Starvation mode!
“But you have to eat to keep your metabolism up!”
I don’t know about that. Many, many, many diet programs want you to eat every few hours to keep your metabolism running, and to keep it from dreaded ‘starvation mode’. To me, that doesn’t make sense.
If you define starvation mode as your body’s natural reaction to a reduction in calories – it panics, slows down your metabolism to make what reserves of food in your body last as long as possible – it means a body in starvation mode is having the opposite reaction you want from a weight- and fat-loss point of view.
But we’re not living in the desert here, and many of our ancestors weren’t either – don’t you think we’d be a little better adjusted then that? You can make the arguement that they were grazers – eating handfuls of berries as they came along, just a little bit here and there all through the day.
Click here to investigate starvation mode further.
But I can just as easily imagine a past where hunters had to be stealthier in hunting then digging for roots and disturbing berry bushes for food, where it would be normal to not eat for awhile – and you’d better believe they gorged on the meat they caught – so much less effort to eat meat right away then try to preserve it.
Can eating less food actually mean you lose less weight? What a contradiction! Calories in balanced with calories out maintains weight, no matter what. Resistance training to preserve muscle mass can support a body intaking low calories for a very long time, without losing muscle mass.
I realize that’s a lot of hand waving. A study recently published in the Journal of Obesity had 94 women lose 25 pounds. The women accomplished the weight loss by following an 800 calorie-per-day diet and supplementing it in one of three ways -
1: Resistance training workout program
2: Aerobic training program
3: No working out
For up to 5 months straight. The results were rather exciting for people who want to lose fat but stay healthy (even if the 800 calories sounds absolutely horrendous – I would consider that ideal circumstances for starvation mode to kick in).
Lean mass deteriorated in women in the aerobic training program, and the no workout group. The latter might seem obvious, the aerobic exercise is interesting – they were still working out.
For the women in the resistance training group – all their fat loss was taken from their fat stores! No reduction in their lean muscle mass. Even after the extremely restrictive diet for an extended period of time – and their metabolism was unaffected as well. Huzzah!
It’s an interesting study, and I think it shows pretty well that starvation mode is something of a myth. There’s probably some science behind it, but not enough to effect our day-to-day life, no matter how often we are pushed to eat-eat-eat every few hours to keep our furnace going. We all have stayed alive this long, I think our furnace is a little smarter then that.