Fasting, extreme low cal diets, and the "starvation mode" myth...

I originally wrote this post in response to a question about an extremely restrictive diet. My fear was that, because there were so many posts under that thread already, the original poster would just get over whelmed and not read my post, which I worked really hard on! Kidding. I also do think this could be useful to others, as so many people seem to believe that there's a "starvation mode" that your body goes into when there's an extreme lack of food. It's not quite untrue...but it's not quite right either.

My sister is in medical school and studied nutritional sciences for her undergrad. She told me that when you don't eat for a day, or any other prolonged period of time, your body produces the energy it needs to live and move by "eating" your muscles instead. Muscle weighs more than fat, so when you step on the scale, you will see that you have lost weight.

Consider, however, that muscle takes the most energy for your body to maintain. A person with a lot of muscle mass burns more calories per day than a similarly built person who has less muscle, even if both are just sitting on the couch watching TV.

So, when someone stops fasting, he or she will have lost weight because they have lost muscle mass. However, his or her body will now burn less calories per day than it did before they started fasting. If that person were to start eating again as they did before the fast, he or she would now gain weight, where as before the fast, they broke even, and neither gained or lost.

It's quite possible that the same is true for when you eat an extremely low amount of calories per day. Your body needs energy to keep moving and living. It is not getting that energy from food, so it burns up some muscle, because muscle a) provides more nutrients than fat, and b) requires more energy to maintain, energy which your body no longer has.

The belief that your body goes into starvation mode, then, is a bit of a myth. Your body does not think "oh, no food, better lower my metabolism for a while". Your body is a machine really, it doesn't think much of anything at all. Eating too little, however, does lower your metabolism because your body is eating up its muscle mass. This is not a temporary change though, as the words "starvation mode" may lead you to believe. The lowering of your metabolic rate will be permanent until you exercise to build back the muscle you have lost.

Hope you found this interesting and helpful, and if anyone has anything to add to or counter the above, please feel free to post it below. Thank you.

Sun. Dec 7, 11:07pm

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