Eli5: if on a diet why cant someone live off the calories they have stored up as fat before introducing new calories while losing fat? Ie why cant we slim down with exercise before eating more food?
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From my understanding it’s a throw back to how we evolved. Three meals a day wasn’t the norm (and still isn’t in many places), so our bodies evolved to burn off stored calories, but only to a point. Eventually you’ll go into a different mode where your body saves everything because it doesn’t know when the stores will be replenished. The body slows down the number of calories it burns in an attempt to thwart starvation. It’s why when you diet you periodically hit plateaus. It was a great survival mechanism when we evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, but now it kinda sucks when you need to lose weight.
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