Long time, unanswered question

I'm not trying to rebuttle anything anyone says, but every time I read someone saying something about going into Starvation Mode, where your  body is conserving everything it consumes, you don't lose weight.

Why then, do Anorexics get so skinny?

You are confusing starvation mode with plain starvation...

It might better be termed "preservation" mode instead of "starvation" mode.

I don't buy the 'starvation mode' theory myself. From what I hear, it sounds like if you go a week without losing weight, instead of owning up and admitting you cheated or brushing it off as a bad week, you should become overly defensive about your perfection and insist that some strange force is at work within you to create fat from thin air.

Your body is sort of like a bank account. You have excess stores of fat and seek to rid yourself of them. So, dieting is like taking a cut in pay. You put less in but for a while, you still spend the same, so of course you notice an initial and substantial drop in the beginning. But your body, being a living thing, adapts to a lower income and becomes more frugal with it. This isn't a bad thing, nor is it very drastic, really. Heavier people have higher metabolisms and losing weight will slow it down somewhat. When I was losing weight, I never heard of starvation mode or plateaus and I went through a few periods, each lasting a couple of months, where my weight stayed the same and it never bothered me. I thought that was how you were supposed to do it. Lose some weight, give your body time to get used to being lighter and then lose some more.

When people are truly starved, they get thin. Period. And the body does not begin to use lean tissue for fuel until fat stores have been used up first. That is what fat stores are for. And before I get slammed for saying this, I do know that lean tissue loss occurs even in the early stages of weight loss, but I don't see where that is a matter of concern. A heavier person has more lean muscle mass than a thinner person, they have to just to be able to carry their excess weight around. As they lose weight, they will naturally lose the lean tissue that supports the excess fat. Their livers get smaller, as do their hearts, and other muscles and organs. You simply don't need a huge heart at 120 pounds.

A slower metabolism is a desirable thing. The whole idea in losing weight is to bring your body back to a more natural state, where all functions are in balance. I don't see where you can have a very thin body and a very high metabolism.

Unless you're a teenage boy, that is, and even they grow out of it.

That's kinda what I was thinking; there must be a very fine line between undereating to actual starvation, or undereating to preservation mode.

Interesting

Wow Cardamon, thanks for a great response :) and totally makes sense.

Original Post by cardamon-tea:

I don't buy the 'starvation mode' theory myself. From what I hear, it sounds like if you go a week without losing weight, instead of owning up and admitting you cheated or brushing it off as a bad week, you should become overly defensive about your perfection and insist that some strange force is at work within you to create fat from thin air.

 

 THis made me laugh so hard. I used to think there was some strange force getting back at me for some reason, but then I realized I was SLACKING OFF!!!

I dont believe in "starvation mode" either.

Well, I think "starvation mode" is definitely overused, but I do think that restricting calories too severely is probably a good way to train your body to regain with a vengeance should you go back to old eating habits.

 

Cutting down to a more moderate calorie count is more satisfying, you're less likely to go nuts and binge, and the rebound/refeeding should you stop the portion control should be less severe.

 

I know that when I was doing like 1200 cal of only moderately nutritious foods a couple of years ago, I was unsatisfied, and when I slacked off, I regained 40 lbs in just a few months.  After that, I re-determined to resume counting, but this time with more calories (1500-1800) and almost entirely high-nutrient whole foods, and that has been much better all around.  I've lost almost as fast as I did on 1200, but I look and feel a lot better, and doing the dumbells has helped a lot, too.

I guess what I'm saying is restricting calories too much to try and lose too fast is counterproductive.  I just don't think "starvation mode" is really the best descriptor of it.

I like your analogy of a bank account, that is very good.  I am trying hard not to feel like I'm doing it "wrong" when I hit a plateau - I think that analogy will help me.

I see no reason to give up my extra muscles and stronger organs just because I lose weight.  To me, it is one of the few benefits we get from being overweight and we should do strength training and cardio to preserve it. 

