Gah! Quit saying “loose” and “loosing!” :dubious:
Except that it’s not. It may be widely believed, but it is NOT true.
Garden-variety diet advice. None if which has anything to do with the fact that if you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight. Nor does it have anything at all to do with this “starvation myth” mode. Once again, it is physiologically impossible not to steadily lose weight if you maintain a constant, steady calorie deficit. It is impossible to “stop losing weight” or even “start gaining weight” while maintaining a calorie deficit.
Agreed that when a person is starving to death (real starvation, not some fatty losing a few pounds) the body starts to slow down and conserve energy. But they will not stop losing weight if they are running a calorie deficit.
p.s. It losing weight, not “loosing”. :rolleyes:
Why -it’s not the correct form of lost? 
One ‘o’.
Losing and lose.
Loose is a long ‘o’, like ‘my shoelaces are loose’ (rhymes with moose).
“Loose” and “lose” have the same “o”-sound, it is the “s” that’s different! 
Haha, so you are right! I had to say them out loud even!
I’ve actually been in a study for sports medicine where I did this.
The fact is that “FACT” you’re referring to is correct. But it only works at VERY small levels.
I actually had one lady say “I didn’t lose any weight this week, 'cause I ate an extra sandwich and it stopped my metabolism”
Studies show even after decades of yo-you dieting and starving yourself, the “starvation mode,” is real and amounts to about 100 calories per week on average.
In otherwords if a person who diets “sensibly”, would lose say, 100 calories a week more than the same person who has a history of starvation or yo-yo dieting.
One pound of weight equals 3,500 calories.
I’m going to oversimplify this a bit. 52 weeks in a year, multiplied by 100 calories comes to 5,200 calories a year. 5,200 divided by 3,500 comes to 1.48 punds.
So the person who diets “sensibly” would go from lose about a pound and a half more than the yo-yo dieter.
As you can see a pound and a half, isn’t even noticeable. No one is gonna know if you dropped from 150 pounds to 147.5 pounds.
And I oversimplified this. There are many other factors besides diet that effect metabolism.
Look at people in concentration camps and other such things. In the Siege of Leningrad in WWII, the average calorie intake for almost 900 days was about 1,000 calories per day. Yet some people did just fine.
People get confused 'cause they fail to understand food is fuel. That is all it is.
There’s no secret way to eat, there’s not special fuel.
And when you look at these diets, they always pull disclaimers. For instance in the Atkins Diet, the book states in so many places of “free food,” that is food you can eat as much as. Then at the end, the author states, if you’re still not losing weight, it’s cause you’re eating too much. You’re not supposed to eat unless you’re hungry. But few people read this part.
Like everything else, these fad diets take a truth that works on small levels and exploit it.
This is true. However, there is significant evidence that a person can consume the same number of calories from week to week, and feel like they are maintaining the same amount of activity, yet go from running a calorie deficit to running a calorie surplus–because their basal metabolism has shifted (b/c of slowed processes or lost mass) or because a lower energy level has left them less likely to engage in daily activities/more inclined to sedentary activities.
If you are eating so little that you are getting lethargic and, without even realizing it, no longer walking to the water cooler and avoiding the grocery store because you are too tired, then the solution is not to eat less or even engage in more dedicated exercise to make up for all the daily exercise you are too tired to do. That’s a vicious cycle. You need to find a happy medium–eat up to a level where you have the energy to live a life of normal metabolic processes and moderate exercise while still maintaining a 500-1000 calorie a day deficit.
This is how someone can eat 600 calories a day and not lose *much *weight–they spend the rest of the day in a stupor. You can do this, and you will lose some weight, but you could lose the same amount or more eating 1500 calories a day and engaging in a normally active day and adding some exercise, or 1200 a day w/o exercise.
There exists a point of diminishing returns with a calorie deficit–a point past will power can’t help you because it’s the automatic processes that slow down. It’s not ignoring the rules of thermodynamics to suggest that there isn’t a perfect direct correlation between calories consumed and weight loss. The body is a complicated system.
I think I understand your other misconception: People don’t keep eating a deficit = less calorie intake than calories burned during a diet (as opposed to a real starvation situation).
I quote from Post 24
Joe in this example can measure
his weight and weight loss (difference) easy with a scale
his caloric intake easy to difficult, depending on whether he’s eating packaged food with caloric information (so all he has to do is weigh his portions and calculate) or if he cooks himself (so he has to guess.
