Quote:
Originally Posted by dragonlady1978
I am not a member of the "you're not eating enough" crew. It has been proven that ANY dieting temporarily changes your metabolism for the worse, but starvation mode is a myth. If eating too little made you not lose weight, people couldn't become anorexic or die of starvation. The science of that idea just doesn't make any darned sense to me.
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The science makes sense if you understand it. Starvation mode can slow metabolism, it can't stop it. "Starvation mode," doesn't make you starvation-proof, it only makes you starvation-resistant. And not everyone is starvation-resistant to the same degree (The difference may be due to genetic or environmental, or physiological factors. Some of these differences are known, and some of them aren't).
If starvation mode were not possible, if everyone had the same metabolism, then everyone who started at the same weight would die of starvation at the same rate (at least if their activity level were the same). And people would die of starvation much faster than they actually do.
It wouldn't explain why one person can die of starvation in six weeks and another person of the same starting weight, on the same calorie level can live for years (on a daily intake of 500 calories or less).
People do die of starvation, but it's a slow process, and a slower process for people who have practice at it. That is a healthy person who has never been on a diet at all, will starve to death faster than an anorexic or a person in a country that experiences frequent famines, because their body has had more practice at conserving energy.
The process by which metabolism slows down isn't entirely a scientific mystery. A lot of it is quite well understood. There are even genes that have been identified that are associated with different metabolic abilities.
The body can't tell voluntary famine (dieting) from involuntary famine (no food in the environment), but most people have inherited various abilities to deal with famine. For example, "shutting down" nonessential processes (and which processes are being shut down and to what degree). It's just like a large factory shutting down production lines and even parts of the factory that aren't needed during a bad economy.
One of the ways the body will conserve energy during famine is spending less of it's energy resources (calories) on immune function (which is why people don't really die of starvation, they die of something else that they would have been able to fight if they'd been healthy - such as infectious disease).
Another way the body will conserve energy is by increasing fatigue levels and the amount and deepness of sleep. A person may sleep more and have less energy during the day. The difference can be small enough you might not even notice it. Not everyone will notice that they're sleeping an extra half hour or that they're figiting less, or that they're getting the same amount, but a different depth of sleep.
Even the type of food can affect metabolism. I've found that on low-carb my body temperature is a full degree higher than on high-carb. Body temp is a metabolic process, so that means my metabolism is different on low-carb than it is on high carb. I can eat about 1800 calories to lose the same amount of weight as 1500 calories of high-carb (this seems to be true for a lot of people, but it's not universal. Some people seem to lose equally well regardless of calorie intake. There may be a genetic difference, or it may be a process difference, there might be a physiological trigger).
It doesn't mean that increasing your calories will help you lose weight - just that it might. You might have more energy to do more (without even realizing it) or more energy for internal processes you're not even aware of (like boosting your immunity).
I want to scream!
