Starvation mode

S

skyler1

New member
how to prevent starvation mode...

i read this article from webmd and it clarified some on starvation mode and how important it is to get in all your calories and eat throughout the day..
thought i'd share...

What's interesting with my clients is that a lot of them are on a low-carb diet originally before they work with me. They only may eat usually one meal a day -- dinner. Dinner is usually high protein, low-carb. They will skip breakfast, they skip snacks and they skip lunch. If they skip those meals, unfortunately the body goes into a starvation mode. That is the second most popular diet plan for a lot of people who are overweight -- starving, just not eating. They think they are fat and they don't want to eat. They think they can tough it out in the morning and they stop eating. When you stop eating for more than three hours and 15 to 20 minutes, from what the science shows, the body literally flips a switch on.


"So, by eating every three hours you lower belly fat, you burn two pounds a week and you prevent muscle loss, which keeps your metabolism active. Then you constantly reset the metabolism so you're constantly burning fat."


MODERATOR:
Is that the "starvation protection mechanism" that you talk about?

CRUISE:
That's it. When the switch gets flipped on, this is called the starvation protection mechanism (SPM). This SPM has been literally designed through thousands of years of being a human race. In the past, food wasn't readily available and so your body had to preserve the most precious caloric tissue on the body, which for good or for bad, is fat. Your body is designed to store fat and burn muscle when it goes into starvation mode, which is the opposite if you want to stay slim and trim.

So when that switch is flipped on, when you go more than approximately three hours and 20 minutes without eating, this alarm goes off and the body says "I'm not getting enough food. All right, what am I going to do?" What your body is going to do is precisely what the research shows -- it burns approximately 50 percent of the calories that it needs from muscle. So, actually it's worse than the Atkins plan.

MODERATOR:
How does eating every 3 hours help you lose weight?

CRUISE:
That's the magic -- eating every three hours does a few things:

First, it removes the starvation protection mechanism -- in better words; it turns it off . When the starvation protection mechanism is off, you don't burn muscle, you just burn fat. That's critical.

Second thing that happens -- you lower cortisol levels. Cortisol is the stress hormone that comes from not eating and putting your body in the stress mode with starvation. When you lower cortisol you burn belly fat first. That's brilliant for people that need to lose weight because belly fat is the most dangerous and the most unattractive fat you can have; it sits there and is bothersome.

That's another thing, when you eat every three hours it teaches your body to constantly reset its metabolism. It is almost like a workout for the body every time you eat these meals. There are no bad foods on my plan, just bad portions, I just teach the right portion at the right times. It literally gives your body an eating workout; where your body then is constantly consuming what you need it to consume -- fat. It's working out and revving the metabolism and that's a great thing -- most people aren't aware of that, they don't realize. Now obviously if you sit down and eat the whole house, that's going to stop it up. It's like putting too much gas in the car, it just breaks it down, it's not necessary. Unlike a car, it actually overspills. Your body will just expand and absorb it and try to work with it. You don't want to do that.


from webmd.com
 
THANKS SKYLER! :) That'll keep me eating regular!
 
i hope it helps...i know a lot of people have the same types of questions and assume that if you eat less, you lose...not exactly the case!
 
Wow, I didn't know this. Thanks for posting this. I guess then that I would do better to eat something every 3 hours and not to eat bigger meals.
 
Ok, I have a question on all this: Does anyone know how many calories you're supposed to eat for metabolism to "register" it as a food coming in? For example, will 50-calorie tea or coffee or milk count? What about a 100-calorie snack? What about situations when you're not hungry? Do you still force yourself to eat smth?
 
Starvation mode is not as bad as made out!

Just found this article:

Q. Some claim that that your body will go into 'starvation mode' if you eat too few calories, preventing you from losing weight and that trying to lose weight by eating fewer calories doesn't work. What do you think?

A. Well there is no doubt that the body slows metabolic rate when you reduce calories or lose weight/fat. There are at least two mechanisms for this.

One is simply the loss in body mass. A smaller body burns fewer calories at rest and during activity. There's not much you can do about that except maybe wear a weighted vest to offset the weight loss, this would help you burn more calories during activity.

However, there's an additional effect sometimes referred to as the adaptive component of metabolic rate. Roughly, that means that your metabolic rate has dropped more than predicted by the change in weight.

So if the change in body mass predicts a drop in metabolic rate of 100 calories and the measured drop is 150 calories, the extra 50 is the adaptive component. The mechanisms behind the drop are complex involving changes in leptin, thyroid, insulin and nervous system output (this system is discussed to some degree in all of my books except my first one).

In general, it's true that metabolic rate tends to drop more with more excessive caloric deficits (and this is true whether the effect is from eating less or exercising more); as well, people vary in how hard or fast their bodies shut down. Women's bodies tend to shut down harder and faster.

But here's the thing: in no study I've ever seen has the drop in metabolic rate been sufficient to completely offset the caloric deficit. That is, say that cutting your calories by 50% per day leads to a reduction in the metabolic rate of 10%. Starvation mode you say. Well, yes. But you still have a 40% daily deficit.

In one of the all-time classic studies (the Minnesota semi-starvation study), men were put on 50% of their maintenance calories for 6 months. It measured the largest reduction in metabolic rate I've ever seen, something like 40% below baseline. Yet at no point did the men stop losing fat until they hit 5% body fat at the end of the study.

Other studies, where people are put on strictly controlled diets have never, to my knowledge, failed to acknowledge weight or fat loss.

This goes back to the under-reporting intake issue mentioned above. I suspect that the people who say, "I'm eating 800 calories per day and not losing weight; it must be a starvation response" are actually eating far more than that and misreporting or underestimating it. Because no controlled study that I'm aware of has ever found such an occurrence.