I agree that starvation mode is often overused, but I don't necessarily discount it.  I read a medical article about a year ago(which of course, now that I want to post it, I can't find it anymore) that detailed where the 1200 number comes from.  The concept was that the heart requires X amount of calories in a day to function properly, the brain requires X amount, the lungs, etc... 

So, perhaps this "starvation mode" comes from the concept that if your organs need a minimum of 1200 calories or so in a day to function properly, if you are getting less than that, your body may be unable to function properly, so it hangs onto extra stuff (i.e. fat) to make sure that the brain/heart/etc can work properly later. 

I would definately agree that at some point you would have to change things up to avoid plateaus.  Your body adjusts to exercise and calorie levels to create a balance and unless you shake up the status quo, you won't really see results.  So, I don't look at plateaus as doing something wrong, but rather that I need to change what I'm doing now that my body has adjusted to a certain routine.

kind of a simplified account of what happens when you go into "starvation" mode which is more like preservation mode is this.  If you cut your calories too greatly your body will eventually lower it's metabolism to match that intake.  For a person with a lot of weight to lose this will happen even when the weight loss is healthy like mentioned above.  However when your calories go below your BMR is when your body starts to preserve.  If you consistantly eat below this your body will first get rid of any unnecessary muscle as it is more costly to maintain.  Since you are emating below your necessity level at a healthy range your body gets rid of the muscle so it can use those calories for your normal function and your metabolism is slowed down.  If under eating is done for a long time or at an extreme your body will start to release enzymes that signal your body to store fat.  Any time you eat over your new BMR (what your body has lowered to) these enzymes tell your body to store those excess calories as fat (regardless of how much you burn)

Ex: lets say we have some with a BMR of 1400 who has a daily burn of 2000.  If that person starts to eat at 1000 cals/day their body will eventuall drop their BMR to 1000 to stay alive.  while they are still burning 2000 cals, more than they are eating, the body is going to hold onto the fat and not let you burn...it's in "preservation mode"  Now lets say one day this person eats 1400 cals again.  Those extra 400 cals are going straight to fat stores.  Your body leaps at the chance to store more energy for the next time you cut your cals again. 

This is why when people have been consistantly eating to little they gain a few pounds when the increase their calories.  those enzymes are still being released and storing the "excess" you are eating.  After a few weeks your body realizes it no longer needs to conserve as you are feeding it what it needs every day.  It will now stop creating those enzymes and actually alway to lose fat.

Liz's response is perhaps the best one I've read. I completely disagree with cardamon when he/she said "instead of owning up and admitting you cheated or brushing it off as a bad week..." because I actually had preservation mode kick in for me not long ago. I had been eating about 1100-1200 cals a day for a few weeks and everything slowed down. It wasn't a "bad week" because it lasted for two and a half weeks, and I definitely didn't cheat. I didn't know what I was doing until I read something on starvation mode, then I raised my intake and everything is fine again. "Starvation mode"or "preservation mode" happens. It's not a strange force, it just happens.

 Sometimes metaphors confuse the issue more than they clarify - and the bank account analogy obscures more than it reveals. Besides, our bodies don't run on metaphor, and metabolisms are quirky.

"The "plateau effect" has been known about for some time and weight management consultants recommend longer exercise times, higher intensity or cross training to combat it," Dr King said.

"But these studies show that a plateau in body weight occurs even in the face of a continued negative energy balance."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/ 060830220440.htm

 It also depends on what sort of workout you do - if you're doing resistance training your body will maintain your muscle in the face of rather extreme provocation, if you only do cardio it will at least somewhat keep up the muscle (but you will lose significant lean mass), if you don't work out at all, you will experience a significant and persistent drop in lean mass and metabolism/enzymatic activity.

 I haven't seen the characteristics of the workout program used in Dr. King's studies, but I betcha they focus on mostly cardio.

