add a image in on this website.

http://scixchange.missouri.edu/blog-post/what-our-guts-tell-us-about-disease/

Was reading different sites and they give different answers. Both sides were malnourished.

An example of starvation mode in humans:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/46/4/622.short

"Obese women (140-180% of ideal body weight) were studied on a metabolic ward during 1 wk of maintenance feeding, followed by 5 wk of 800 kcal/d (liquid formula diet).

....

Resting metabolic rate (RMR) declined similarly in both groups (approximately 20%), even though exercising subjects were in greater negative energy balance due to the added energy cost of exercise."





Let the nitpicking begin. Complain about the size of the study and the fact that it was only women, and only obese women. Then ask what if they'd been fed 1200 calories, or 2000? What if they had been merely overweight? Or normal weight?

And most important as far as I'm concerned: was the resting metabolic rate decline permanent and if not, how long before they went back to normal and did they go all the way back to normal or did they continue to suffer some slowdown for the rest of their lives?

That is thermogenic adaptation which is true versus "starvation mode" which is bullsh*t. People who tout "starvation mode" are assuming that if they don't eat enough they will literally retain all of their fat instead of losing it. The truth is if you don't eat enough your body will attempt to compensate by slowing your metabolism and lowering your BMR but NEVER to the point where you will stop losing weight. During the Minnesota starvation experiment I think they got a thermogenic adaptation of close to 40% which is the highest recorded but still this is not going to result in you just holding onto your fat while being at deficit. That lowering is not permanent and can be reversed by returning to a normal diet over time.

If you truly are eating enough calories to sustain your body then you are, by definition, not starving...your in maintenance.

The people who assume that if they don't eat enough they will lose no weight whatsoever are indeed wrong. But that doesn't mean starvation mode doesn't exist, it simply means it's being defined in a rather silly and extreme way.

Meanwhile, I still want to know whether those women had a return to normal function. Or in fact, since they started out obese, were they indeed normal to begin with? Either way, more research needed. It's a great topic, just really misunderstood.

Well its ill-defined then but the context I always see "Starvation mode" coming up in on this forum is the irrational fear that someone isn't losing weight because they aren't eating enough which of course makes absolutely no sense yet they say it seriously because they read it somewhere on the interwebs and didn't bother to think about it for 1 minute. Sorry, a bit bitter from previous discussions of "starvation mode".

It's okay. I don't even know what I'm doing in this thread. I know how they usually end up! But I did find some interesting studies I haven't seen before. Thank you, Google Scholar, allowing the slothful to move beyond Wikipedia one search at a time. :laugh:

Heh fair enough. I probably shouldn't let past baggage weigh me down on topics like this anyways. Just had some really irritating conversations with people who insisted that starvation mode was real. One person even gave how pictures of starving African children have engorged bellies as indication that "see, they are fat because they don't eat enough" said completely seriously.

Can I hear your answer about the African Children. Would like to seriously know. I know Cushings causes a similar condition on under 1200 calories a day.

Can anyone explain to me why when I watch the charity programs about African Children, they have protruding stomach

That's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor - protein deficiency with adequate energy intake

Ok thanks, makes sense. Hope Durianrider doesn't get this:laugh:

Meanwhile, I still want to know whether those women had a return to normal function. Or in fact, since they started out obese, were they indeed normal to begin with? Either way, more research needed. It's a great topic, just really misunderstood.

There are longer term studies that suggest "once fat" people have a lower BMR than "never fat" people of the same dimensions, and that the adaptation during dieting reduces on returning to maintenance.

It's never a huge amount of calories, maybe a candy bar, and the science gets messy when they can't fully explain the components of the reduced TDEE.

Thanks! A candybar a day isn't insignificant, but at least it's not a full meal for life. I can live with that. Guess as a practically professional lifetime yo-yo dieter, I have to live with it. I'm lucky then that my resting metabolic rate isn't lower than it is.

Can anyone explain to me why when I watch the charity programs about African Children, they have protruding stomach, while Holocaust victims do not? Both are in starvation mode but look different. Here is a url, I don't know how to add a image in on this website.

http://scixchange.missouri.edu/blog-post/what-our-guts-tell-us-about-disease/

Was reading different sites and they give different answers. Both sides were malnourished.

When you see pictures of African children with overly engorged bellies there are two possible reasons. One is a condition called kwashiorkor which is caused by severe protein deficiency leading to eroision of the rectus abdominus, severe edema in the area (swelling due to fluid) and sadly essentially the organs spilling forward no longer restrained by muscle.

The other condition is caused by an infection of leishmoniasis in the gut (visceral leishmoniasis) which causes the swelling and distension of the belly. Leish is endemic in that region.

AS for why it wasn't as prevelant in concentration camp victims I don't know I could only guess. 1 kwashiorkor is only really noticible in children where the distended belly is very disproportionate to their size. Second concentration camp victims were fed, just very little, something like 500 calories a day and some of that may have been enough protein to make them not as severely malnourished as the pictures you've seen of African children during famine. Another reason might be that actually there were big-bellied children in concentration camps but they weren't the pictures featured in the history books.

Honest answer though is I dont know.

I bought a food scale to ensure accuracy now, but I'm sure it was water because I lost weight once i started eating again and there is no way it was fat that fast.
Thanks for the info. I was buying into the starvation mode thing for a while. Now I'm just gonna eat to my calorie goal and enough to be content.

In to read some of the links...

There is a theory many hold (which is not true) that eating too-few calories will prevent fat-loss because the body will try to spare it. Many that believe this theory (again, un-proven) refer to that as "starvation mode".

There IS, however, a component to energy expenditure known as 'Adaptive Thermogenesis' which IS a real thing - it's when the body adapts to your change in energy intake - correspondingly changing it's own energy expenditure to maintain homeostasis.

There's some good papers on Adaptive Thermogenesis if you want to google it.

One article in the Intl. Journal of Obesity summarized it:

"Important inferences can be drawn for therapeutic strategies by recognizing obesity as a state in which the human body actively opposes the “cure” over long periods of time beyond the initial resolution of symptomatology."

This