"Starvation Mode"

Bottom line - just stop shoving food in and workout at SOMETHING until your heart is racing a little and you begin to sweat - two signs you are using energy!! Keep at this and you will see results - PERIOD!!

Not always true. I have a lapband so with all the work outs I do, there is no way for me to eat the calories it would take for me to gain weight (unless I'm drinking my calories which I only drink zero calorie drink, so that's not it either). And I have not lost anything all year. It's so easy for people to say, stop eating, stop eating, exercise, exercise, but I am living proof that doing that is not always the fix. It's part of the problem that contributes to the stereotype that overweight people are greedy and lazy. People (smaller people even more so) are amazed when they see me eat such small portions, when I say no to sodas and alcohol and treats, and they are equally amazed when I am doing zumba,sweating my *kitten* off, but my *kitten* keeps moving for the whole hour while they are stopping or leaving class! Yes I am ranting a bit, but I am really tired of people making it seem like weight loss is so simple and easy! And that is why so many give up when it's doesn't work like you all say it should for them, because they are made to feel they just aren't trying hard enough or that they are fudging the numbers of what they eat or how much they exercise. There's more to it than any of us will ever know in our life time and what works for you, doesn't work for everybody. If it were so simple, nobody would be overweight, trust me, it's no fun!

I could not agree with this more and I have this argument about this very subject very often. All the time I am thinking to myself that its not that difficult to understand...thank you for posting this and I hope lots of people read this!!!

What I wanted to say to this post was that I am always in "starvation mode" and I have been (at least since) i started taking my ADHD meds, because they take away your appetite and when you first start them, they up your metabolizm too so at first you aren't eating much and you are loosing mad weight.... however, although you never fully get your appetite back your metabolism gets used to the medication and slows back down therefore you still are barely hungry but your body isn't overly burning anymore, ergo you just put on weight even though you don't eat. So basically, if your metabolism isnt being engaged your body will store fat, believe me.

The reason we rely on science is that little anecdotes like this have too many variables to tell us much, if anything. 1 week is not enough time to evaluate any diet plan. The fact that you did these two back to back also skews the results, we don't know what holdover effects from the first week might have affected the second week. We don't know what your BMR or weight or BF% is. We don't know what your diet was before you began this little experiment. 3lbs is a kind of a huge amount of weight loss, and so is 2 lbs of gain in a week. It makes me wonder if you were weighing at the same time of day each time. 3 liters of water is a lot in addition to your food intake, so water weight variances could be at play. We have no idea of your activity levels during these two weeks. You also sound like you radically altered your diet composition during the first week, so who knows if it just took time for your body to sort things out....about a week, perhaps?

Way too many variables. Anecdotes are next to worthless.

This thread has had some interesting discussions — I say this as a person who was castigated by a moderator and, in the same thread, who was "nominated" to be banned for daring to suggest that it was safe to lose weight on 800 to 1000 net cals/day.

Oh, how times have changed…

One thought that you might want to keep in your intellectual quiver — "The plural of "anecdote' is not 'data'."