Joe can only can guess the averages for
the calories burnt during exercise - jogging an hour is so-and-so many calories, but it’s difficult for Joe to notice that he’s running a bit slower in starvation mode and thus burning a bit less than before
the calories in resting mode/ base metabolism. He can look up the average amount in a table, based on his age, sex, weight and amount of activity, but if his resting mode has dropped from 1 500 calories to 1 000 calories, Joe can’t measure that exactly.
So Joe started out eating a calorie deficit, but once his body goes into starvation mode, he might end up even, eating as many calories as he burns - which means your assumption at this point is wrong.
Joe won’t be able to measure his resting rate, though, he can only see that his weight loss has plateued.
What Joe can or can’t measure is completely irrelevant to this discussion. As long as Joe is steadily running a calorie deficit, he will steadily lose weight. A “plateau” is a mathematical impossibility when energy output exceeds input.
Maybe if we oversimpify this you will get the physics.
Person 1 is maintaining a body temperature of 98.6 degrees F. Person 2, with a recent calorie deficit, is maintaining a body temperature of 97.6 degrees F. Do you get the physics of why person 2 is burning fewer calories?
But a person can eat the exact same amount and go from a calorie deficit to a surplus as energy demands shift. This creates a plateau.
Okay, I’d just like to note that I don’t think anyone is actually disagreeing with anyone else here.
What Gruntled is saying is “If you are burning more calories than you take in, you will lose weight.” This is true.
What some other people are saying is “When your body enters starvation mode, it does less so as to save calories.” This is also true.
So, as an example of both:
Normally, your body burns 2000 calories as part of natural process. You balance this out by eating 2000 calories worth of food. Then, you decide to chop some wood, so you burn an extra 500 calories. You are now at a -500 calorie balance.
But now, all of a sudden, you are in starvation mode. Instead of your body burning 2000 calories for natural processes, it cuts back to 1500 by heating you less and digesting slower and the like. You still are doing the 500 calories of lumber chopping and eating 2000 calories of food, but instead of losing 500 calories, you’re losing none.
Because your body is burning fewer calories than it was, what was once a calorie deficit is now a calorie balance. If you doubled your work, and burned 1000 calories with lumber chopping, you would once again have a calorie deficit, but you would be burning fewer calories than you would be if you weren’t in starvation mode, because other parts of your body are burning less than they would be normally.
Agree 100% with both of these.
What I don’t get is these people who blithely insist that if they enter this OMG dreaded “starvation mode” that no matter how little they eat and how much they exercise they WILL NOT lose an ounce. They could eat absolutely nothing today and run 5 miles after work, but would not lose any weight today…because they’re in starvation mode, see? :rolleyes:
Sorry, but that is simply impossible.
People who think that Starvation mode means you can’t lose weight period are just wrong. But I don’t think that anyone here agrees with those people or believes that.
People like EmAnJ apparently do believe this. Note where she claims to have eaten only 400 calories a day and exercised “like mad” for 3 weeks but never lost an ounce.
Er, it’s a true story. Why would I lie about something like that? I probably went up and down a pound over those three weeks, but I couldn’t seem to get myself to lose any more weight doing what I was doing. One factor that may have contributed is that I had started to purge at that point. Another contributing factor may have been that I had been eating such low calorie diet for a year and perhaps I had reached a weird balance point. I also know that my ‘exercising like mad’ at that point was no where as hard as I can do now because I just didn’t have the energy, but I certainly was on a machine at the gym for a few hours a day.
Note that I agree that there isn’t a ‘starvation mode’ as per what these friends of yours believe and my case was more extreme then someone who is overweight, but something was going on in my body that didn’t allow me to lose weight. Starvation mode or whatever, who knows, I was only giving an anecdote from my own personal experience.
Another anecdotal data point - my husband has been writing down his calories eaten and exercise every day for almost the last year (he is quite scrupulous with it - more than I am). I can tell you that the “calories in/exercise out” formula is NOT simple and straight-line in a human being. If we were machines, he would lose weight when he is under his budget, and gain when he is over - it hasn’t gone like that at all. All other things being equal, he’ll be over his allotted calories by 3000 for the week and lose three pounds, or be under by 700 and gain two. The overall picture is a slow (and hopefully permanent) weight loss, but the path looks like a drunk staggering, not a straight slope.
I don’t subscribe to the obviously erroneous idea that you can’t ever lose weight in starvation mode, but our experience with recording eating and exercise has really demonstrated that weight loss and the human body is far more complicated than x-y=z.
It’s important to recognize that he’s not tracking calories in vs. calories out. He’s just tracking exercise calories, which is a small portion of calories out. He may burn 2500 calories in a day with just 300 of those being from exercise.