Gridlock1 wrote:Traditional diet advise has it that if you cut your calories to low then your body actually goes into starvation mode and your basal metabolic rate actually drops - at least that is what every person with half a GCSE in PE wants to tell me.
Having never seen any scientific evidence of this I would like to have it confirmed or debunked.
Frankly it sounds unlikely.
Not the basic idea of the body conserving energy if it thinks you are starving, that sounds logical but it raises another assumption that I doubt. For the body to be able to shift to starvation mode then that must mean that under normal circumstances the well fed body has a default mode of being inefficient. That is the body normally burns calories it doesn't actually have to.
That sounds incredibly unlikely. 20 million years of evolution during which lack of food was almost certainly always an issue, surely your body would have developed to work with maximum efficiency at all times, during feast and famine. Surely that is why it is so easy to put on fat and so hard to get it off?
What are these extra non-essential processes that the body does when you are well fed that it can stop when you are starving, where does it skim off the extra calories? Apart from digestion in what ways does an overfed person use energy that a starving person does not?
Anyone know about this? Can anyone point me to any evidence based reviews on the matter?
Oh good question.
Calories are going to be burnt by all through the basics, digestion, breathing, bodily movements, heat regulation, brain activity etc. A well muscled individual would then burn more calories at rest than a fat person because of the extra calories required to move/keep the extra muscle mass.
On the flip side of that both individuals weighing the same but with different body fat percentages would still burn "similar" amounts of energy when moving their bulk bodies around. this was something a program debunked a few years ago about fat people being fat because their metabolisms were "slower". Scientists came back & proved that it was false, just as many calories burnt/used because the body had to work harder to move the larger individual around.
As for switching to starvation mode well I would have thought that for the body to kick something like that into action then an individual would have had to have been on a very low calorie diet for an extended period of time. I would hazard a guess that this "starvation mode" is yet another thing that has been taken out of context from any original studies & manipulated via the usual channels of media, manufacturers & body-builders
to justify the need to eat every 3 hours on the dot or they will waste away.
"If you don't have conditioning it doesn't matter how big your muscles are they ain't gonna reach their full potential!"
21st century Takism
"wyrd bið ful aræd" Destiny is Everything