I have been reading many posts on various forums (not just 3FC), and I see so many varying opinions on so many topics.

Ones that have caught my eye lately:

-starvation mode &
-metabolic destruction

I feel full on very low calories (under 1500 average) and have good energy levels, but these two subjects above are always poking at me.

Are they true or false? Should we be taking breaks for months at a time to prevent metabolic destruction? If we eat under our recommended calorie intake for loss, will we go into starvation?

I'd love to hear everyone's experiences, fears, and thoughts.

I really do not believe in the starvation mode theory.

Metabolic destruction, most likely done through severe, stupid fad diets, over and over. Basically you may lose, but at the same time you are causing malnutrition, and harm to your body.

We need to fuel our bodies with proper nutrition at a reasonable calorie deficit or maintenance number, and get some exercise.

This isn't a matter of opinion it is a matter of science.

Our bodies can only slow down our metabolisms by a small amount and there is a good reason why. Assuming your alive, your heart is still beating, your lungs are still moving oxygen around, your liver - kidneys ... brain ... they all require energy to function. Your BMR is the energy required to keep you alive and in severe caloric restriction and even total fasting your BMR simply doesn't change much.

Granted - if you're eating too little - you might have a lack of energy - and therefore you might sit on the sofa all day - and therefore burn fewer calories ... but the idea that the body can somehow go into a mode where it can store fat in an energy deficit is simply lack of understanding how the body works.

Agree with what has been posted.

It drives me crazy when people say that if you don't eat x number of calories for a day or two, your body will go into starvation mode. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that

I've never found that to be the case.

I tend to calorie cycle just because we you need such deficits eating a couple days at 800 cals and then letting yourself have a couple at 1500 cals is a lot easier than just doing 1200 calories everyday.

Calories are calories are calories. If I eat because I'm PMSing, it's still calories and I don't lose weight. If I don't eat because I'm ill, then I'm not consuming calories and I lose weight.

There are always going to be water weight fluctuations and times where, for a couple days, your body prioritizes other things over letting go of a pound or two, but ultimately it comes down to what you consume vs what you need to consume to maintain your constant.

Medifast diets and others do those supervised nutritional drinks where they have their clients on like 500 to 800 calories a day. (I think it's Medifast) Anyway, that may be multivitamins on steriods but it's still extremely low calories, and it works. Maybe not in the sense of helping you learn a better way of eating, but functionally it takes the weight off and people see results.

Nope, do not agree with the starvation mode/metabolism destruction.

As your body gets used to the caloric level you maintaining over a long period of time, weight loss may slow, sometimes dramatically, but it will never stop completely.

I also agree with all posts.

Basically, I am afraid I am hurting myself by eating such low calories. BUT! I have energy and feel full, and feel good that I am eating un-processed food.
I was told to eat more -but why? Why should I sacrifice my body and eat junk just to reach a caloric goal? Doesn't make sense to me.

I guess I am scared because I have been bouncing between 207-208-209 for the past 6 days. Would this be a plateau or a stall, or normal? I really don't know if I should be worrying!

Most people who claim starvation mode just aren't tracking properly. The vast majority of people have no idea how to eyeball calories (I don't and I've been at this almost 10 years). I have watched my husband "measure" days at 1500-2000 calories, only to actually weigh & count his one popcorn "snack" at over 1000 calories.

Can people damage their metabolism over time? Yes, they can, but they are not as common as most people would like to think. Everyone thinks they are special but the vast majority of us are not. It's portion distortion.

I find it very hard to believe that such a population (overweight) are in starvation mode yet another population, those with anorexia (who might meticulously wiegh every morsel down to the gram wtih obsession) are actually severely underweight.

hmmm... This is a good topic. I have always been told I cannot go under 1200 calories a day because my body will go into starvation mode, but since I started this new journey almost 40 days ago and have been Op since then some nights I have problems using all the calories and I'm forcing myself to eat more when I'm not hungry. The last two nights were good examples because I work till 1am. At like 8 pm I wasn't hungry but realized that I still had 600 calories left and went and found something to eat to get me closer to that goal.
This makes allot of sense. I'm glad the question was asked!!

yep, exactly.

Also, to add to this, in our current society we have very little grasp on how much we consume, compared to our ancestors.

We tend to think of 1200 calories or so as being a 'little' bit of food.

When I was little, I was enthralled with the history of the American West/Midwest. I remember reading journals where they would recount daily life and the journal entries would be things like "carried a boiled egg, biscuit and piece of jerky out to Sam for lunch while he plowed"

They were plowing all day on what, maybe 500 calories?! Figuring breakfast and dinner and it would have been darn hard for them to routinely get more than 1500 or 2000 calories a day, and they were working WAY, WAY harder than any of us do, and expending more calories keeping their body levels consistent (no a/c or heat really)

So, our ideas of 'starvation' are ridiculous when you look at it in the context of human civilization. Not that they were 'healthy', I'm sure they were low on some vitamins, etc, but they were functioning and working. If they were in starvation mode they couldn't have survived the years they did.

We are just to a point in human history where we have become so accustomed to 'extra' that 'less than' seems suspect and a bit traumatic.

This is so weird to read today because over the weekend, I watched a show called Frontier House. It was a PBS reality TV series from over 10 years ago, about 3 families who recreated a homesteading lifestyle of the 1880s for about 5 months. Although no one was dieting, they all lost weight, and one participant in particular was very concerned about the weight he had lost. The doctor who examined them said that the men ended up weighing what the average weight was for men in the 1860s (going by Army records from the Civil War.) Based on the changes in diet and activity level, this is where their bodies normalized out at.

This one guy wasn't all that heavy to start - maybe slightly into the overweight range. But he was a bit freaked out because he thought he looked unhealthily skinny compared with what he was used to seeing. But of course, he was extremely healthy but this is what his body was designed to weigh, with lots of routine physical activity and no processed foods, and enough food but not an unending supply of it.

If you consistently eat way too little and get malnourished, you will either eventually starve to death or hit a breaking point and binge and binge and binge. Some people reach the binging point with more or less caloric restriction than others. I feel like I'm going to die/binge if I eat under 1500 more than a couple days in a row so I don't do that.

It sounds like you feel fine and can do what you need to on your current intake, so don't worry about it. If you feel HUNGRY for weeks on end, you might want to have a refeed day or think about calorie cycling so that you don't have a meltdown and eat everything in sight.

100% normal. Your weight fluctuates every day due to a number of reasons - salt, exercise, water, etc.

Also it's quite normal to go a couple weeks or even a month without losing any weight despite staying on plan, especially as you get to lower weights. It's only when you're not seeing any weight loss for maybe 6 weeks or so that you should reevaluate your plan.