So I think the starvation response (a drop in metabolic rate) is certainly real but somewhat overblown. At the same time, I have often seen things like re-feeds or even taking a week off a diet do some interesting things when people are stalled. One big problem is that, quite often, weekly weight or fat loss is simply obscured by the error margin in our measurements.

Losing between 0.5 and 1 pound of fat per week won't show up on the scale or calipers unless someone is very lean, and changes in water weight, etc. can easily obscure that. Women are far more sensitive to this. Their weight can swing drastically across a month's span depending on their menstrual cycle.

Thing is this, at the end of the day, to lose weight or fat, you have to create a caloric deficit, there's no magical way to make it happen without affecting energy balance. You either have to reduce food intake, increase activity, or a combination of both.



I guess if you are willing to lose weight quickly, then slowly go back into your normal eating plan. You can do so without piling the weight back on. As "starvation mode" only drops your maintenance cals a couple of hundred.
 
What have I been saying all along?

Pretty much that, word for word. Even citing the same study. :rolleyes:

ETA: Starvation is still not the answer though. If you are only concerned with "weight" loss, you are an idiot. Body recomposition is the name of the game, and that can't be done with a starvation type of diet.

Avoiding the physiological survival mechanisms, namely hormonal shifts, brought about by the "starvation response" is very important IMO.
 
Last edited:
Not really. Unless you're just interested in weight loss. Eating 1000 cals per day is borderline eating disorder IMO. Most people confuse weight loss with fat loss and use the terms interchangeably.


Can you post where you got the study from? Id like to see who the person being asked the question is.
 
You could get away with anything, to a certain extent. Would I recommend that to ANYONE? No, not at all.

FYI, there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. We don't need them.

We only NEED essential aminos and fatty acids. :rolleyes:

If I would ever put someone on something so drastically reduced in energy, it would be something like a Protein Sparing Modified Fast, but that would be a very temporary recommendation to jump start a weight loss.

Again, starvation is not the optimal answer. And the Minnesota study showed that people didn't stop losing weight until they were down around 5% body fat, right? It is very individual. The candidates for that specific experiment were all lean to begin with. The starvation response can be triggered to larger people long before they reach their goals.
 
tonymcclellan said:
Not really. Unless you're just interested in weight loss. Eating 1000 cals per day is borderline eating disorder IMO. Most people confuse weight loss with fat loss and use the terms interchangeably.


Can you post where you got the study from? Id like to see who the person being asked the question is.
Click to expand...



But if you do weight lifting as well you wont lose muscle. Only fat.
 
EazyE said:
But if you do weight lifting as well you wont lose muscle. Only fat.
Click to expand...

Lyle def. knows his stuff. One of the best IMO opinions when it comes to nutrition. I did not check the link, but the PSMF that I spoke of in the previous post is from Lyle. Lyle likes to say these things in order to shut the moronic trainers up who say, "You have to eat every 3 hours and if you don't account for every one of your calories in a day, you are going to trigger the starvation response."

Speaking for Lyle of course, and he would probably ream me a new one if he saw this.... but basically, people try and scare the day lights out of people using the starvation response tactic. There is some validity to it though, but it is not something that happens over night.

Regarding your weight lifting statement, that is a VERY general comment.

Sure, weight lifting while in a caloric deficit wards off catabolism, to an extent though. Training while in a deficit becomes very important, meaning, how you go about setting up program design and periodization.

And if you are starving yourself to the point where you are eating 50% of maintenance, no program in the world is going to save your muscle, period.

A deficit will always yield fat AND muscle loss. The secret is, setting up a HEALTHY caloric deficit coupled with a well thought out resistance training program to manage fatigue, and hopefully muscle loss will be kept to a minimum.
 
Ok.
Well what would you say is a healthy deficit for my stats:

Male
15 years old (16 in 2 months)
5 ft 10
12st 8 (176lb)
BF% (got this from scales) 25.2%
Muscle% 43.8

When those maintenance calorie calculators ask how active you are, i dont know what to put because i only recently started doing exercise. I do H.I.I.T every day for 10-15 minutes and weight lifting 40 minutes a day 3 days a week.

Please reply.
 
I see that you have lost a good amount of weight. Congrats. 15 calories per pound of body weight is a good general starting place for determining your maintenance intake. From there, I like to use something like a 15% reduction to trigger weight loss.

This said, at 15, I would not diet down to super lean levels. Take advantage of this time, as you are still growing. If anything I would be trying to pack on as much muscle now through your prime anabolic years.
 
Steve said:
I see that you have lost a good amount of weight. Congrats. 15 calories per pound of body weight is a good general starting place for determining your maintenance intake. From there, I like to use something like a 15% reduction to trigger weight loss.

This said, at 15, I would not diet down to super lean levels. Take advantage of this time, as you are still growing. If anything I would be trying to pack on as much muscle now through your prime anabolic years.
Click to expand...

Well ive hit a plateau since like November and im still not out of it. I have 1500-2000 cals a day and like i said have started HIIT and i do weight lifting. What can i do to get out of the plateau, have 1300 cals a day?
 
EazyE said:
Well ive hit a plateau since like November and im still not out of it. I have 1500-2000 cals a day and like i said have started HIIT and i do weight lifting. What can i do to get out of the plateau, have 1300 cals a day?
Click to expand...

Did you not read my last post?
 
emilymarie137 said:
Exactly!! If starvation mode were true, anorexics would be fat! lol
Click to expand...

Umm, I think you got it wrong. The starvation response is a very real survival mechanism that resides in each and every one of us. Don't be silly. Nobody said the starvation response makes you fat.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top