starvation mode might be a myth

ok I know this might be controversial but I was curious. I was wondering if my weight loss was stalling bc I was not eating enough. so I was looking online to find info about the starvation mode theory and this is one persons opinion. Im not saying I agree but its interesting. By the way I found very similar info on several sites, so Im really questioning this


"So what is the Starvation Mode Myth? It goes like this: "If you don't eat enough, you won't lose weight!" Okay, so all I have to do to lose weight is ... eat more food! Wow, isn't that awesome? If I stall out at 800 calories, I'll just go up to 1000. And if I stall at 1000, I'll go to 1200. If that doesn't work, how about 1500? 1800? 2200? Oh wait, when I ate 2200 calories, I weighed 223 pounds. Okay, that's not going to work. But what if I just don't go below the magic "1200" that "everyone" says "no one" should go below? That must be what they mean by "starvation mode," right? If I stay at 1200, I will lose weight but if I go below that, I won't. The problem with this idea is that, if it were true, no one would die from starvation and obviously people do. Clearly, even if you eat what is obviously too few calories to be healthy, such as an anorexic does, you will continue to lose weight. So where did this idea -- that not eating enough calories makes you not lose weight -- come from? It started with the famous Minnesota starvation study. Some normal-weighted men agreed to live on a compound where their exercise and diet was strictly controlled. For portions of the study, they were on a "starvation diet" which is defined as 50% of the calories your body needs to function. For me, these days, that's about 750-850 calories a day. So I was on a starvation diet up for the first four months after my surgery. Yet I lost weight just fine during that period -- better than fine, really. Most of the people on The Biggest Loser are also on starvation diets, from what I can tell. They may eat a lot more than I do but they also exercise strenuously 6-8 hours a day. So they are often below 50% of their calorie expenditure for the day. They seem to lose just fine too. How can this be?! The answer lies in what actually happened to the Minnesota guys when they were on their starvation diets. Like most of us on a diet, their metabolisms did slow down. In fact, after they'd been on this diet for a while -- we're talking months, not days here -- their body fat percentage got to a point below what is considered minimal to live on (about 5% for a guy, 6% for a gal). At this point, their metabolism had slowed down as much as 40%. But -- and this is the important point for those of us on a diet -- they continued to lose weight. Even with that big of a slow down in their BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), they were still operating at a great enough calorie deficit to lose. If this is true with a 40% slow down, it's even more true when the slow down is somewhere in the 14 - 22% range, which is more where if falls with normal dieting."