According to my two favourite studies on the stubject, that would probably be the problem right there:

  Hunter et.al. : Resistance Training Conserves Fat-free Mass and Resting Energy Expenditure Following Weight Loss - 

D, DE, and DES demonstrated a similar and significant (P <= 0.05) reduction in body mass (-9.64, -8.99, and -9.90 kg, respectively) with fat mass comprising 69, 78, and 97% of the total loss in body mass, respectively. -
Kramer, Volek et al. Influence of exercise training on physiological and performance changes with weight loss in men.

A third of the weight loss in the diet-only group was muscle(2.98 kg, or 6.5lbs) and the diet+cardio exercise group also lost significant muscle(1.98kg or 4.35lbs), while the diet+cardio+strength training group mostly retained theirs, losing 0.297kg or just shy of  0.6lbs of muscle.

 'course, there's a very exaggerated notion of how much energy a pound of muscle tissue requires floating around thaks to some very optimistic personal trainers who keep quoting 50cal/day. Depending on which study you read, estimates for muscle calorie expenditure range from about 10-12cal/day to a low of 8cal/day at rest - and I keep entertaining the suspicion that the Mifflin-St.Jeor study that arrived at the lower figure is the more accurate one.

 Still better than the 1-3cal/day for fat mass, and compounded over time an extra pound of muscle will burn a pound of fat in a year, and the thing about working out to retain muscle mass is that - well, the "at rest" figure tends to not apply to you. Which is probably why incorporating exercise into your lifestyle is the greatest predictor for succesful long-term weight management.

The U.S. National Weight Control Registry, which tracks the habits of some 5,000 successful maintainers, cites a study showing only a fifth of dieters with a history of obesity sustain a loss of 10% of their body weight for a year or more. "The best predictor of the ones who are not going to regain are the ones who are doing the most physical activity," says Dr. Holly Wyatt, an obesity expert at the University of Colorado. She says most registrants exercise, on average, at least an hour a day.
Fat Chance , Time Magazine

Exercise is the junior partner in succesful dieting - you can't out-train your diet. But it's a crucial component of succesful long-term weight management, and as the studies I've linked to show, resistance training is the indispensable component of any fat loss training plan.

 One more study to consider is  Izumiya et al.: "Fast/Glycolytic Muscle Fiber Growth Reduces Fat Mass and Improves Metabolic Parameters in Obese Mice" - done on mice, so direct applicability for humans is quite debatable, but it does tend to point in the same direction as the other studies, neh?

 Plateuing is real. One component is likely a downgraded metabolism mediated through leptin response - not "leptin-driven fat burning" as some people claim, dieting reduces lepin production from adipose tissue, reduced leptin downregulates the production of T3/T4 hormone and signals your body to turn down the metabolism and use less energy, consequently burning less fat.

 Another component is the loss of lean mass from dieting. The combination and downregulation of RMR is likely the culprit for plateuing, but it's a poorly understood process and as of now we're still kinda sorta guessing.

 We do know that it's real tho'.

Liz and melkor seem to me to be pretty much spot on here.

As everyone knows, in order to lose body fat, you need to bring your daily caloric intake below your maintenance level.  At first you lose weight, then your progress slows, and then you hit a plateau where it seems you can’t lose any more weight. If you reduce your calories even further, then you start to lose muscle in addition to losing fat due to your insufficient caloric intake.  This is not good because this lowers your metabolic rate, making it even harder to lose fat.

Also, when you restrict your caloric intake for a period of time, your body starts to think that you’re starving, and reacts by lowering your metabolic rate and increasing your appetite.

Researchers believe that the reason your body does this relates to your bodys levels of leptin.  If you’re on reduced calorie diet, leptin levels will begin to fall in your body. When leptin levels fall in the body, this effectively reduces your metabolic rate, and also triggers increased cortisol production (a catabolic hormone that promotes muscle loss and makes it hard to lose fat), essentially promoting body fat gain. It’s your body’s defense mechanism because it thinks you are starving.

