No doubt, your body was eating fat stores which it was designed to do, after the first few days it was probably acclimated to using stored fat for energy. There’s no scientific problem with your described weight loss, but as someone who struggled with weight immensely when I left the military I have to say that the worst possible thing for a “regular” person wanting to lose weight is to pursue an extreme diet.
Yeah but Una you know how bad people are at estimating their calories …
(
but still d&r …)
More seriously, the fact that you had no serious complications of your depression induced tin of creamed corn a day starvation diet does not make such a thing any less of a poor idea. (And in point of fact, few would lose that much that fast even eating that little. The average on a medically supervised very low calorie diet, as Martin Hyde’s early link notes, is 44 pounds over 12 weeks. And longer term success is still contingent on long term lifestyle changes.)
It’s also very possible the starvation increased the depression in a feedback loop.
I agree completely.
My anecdote was meant to be just that, not a judgment on the overall process. Clearly, for a short time and under special circumstances, 500 calories a day could support an active adult. “Healthy,” however is highly debatable.
How do you think weight loss is achieved? You HAVE to exercise (or take in few enough calories) that your body burns “negative calories”- it’s own fat stores.
LOL! You’re totally right. Reading that now, I wonder what it was I thought I was typing. I think, I was meaning to convey that I could not imagine exercising away every last calorie I had taken in that day. I’m not really sure.
I know how weightloss is achieved and am succeeding at it in a sensible manner (50 lbs in the last 20 mos).