"starvation mode".....

5) i know that your metabolism slows when you arent eating anything (ex... skipping breakfast and fasting til dinner).... but what if you eat/snack consistently (like 8, 100 calorie meals paced out through the day) wouldnt that keep your metabolism strong even if you might be cutting below 1200 total?

Increased meal frequency does not increase metabolism and metabolic slowdown will occur somewhere around the 48-72 hr mark, not simply skipping breakfast

As for "starvation mode"

from lyle mcdonald

Quite in fact, most studies don’t examine lean individuals at all but there is one study that is possibly relevant which is the seminal Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study.

I’ve talked about this study before and it represents one of the most massively well-controlled studies on the topic ever done (or that will ever be done). In it, war objectors were placed on approximately a 50% reduction from maintenance calories (which only put them around 1500 calories/day or thereabouts in the first place) and were held there for 6 straight months. Activity (walking) was enforced and most men reached the lower limits of body fat percentage by the end of it. I’d note that only men were studied so it’s possible that women, who are prone to showing more resistance to fat loss, could show a differential response.
And the total reduction in daily energy expenditure only amounted to 40% (of which the majority of that was due to the weight loss). Weight and fat loss had basically stopped at the end of the study which makes sense; the original 50% deficit had been reduced to at most 10% due to the 40% reduction in metabolic rate.

The bottom line is that no study I’ve ever seen has suggested that total daily energy expenditure could be reduced to the levels that are implied by ‘gaining fat rapidly at 700-900 calories/day’.

So what’s going on? Certainly some bad hormonal things go on when you combine heavy activity with heavy deficits for extended periods to low body fat levels (I’d note that various types of cylical dieting such as my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 and Martin Berkhan’s Intermittent Fasting approach seem to side-step at least some of this). Thyroid levels drops, nervous system output drops, testosterone levels crater, cortisol goes through the roof.

And I would suspect/suggest that it is this last effect that is being observed and taken as evidence of ‘metabolic damage’. In a water depleted, glycogen depleted bodybuilder coming out of a contest diet, water balance is going to go absolutely crazy and cortisol is one mediator of this. Water retention secondary to glycogen storage will also contribute.

So you have a situation where a post-contest bodybuilder may be seeing just massive swings in water weight (which can appear like rapid fat gain) following the contest; especially when you consider the normal runaway hunger that tends to occur at that point.
Between glycogen storage and simple cortisol mediated water retention, I can’t see any other reason to explain the observation. Even one day of overeating carbs can cause massive water retention (for example, shifts in water weight of 7-10 pounds over a day or two are not uncommon on cyclical diets) and I suspect that’s what is being observed.

Which is all a long way of saying the following: certainly there is evidence of metabolic derangement when you diet people down to low levels of body fat, this can probably be made worse if you undergo the normal severe overtraining cycle that most dieters go through at that point. But I don’t see any physiological way that true rapid FAT gain can occur at such low calorie levels. I’d suspect that water retention (and a bit of neurosis equating water weight gain with true fat gain) is the primary culprit here.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/permanent-metabolic-damage-qa.html

The 1200 calories is an arbitrary number chosen for safety. Below that, it is difficult to get all the vitamins, minerals, and protein you need for minimal health. But logic should tell you that starvation mode for a 6'4" man and a 5'1" woman will be at different calorie levels. And if you don't eat sufficient nourishment, you can still have problems at higher calorie levels (eg, if you drink soda instead of having meals).

One important thing is that to build and maintain your lean body tissues, you need enough protein, calories, vitamins and minerals. And you need all of them all at the same time. To build fat, all you need is excess calories. It's like building a house: You need all the building materials to make anything, or else all you get is a pile of junk in the front yard.

The body does function differently at lower calorie levels. If you eat nothing but water, you will lose weight more slowly as time goes on, but you certainly won't gain any weight. Your body reduces your calorie needs by making less cholesterol, less protein, less blood hemoglobin, etc. You become less active. Look at the videos of people in refugee camps, too weak to brush away the flies. They aren't consuming many calories like that. They aren't losing weight as fast as you would predict from the calorie calculators. But they're still losing, not gaining.

If you feel good, if you have energy, if you're not bruising or getting short of breath or losing your hair or getting puffy ankles, your metabolism is probably working normally.