So what seems a little counter intuitive is that to lose weight, you also need to have a minimum amount of calories too!  Also, I have seen some recommendations to try not to scare your body by having a day a week where you eat more calories than even your maintenance level, as long as you have kept to your reduced calorie level for the week when added together. 

For example, if you are a 5'9" young female of about 140 that is reasonably active, then your caloric maintenance level is about 2100/day, then you should be having a minimum caloric intake of 1300, and to promote weight loss, you would want it to be between say 1300 and 1700 per day, on average.  Still, one day a week, you could have a day of around 3000.  So, doing the math on this, say for 6 out of 7 days, you average 1500/day, and then one day at 3000.  Over the week you are: 2100-1500=600, 600*6=3600, 3000-2100=900, 3600-900=2500, so 2,500 calories under your maintenance level for the week.

That is maybe getting off track a bit, but coming back to the original question, basically it is the slowing of you metabloic rate, the decrease of your leptin levels and increase of cortisol production from eating too few calories that makes your body try to hold onto its stores of energy (fat), but of course your body does need energy to keep going, so at some level you can eat less than your body requires as an absolute minimum, and therefore you can become anorexic.  You don't need to be a scientist to see that this is absolutely the wrong way to lose weight though!

Hmm, if your body is a bank account and calories are the money coming in, then muscles are the SUVs that use a lot of gas and need a lot of maintenance.  Fat is the economy car that gets you where you need to go and gets 50 miles to the gallon.  When your strapped for cash, you gotta sell the SUV because it costs to much to keep up.  The economy car (while not as pretty) uses less gas, so you keep it around.

Muscle --even at rest -- take more energy to maintain (burns more calories) than fat, so if your body thinks it's not going to get enough it will get rid of the muscle.  Then your body naturally uses less calories to maintain the same weight. 

I, too, believe that starvation mode exists- it happened to me.  I lost weight WAY too fast (at least 4-5 lbs/week) and for months afterward if I ate anything more than 1,000 calories I gained weight.  Plus I was tired all the time and my fingers and toes were really cold.  My metabolism never went back to normal.  So it's hard to get into, but don't try.

Original Post by kristinedaqueen:

Original Post by cardamon-tea:

I don't buy the 'starvation mode' theory myself. From what I hear, it sounds like if you go a week without losing weight, instead of owning up and admitting you cheated or brushing it off as a bad week, you should become overly defensive about your perfection and insist that some strange force is at work within you to create fat from thin air.

 

 THis made me laugh so hard. I used to think there was some strange force getting back at me for some reason, but then I realized I was SLACKING OFF!!!

I dont believe in "starvation mode" either.

 How do you guys explain this?

Karozel.....you example is awesome. Honestly I love it.

Original Post by floggingsully:

Original Post by kristinedaqueen:

Original Post by cardamon-tea:

I don't buy the 'starvation mode' theory myself. From what I hear, it sounds like if you go a week without losing weight, instead of owning up and admitting you cheated or brushing it off as a bad week, you should become overly defensive about your perfection and insist that some strange force is at work within you to create fat from thin air.

 

 THis made me laugh so hard. I used to think there was some strange force getting back at me for some reason, but then I realized I was SLACKING OFF!!!

I dont believe in "starvation mode" either.

 How do you guys explain this?

Thanks for adding that link - I was looking for it myself to post here!!  Its a great article.  I have a mum and a sister who are living proof that this happens.  Both have had so few calories for so long they can gain on 700 or so calories and are now considered to be obese.  It is tragic and they are both killing themselves. 

I joined a slimming club that set me 1200 calories at 5' 5 1/2" (with a fairly active job and exercising 3x a week) and I lost 2-3 lbs a week but found that I got to a point where I could no longer lose, was cold all the time, had no energy.  I was definitely NOT slacking off and it was not a "bad week" it went on for months - I had lowered my metabolism.  

Now I'm on CC I avoid lowering my calories at all costs and am eating much more in order to lose weight.