I am not at goal, but I do have a background in science and health, and so when I first came on to this site and saw numerous references to "starvation mode"... etc. I felt a healthy skepticism.
So I did a little research myself, and I did not find exactly what Suzeeque found.
One: the "set point" theory of weight was popular at one moment in time, but it has not borne scientific scrutiny. This idea, largely outmoded now, believed that we were born with an inherent set point and that if our weight deviated above or below that point, the body would make metabolic adjustments to fight to get back to that point. This is an appealing theory, and one that I used to believe in. I remember being "set" at 151... and about ten years later, I thought I was "set" at 251.
But, it turns out that there is nothing magical or "set" about a weight that we tend to hover around. It just means that we are keeping our input and output at roughly the same amount for a given period of time.
When my weight was 151 I was a high school varsity athlete on a rigorous training schedule. I was seventeen, and I had a very active lifestyle where I walked everywhere.
When my weight was 251, I had largely sedentary lifestyle, drove everywhere and had a tenacious binge-eating habit.
My lifetime tendency has been to continuously out eat my caloric needs so that my pattern has always been one of slow to moderate gain. My weight was higher at 28, higher again at 38, highest at 48. True, I hovered at certain weights for longer periods of time, but the cause of the gain was pretty obvious. Higher caloric intake, lower metabolism due to age, and progressively more sedentary lifestyle.
All of the research that I've done on "starvation mode" indicates that the theory was derived from some studies of hunger that were done after WWII. In those studies, it was found that once people reached such a low body weight that they had no more fat to burn, the metabolism would reset lower in order to spare muscle. There was NO INDICATION that this same mechanism occurred in people who still had abundant fat stores to burn. Even if there is a modest slowing of metabolism, the calorie deficit is still more significant than any metabolic difference. That is why people are able to lose weight.
Our body is designed to store fat and then burn it in times of hunger.
I can see why the idea of increasing calories to lose weight would appeal to obese people!
We are purposely restricting our calories, an act that is not natural to humans-- we are basically exercising mind over matter, using our intellect to overcome our natural desires. This is NEVER an easy thing to do.
But, I have not yet been able to see any compelling scientific data to indicate that increasing calories would accelerate weight loss.
If anyone has a good reference for that, I'd love to see it.
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