Eating too little calories, makes you fat?

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Is it a fact that if your trying to lose weight and eat too little that your body goes into starvation mode? To me it sounds like rubbish but apparently not.

Lets say I need as a grown male 2500 cals a day and I consume 1800 and then burn off 300 through exercise , in this case I have created a calorie deficit of 1000 cals per day which over a week equates to approx 7000 cals.

I pound=3600 cals (I think) so therefore after 1 week I should lose 2 pounds.

I know weight loss isnt as efficient as that exactly but you get the idea.

After 4 weeks however one would expect a weight loss of around 5-7 pounds but instead there is no weight loss just fluctuation between starting weight, a little lower and back again.

If its the case that eating too few calories has caused the starvation mode,then how exactly is it even possible to lose weight at all??

Is it a fact that if your trying to lose weight and eat too little that your body goes into starvation mode? To me it sounds like rubbish but apparently not.

Why does it sound like rubbish? For mans longest period on the planet, the next meal was not guaranteed. So when food got thin on the ground, the bodies metabolism slowed down, to conserve energy.

I'm not an expert but a deficit of 1000 a day is IMO quite a lot if you are exercising as well. Do you exercise everyday? Do you not have any rest days? Or cheat days? What exercises are you doing? If your doing too much exercise and not eating enough you're basically burning the muscle you you are building during work outs.

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Deleted User wrote: »

Why does it sound like rubbish? For mans longest period on the planet, the next meal was not guaranteed. So when food got thin on the ground, the bodies metabolism slowed down, to conserve energy.

I'm not an expert but a deficit of 1000 a day is IMO quite a lot if you are exercising as well. Do you exercise everyday? Do you not have any rest days? Or cheat days? What exercises are you doing? If your doing too much exercise and not eating enough you're basically burning the muscle you you are building during work outs.

Hi thanks for your answer, I am just wondering what you think is a healthy deficit? It does seem hard to get the combination correct, I run about 4 times a week and play tennis once, a few chinups and press up for a few mins a couple of times a week also. I do have the odd cheat day but quite honestly its not even once a fortnight in general.
I just dont feel hungry and can quite easily function on 1200 cals but I am really not losing weight just the same as always. I am beginning to wonder about this starvation mode now.....
I had been following the food pyramid and it worked for a while but I just cant eat all that food lately.

What do you eat on a regular day and what do you eat on your cheat day? Are you including your liquid calories in your 1300 a day?

Hanley

Sustained under eating leads to eventual over eating. The net effect averaged over a period of time is that you eat above maintenance kcals, so you gain weight. Long short.

The starvation mode thing is a load of crap.

EDIT: unless you're weighing and measuring ALL your food and recording it accurately, you're probably eating way more than you think as well.

Antisocialiser

This is a paragraph taken from the Ultimate Diet 2.0 by Lyle McDonald. I don't want to confuse the OP but the book is (basically) directed at athletes i.e. (men circa 12-15% bodyfat) who find it hard to lose those last few pounds.

Leptin and the brain
Now, I want you to think back to the first couple of chapters of this book, where I talked about the evolutionary reasons it's so hard to get extremely lean. To your body, becoming too lean is a very real threat to your survival. From a physiological standpoint, that means that your body needs a way to "know" how much energy you have stored. As you may have guessed, or known from my last book, leptin is one of the primary signals (along with many others including ghrelin, insulin, peptide YY and other as of yet undiscovered compounds) that signals the brain about how much energy you have stored and how much you're eating. All of these hormones send an integrated signal to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus that "tell" it what's going on elsewhere in your body. Changes in levels of these hormones causes other changes in various neurochemicals such as neuropeptide-Y (NPY), corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH), pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) and several others to occur. These neurochemicals regulate metabolic rate, hunger and appetite, hormones and a host of other processes. So when you restrict calories, causing changes in all of the hormones and neurochemicals mentioned above, and a number of physiological processes change, mostly for the worse. Levels of thyroid stimulating hormone, leutinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone (TSH, LH and FSH respectively) go down. This results in lowered levels of thyroid and testosterone. Levels of growth hormone releasing hormone (GHRH) go down meaning GH output can be impaired. Sympathetic nervous system activity goes down which, along with the drop in thyroid, has a huge impact on metabolic rate. Cortisol levels go up as does hunger and appetite. You get the idea.
What you end up seeing is an all purposes systems crash when you try to take bodyfat to low levels. I should note that these processes are occurring to one degree or another during all diets, they simply become more pronounced at the extreme low levels of bodyfat.

