How can I get out of starvation mode?

5'7" and 122 pounds is considered underweight. You are flirting with an eating disorder and serious damage to your organs. Get some psychological help, as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more disordered your thinking will become. You are living on almost no nutrients, and your brain can no longer distinguish right from wrong apparently.

this was my thought. you need to start eating more and figure out what your maintenance calories are and yes you will gain weight but you are underweight and i agree with the person who suggested an ED. I think you may already know that and hopefully this is a sign you are trying to break free from it.

Stop telling me I'm underweight. This goes to everyone who has. I'm not. Even if I'm in the low end of the healthy range bmi wise, I'm still healthy. I know I have some sort of eating disorder but I'm just not that concerned about that, I just want my weight back down. In all honesty I was happiest when I weighed 110 back in November.

I've just just just started exercising. If I exercise that day I'll eat more than 1200. If I'm not, I'm
Aiming for 1200.

I've just just just started exercising. If I exercise that day I'll eat more than 1200. If I'm not, I'm
Aiming for 1200.

It is a good plan atleast. I wish you luck on getting back to your wanted weight

No it's really not.

Daily water weight fluctuations means that you shouldn't get all worked up when you gain weight. I've seen people gain and drop as much as 8 lbs in a day. It's just water retention.

That being said, you are undereating. Implement a Full Diet Break immediately and resume your diet after at least two weeks.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-full-diet-break.html

Now this is all getting too overwhelming. I just want to stop gaining and lose weight. Pretty much all I care about to be honest.

I thought long and hard about replaying to this thread. The reason being - I completely understand you when you say "all I care about is losing weight", but I am still going to tell you what you won't like to hear. I apologize in advance for the long post, but I think it could do me good as well to put some things 'on the paper' and out there. I understand you because for my whole life I never cared about being fit, about being toned, being healthy - I did't need to. I looked good, I've been attractive/sexy/hot/name it (not as good as some toned models, but pretty good anyway) without ever setting my foot to the gym and eating a typical Serbian diet (which would send 99% of this website running for their life , or, to put in the perspective - my partner, who is from New Zealand, spent 12 days in Serbia and gained 9lbs. do I have to add I didn't gained anything, although I probably ate more than him). Also, I've never been disgusted by the fact that a simple climb up the stairs sends my heart rate through the roof, but I am disgusted by some waves of fat that landed on the back of my thighs in last few years. And, same like you, I am aiming for the lower range of the "healthy" standard - I see many 5.7 women here aiming for 130 as their ideal weight, and I am 5.8 aiming for 125-126. And me too associate certain weight with the greatest level of self satisfaction (not just that but it is a significant factor).
Then came a 5 years period of unhappiness with some choices I made, ending up with a depression and a 7kg gain. Now, I knew my body change, but a real wake up call came few weeks ago when I was buying some t-shirts online and for the first time in years took a measurement of my waist. 8cm more than 5y ago. that was it. So for the first time in my life I decided become REALLY serious about my fitness and my body. And here is the story so far: I started in mid March by doing P90X and following their recommended diet without counting calories, just their recommended portions. Then the inevitable happened - whenever I start eating less I lose my appetite very quickly. So I stuck to the exercise regime but was eating less and less because I wasn't hungry. The stupid scale didn't move at all in two weeks. I knew I needed to up my calorie intake if I were to use P90X properly (and also, I had no energy at all). Then I went for a 2 day trip and said "wth, I know that few chocolate cakes will bring me my appetite back". so I did it . when I came back the scale was still stubbornly at the same number like before. so I decided to forget P90X diet but to come back to MFP (I tried using it once last August when I thought I might do P90X but I got injured in very quickly so gave up on this site as well), set up my goals, track all I eat and all I exercise (I use a heart rate monitor and then calculate Cals burned) and do it properly. I started, of course, with a 2lb per week goal. MFP spat out some number very close to 1200 and for a couple of days I was netting close to that. During those two days I read more about weight loss, calorie deficit etc. and decided to lower my goal to 0.5lbs per week, up my calories to ~1520 and of course eat everything I burn (even if it means eating chocolates, just to get to a calorie deficit not larger than 250 per day ). This morning, for the first time in my life, my scale moved because I consciously did something about it. I didn't lose 0.5lb, I lost about 1kg. I am still not believing it and I'll wait another week before I record my weight here.
Now, why did I up my calories fuor days ago, despite my brain screaming "I might be doing it wrong! this may not work! I won't lose any weight and in a month I'll be sooooooo disappointed and lose all my motivation instead of losing weight!"? Well, because everything I read about high calories deficits and their consequences made perfect sense. I know for many people "the less you eat, the more you lose" seems like a common sense, but common sense is a tricky thing - it works only with the information it has at the moment (common sense was telling us for a very long time that Earth is flat). And I majored in molecular biology and physiology, and did a PhD in molecular genetics, and all this talk about metabolic response, storing fat on a low intake etc. simply made sense based of everything I know about biology (well, made sense for the rational part of my brain - the emotional one was still screaming "nooooo, you should be eating lessssss!". it finally shut up this morning when a scale showed below 63kg for the first time in a very long time. ).
Why am I telling you all this? Call it a 'starvation mode' or however you want, metabolic and hormonal response to very low caloric intake (but not low enough to kill you) is as real as your body is. It will manifest itself at a different time period/caloric deficit for different people, but you can't escape it if you persist. It is an evolutionary burden that we got from millions of years of living on unstable, unreliable food supplies. Your body simply doesn't know the difference between dieting and starving, and it couldn't care less about how you want to look; it only wants to survive. You pushed it too hard and your body is fighting back - you lost your period, you stopped losing weight. The sad truth is: you can't win this battle by force, you can only outsmart it. The same way you can't change, say, a concentration of certain hormones in your blood just by wishing for it to happen - the same way you can't 'explain' to your body that you are just dieting and there is no mortal danger due to the lack of food available to you. You have to make it 'think' that all the food it needs is freely available out there. You can only do that by upping your calories. Maintain some 200 - 300 deficit but give it more food. Again, I fully understand your fear of gaining, and another sad truth is: it will probably happen for you initially (since you've been on such a high deficit for too long). But every battle has it's loses (ironically, in this case it will be the gain ), so prepare yourself for it. Be strong and persistent to go through it - weight loss requires many will powers, not just a self control to restrain form eating; or forget about your scale for a while.
and feel free to add me if you want. good luck!

Yesterday I ate 600 calories and GAINED half a pound. Every day lately I've stayed under 1000 calories and I keep gaining weight. I've stopped getting my period as well I think. I'm 5'7 and 122. How can I beat starvation mode without gaining more than a few pounds? I used to be 196 and so I'm terrified of gaining weight. I'm ready to just call it quits. Anyone help?

Ok, so normally I'm one of the first to be all like ZOMG yer doin it RONG but in this case, I'm not sure what exactly it is about your post, but something is nagging me. I don't want to immediately jump to "You've got an ED", but something in the back of my head is nagging at me that this sounds scary. My sister had an ED, and how you describe things......I see similarities, and I think what bothers me the most is that you arent getting your period. That is a sure sign you don't have enough body fat, and aren't eating healthfully.

So...maybe someone better equipped to give you some advice on here can do so, as im not a psychologist, but I just wanted to put out there that some of what you're saying worries me.