Quote:
Originally Posted by Serenity100
I've always been a little chubby, started when I was a child. I will never think of me as a thin person, I'm just not built that way, and I'm fine with that, I don't want to be thin. Just thinner.
Also want to add I don't buy into the reason you are not losing is that your body is in "starvation" mode. If that were the case there would be no such thing as girls dying from anorexia, or people in third world countries with no food who literally die of starvation
Starvation mode doesn't mean you won't lose weight on zero calories or die of starvation, it just means that in metabolisms can slow enough for it to take quite a long while to do it.
Starvation mode (metabilic compensation is a better term) accounts for why someone who is of average or even overweight who has never dieted or faced hunger can actually "starve to death" quicker than an underweight anorexic or famine victim on the same number of calories.
The more times you face a natural or self-created famine (diet), the more your body will find ways to conserve energy (burn fewer calories).
If metabolic compensation (aka starvation mode) didn't exist, neither would anorexic living for years (rather than dying in months) on fewer than 500 calories a day. Also, it wouldn't be possible (let alone common) to gain back more than you lost after dieting when you returned to your old eating habits.
Without metabolic slowing, when a person went back to their old habits and calorie level, they'd go back to your old weight, not theirr old weight plus a few extra pounds, as is so common.
Some people do NOT gain extra (which is where the theory of set point came from), but some do.
The research seems to indicate that metabolic compensation is a real phenomenon, but that it the rate and degree is quite variable and possibly genetic. Some people starve to death quite rapidly on fewer than 1000 daily calories, and others may take decades to do so on fewer than 500.
Starvation mode doesn't make starvation impossible, it simply can (but doesn't necessarily) slow down the process. Whether and to what degree (and how exactly) a person's body can compensate for calorie restriction is variable and depends on prior experience with calorie shortages and possibly genetic factors.
Some phenomena than indicate and support the existence of metabolic compensation (and the processes responsible)
fatigue and increases sleepiness caused by calorie restriction. Crash dieters, famine victims and anorexics tend to have less energy and sleep much more than those eating more calories. With severe calorie restriction, the differences can be very extreme. A severely calorie-restricted person might sleep (actual sleep, not just lying in bed, being lazy) 14 hours per day or even more.
Lanugo (the downy "fur" anorexics can get) which helps reduce the number of calories needed to maintain body temperature
Reduced body temperature (like many chronic dieters, my "normal" body temperature has declined over the years. At it's lowest (after about 30 years of dieting) my normal hovered around 97 degrees, sometimes lower). Now, about 15 years after giving up crash dieting, my normal has gradually increased to about 97.8.
Reduced immunity. Research suggests that even moderate calorie restriction can compromise the immune system (decreasing the body's resistance to illness). The research in this area makes me wonder if my decades of crash dieting is responsible for my history of immune dysfunction (autoimmune disease and susceptibility to infection). At my crash dieting peak, I was extremely prone to bacterial and viral infection. My immune function has improved significantly after giving up crash dieting. It may be no coincidence that my immune problems resurfaced after trying more drastic dieting for my sister's wedding last summer.