Who increased calories to lose weight?

Do you mean like when your calorie deficit is so low that you end up binging and wiping out your deficit? So you increase daily calories and so can maintain a more moderate deficit and thus weight loss?

That's the only way "increasing" calories will help you lose weight. I used the quotes because you haven't truly increased overall calories.

Too aggressive a calorie deficit can also be stressful, causing you to retain water, which will mask fat loss.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/dietary-restraint-and-cortisol-levels-research-review.html/

...a group of women who scored higher on dietary restraint scores showed elevated baseline cortisol levels. By itself this might not be problematic, but as often as not, these types of dieters are drawn to extreme approaches to dieting.

They throw in a lot of intense exercise, try to cut calories very hard (and this often backfires if disinhibition is high; when these folks break they break) and cortisol levels go through the roof. That often causes cortisol mediated water retention (there are other mechanisms for this, mind you, leptin actually inhibits cortisol release and as it drops on a diet, cortisol levels go up further). Weight and fat loss appear to have stopped or at least slowed significantly. This is compounded even further in female dieters due to the vagaries of their menstrual cycle where water balance is changing enormously week to week anyhow.

And invariably, this type of psychology responds to the stall by going even harder. They attempt to cut calories harder, they start doing more activity. The cycle continues and gets worse. Harder dieting means more cortisol means more water retention means more dieting. Which backfires (other problems come in the long-term with this approach but you’ll have to wait for the book to read about that).

When what they should do is take a day or two off (even one day off from training, at least in men, let’s cortisol drop significantly). Raise calories, especially from carbohydrates. This helps cortisol to drop. More than that they need to find a way to freaking chill out. Meditation, yoga, get a massage... Get in the bath, candles, a little Enya, a glass of wine, have some you-time but please just chill.

Noone ever increases calories to lose weight.

I've often heard of this "starvation mode" thing, but I'm not sure of the science behind it. Anytime I've been told I'm eating too little and that's why I'm not losing weight, I've increased my calories and GAINED weight. Then, I go back to the original caloric intake and step up my workout, and end up losing again.

I think this is largely an American/First World idea. Many of our "starving" people are obese here. The reality is, they are eating too much. Truly starving people (anorexics or people in countries with famine or food deficit) are skeletal, sometimes with bloated abdomens from fluid retention d/t lack of protein.

beccapax wrote: »

I've often heard of this "starvation mode" thing, but I'm not sure of the science behind it. Anytime I've been told I'm eating too little and that's why I'm not losing weight, I've increased my calories and GAINED weight. Then, I go back to the original caloric intake and step up my workout, and end up losing again.

I think this is largely an American/First World idea. Many of our "starving" people are obese here. The reality is, they are eating too much. Truly starving people (anorexics or people in countries with famine or food deficit) are skeletal, sometimes with bloated abdomens from fluid retention d/t lack of protein.

The impoverished can definitely end up obese in the US, as counterintuitive as that sounds. Some of the cheapest protein sources are hot dogs, high fat hamburger and skin on chicken leg quarters. The dollar store has big packages of off brand cookies, chips and other snacks. You can also find some canned vegetables that are reasonably priced, but if you are eating on a really limited budget, some of the cheapest things to eat are pretty high calorie.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

There's the "undereat then binge" version, in which eating more makes a smaller calorie deficit more sustainable than a larger one. There's the cortisol scenario.

I think there may also be a scenario where someone cuts calories too far, gets lethargic, reduces daily activity in dozens of tiny ways that add up, also starts limping through exercise sessions, thus reduces their TDEE. That is, they reduce their effective calorie deficit to the point where weight loss slows to a crawl (doesn't stop), and tiny fat losses hides behind water weight fluctuations (cortisol or other sources). After too short a time to see the slower loss continuing, they decide they're not losing weight and bail out.

Purely based on speculation and anecdote, I think some people's activity level is more drastically influenced by calorie-level changes than other people's. There are quite a few people I've seen who say that tapering their calorie deficit gradually to maintenance ("reverse dieting") resulted in a maintenance TDEE a small number of hundreds of calories higher than their weight loss data would've predicted. I'm speculating that the reverse could also be true, that some people's activity/energy drops off more in a calorie deficit (slowing the loss rate) more than they'd be able to predict from starting maintenance calories. This would never stop weight loss (if it did, people wouldn't starve). It would just make it happen slower than expected.

I have no proof. I'm speculating.

This. A little off topic, but I did my own experiment years back by increasing my calories. I wasn't losing though, I was in maintenance. But I found I could maintain on 2100 vs the 1600 I was maintaining on. It wasn't "magic" of increasing calories. It was because of the fact the extra energy really made me feel 100x better and gave me the perk I needed to do extra things like take the stairs, walk more, clean the house, take the extra trip to bring out the trash, take the stairs instead of the elevator, dance when I hear a song on the radio instead of just slumping in my chair, etc. Instead of taking the easy way during my workouts like not engaging my core and having slumped posture, using the handles, I had the energy to go all out and engage all my muscles thus burning more for the "same" workouts.

So overall, I did "up my calories and continue to maintain", but it was because upping my calories in turn made me more energetic and thus burn more calories throughout the day.