I hear this from time to time. If you cut your calorie intake too much your body with assume food is scarce and initiate its ‘starvation mode’ which will prevent you losing weight so quickly. Is that actually true or is it a story told to stop people following unhealthy diet regimes?
And, if it is true, how can the body do this? If the body can suddenly run on fewer calories then why doesn’t it do that all the time? I guess it must have to stop burning calories on certain activities?
In: Biology
Note: feeling like you are starving is not starvation mode.
There’s no starvation mode until you get to an unhealthy level of body fat. Basically there is a small amount of body fat you need to maintain life such as the fat in the brain or spinal cord. As you get close to this level you subconsciously start to conserve energy, such as simply moving less or slower, one person even mentioned he blinked less.
You can look up the Minnesota semi starvation experiment which is the best of its kind, all the subjects (who didn’t cheat) ended up looking like concentration camp survivors, as one would expect. They lost most if not all their non essential body fat, they also spent most of their day just sitting around and conserving energy.
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