In my mind, at least, this adds some merit to the idea of "starvation mode" and the reasoning behind refeeds? I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of others?

Hanley

Antisocialiser wrote: »

This is a paragraph taken from the Ultimate Diet 2.0 by Lyle McDonald. I don't want to confuse the OP but the book is (basically) directed at athletes i.e. (men circa 12-15% bodyfat) who find it hard to lose those last few pounds.



In my mind, at least, this adds some merit to the idea of "starvation mode" and the reasoning behind refeeds? I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of others?

Utterly meaningless unless you're already at a very low body fat percentage and being incredibly regimented with your diet.

Sure, it's something that could be happeneing, but chances are if you ever get to stage where it could have an effect on you, you'll already be aware of it.

People using "starvation mode" as an excuse for why they're not losing weight is a complete crock of sh*t. You're not losing weight because you're eating too much and not exercising enough.

It takes weeks and months of clean eating and living to make substantial changes to your body. Not 6 days and a cheat meal, 3 more days and a slip up, a bar of chocolate the next day, then 4 days clean.... and people wonder why they're not losing bloody weight.

Antisocialiser

Utterly meaningless unless you're already at a very low body fat percentage and being incredibly regimented with your diet.

Sure, it's something that could be happeneing, but chances are if you ever get to stage where it could have an effect on you, you'll already be aware of it.

People using "starvation mode" as an excuse for why they're not losing weight is a complete crock of sh*t. You're not losing weight because you're eating too much and not exercising enough.

It takes weeks and months of clean eating and living to make substantial changes to your body. Not 6 days and a cheat meal, 3 more days and a slip up, a bar of chocolate the next day, then 4 days clean.... and people wonder why they're not losing bloody weight.

Sorry, I thought I made it clear that I was referring to already quite lean individuals! For the most part (and the majority of people) it can be ignored but the concept of "starvation mode" gets bandied about as a myth when it doesn't seem to be.

To quote Lyle again:

I should note that these processes are occurring to one degree or another during all diets, they simply become more pronounced at the extreme low levels of bodyfat.

It is, however, probably best for the OP to ignore everything I have just said :cool:

Hanley

Antisocialiser wrote: »

Sorry, I thought I made it clear that I was referring to already quite lean individuals!

I thought I also made it very clear what I was referencing. The "unless you're already at a very low body fat percentage and being incredibly regimented with your diet" shoulda been a give away.

Antisocialiser

Hanley wrote: »

I thought I also made it very clear what I was referencing. The "unless you're already at a very low body fat percentage and being incredibly regimented with your diet" shoulda been a give away.

I read your post too. I was simply being polite.

Fitseeker

Eating too little calories makes you fat? - Nope.

btkm8unsl0w5r4

Hanley wrote: »

EDIT: unless you're weighing and measuring ALL your food and recording it accurately, you're probably eating way more than you think as well.

There is the answer op

syklops

sky is the limit wrote: »

Sorry silly Thread title, what I mean to say is that if as a male you don't eat the required 2500 cals in a day then the weight loss stops or even increases. I cannot for the life of me eat anywhere near that amount healthily. I can maybe get to 1600 at tops because I am simply not hungry! I do exercise like jogging and tennis which means I am probably burning a further 3-400 cals also creating a huge deficit of over 1000 a day every day but my weight just comes down a bit and then goes up a bit but never really comes down constantly. I just find it hard to believe I will have to eat like a horse for the weight to finally shift. I am not massively overweight and my diet is mostly paleo however I think the whole peo thing works a lot better for guys in their 20s as opposed to a guy like myself in the late 40s. It's a delicate balance to get it right.

How are you measuring your calorie intake?