Why don't they go into starvation mode on Biggest Loser

I was looking at the biggest loser diet and they recommend this:

Your starting calorie level is determined by multiplying your current weight by 7 (On the television show, they use a factor of 6 for quicker results). The recommendations range from a low of 1,050 calories for a 150-pound person to a high of 2,100 calories for a 300-pound person.

With exercise those people are burning way more than 1000 calories more than they eat.  If I was on the show I'd only eat around 1086 calories.  How is this healthy and how do they not go into starvation mode?

(I'm not promoting this diet... just wondering how it works for TV)

I don't know but I was reading this week's Us Weekly and they interviewed the winner from this season, Michelle. It says that to maintain she eats 1200 calories a day and is "cutting back" to 2 hours of exercising a day. So I'd say she definitely went into, and is in starvation mode. If I ate that little and exercised that much my body would have no choice but to lose rapidly, so something must be going on there. It shouldn't take that little to maintain her weight of 132 pounds.

Interesting. I weigh six pounds more than her, work out about 1/4 as much, and eat 800 calories more to lose a pound a week.

This assumes that everything you see on TV is gospel truth, with no additional 'extras' and/or manipulation that they don't tell you about..... and that's a big assumption!  When it comes to the entertainment business seeing really is not believing.

Stupid show. All about who can loose the most in the least amount of time. I  don't believe anyone can maintain what they are doing for life so why bother? It is about the money. I do believe they teach them some good things like counting calories, exercising, eating right but it is too much.

I think (but don't know), that they do, kind of -- that is why they must spend such extraordinary amounts of time exercising -- because they simply can't drop the calories any lower and yet, and some stage, they stop losing weight.

Better to not go for the extremes.  this is why I don't like TBL show -- false hopes presented to the masses.  But watching someone lose 50 lb over the course of a year while eating a reasonable amount of calories and exercising 45-90 mins per day would not make good TV

Caveat: I've never seen this show.

Starvation mode doesn't mean you don't lose weight; it means that you'd lose more weight if you weren't in it. Thus, they can still be losing weight.

Additionally, I imagine that the people on the show aren't someone who needs to drop ten pounds to be at beach form, but people who are seriously fat. The rules aren't exactly the same across the board, and, in weakly supported general supposition, the more overweight you are, the more your body will tolerate.

Likewise, as a counterpoint to the "It's T.V. Magic and Lies, damnable lies!" point of view, the network can afford money to have doctors and dietitians standing by, thus allowing a greater degree of risk of bodily harm than might be advisable to the average dieter.

i think that this formula only works for people who are significantly overweight and/or obese. by that calculation i should be eating 924 calories a day!! no way that's good for me!!

i think you must be right acarr

I can't understand why anyone would even want to be on the show.  You take a person who is seriously obese (I think they are promoting the next season where one man weighs close to 500 pounds), restrict their calories to some obscene number and make them work out for 6-8 hours a day.  I am fairly certain that most of the contestants have had no physical activity at all for several years, if not their whole life.

Why would you just do it the healthy way?  I started at 226 so I know how it feels to be obese.  $500,000.00 isn't enough to torture myself like that.

$500,000.00 ... I don't know... that would pay off every debt (including the house) I have and put plenty in the bank for the kids college funds.

Just saying, that's a lot of money.  I wouldn't want to mess up my metabolism doing that but in these times... it would be tempting.

Anyway, the stuff on TBL is a crock.  It's a setup to destroy the person's metabolism.  Luckily though with some work these people could recover if they weren't so reignforced by doctors saying it's ok to eat so little and over work out.

I made a post similar to this awhile back and it's nice to see someone agree. I DO like the show, but it is a little too much. I just made a journal entry based on their formula as well with "B.S." in it's title. :P

I'm sure you will lose weight fast with the diet, it's just the maintaining I would be worried about. I feel if your body is so used to taking in low numbers and over working out that when you don't work out as much and up your calories you're bound to pack on a lot of weight back. Kind of makes your efforts pointless in the end if you ask me.

I know people would love to lose weight as quickly as possible, but the effects are never staying if you do it that way. My mom always told me the slower you take the weight off the more likely it's to stay off. I've found this true. If you're taking in a reasonable amount of calories throughout your diet, then when you're maintaining it shouldn't be much of a difference and you should hopefully be able to hold on to it or at least a lot longer.

Add to all that... rapidly taking off weight is a good way to end up with a lot of excess skin.

^Yeah, when you diet. But they also fill quite a bit out with muscle.

Maybe bodies aren't machines & "starvation mode" is something that occurs under certain circumstances. The Biggest Loser is a very special circumstance. So is bodybuilding and weight gain/loss for fighters.

The truth is nobody really knows anything about anything, especially when it comes to the body. If you haven't noticed, nutritional/health/body related ideas change constantly.

I also read that the contestants all gain after the show.

regardless of the number of calories and hours of exercise....which is all a choice of the adults who choose to do it..what i tend to dislike is the stress of losing weight (which is beyond enough)..combined with public humilation when you have to wear very little...(how many people would actually by choice show the muffin tops and stretch marks in bikers shorts to millions) and then have to feel **** if they drank too much water that day and lost for their team....i find that side of the made for tv competion/exploitation drama unnecessary.....the whole set up is for peeps to not feel that great about themselves during the process..

I think the show is good in that it gets people talking about and thinking about being more healthy, but it is a bad example of how to do it.  They make people think that you have to go on an extreme diet and do extreme and very difficult exercises to lose weight.  It looks too hard on TV.