Let’s talk about starvation mode.
People often claim that eating too little will send your body into “starvation mode”, which they will describe as a state where, since your body is nutrient deficient, it will store food consumed fat to use in the future. Thus, proponents argue, you can actually gain weight from eating too little!
If at first this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s because it doesn’t make sense. Why would a body lacking in nourishment not use the nutrients provided as energy? If the body doesn’t have enough energy, the organs begin to shut down, and the body eventually dies. Stored nutrients are no good if the body they are stored in dies before it can use them.
So where would people come up with such a silly concept? They tend to cite the Minnesota Starvation Experiment as their source. The MSE was a study performed in the mid 1940’s. A group of 36 volunteers were brought to a camp in Minnesota where they first underwent a 12-week control period of normal caloric intake.
After this, the starvation period of the trial began. The volunteers had their intake cut drastically, from 3200 to 1560 calories per day. Keeping in mind that the men were generally fit and active, having been selected from the Civilian Public Service.
If starvation mode existed, you would expect these men to gain weight. As you have likely guessed from the images alone, they did not. In fact, they lost an average of 25% of their body mass.
It is true that eventually their weight speed decreasing, but only once they were dangerously underweight. They did not stop losing weight because their bodies did not start hoarding calories, this occurred because they ran out of substances in the body to pull calories from. There was no weight left to lose.
There is no such thing starvation mode as it exists in the world of fatlogic. There are possible drawbacks to severe caloric deficit, not least of which is becoming dangerously underweight, but you will never, ever, ever gain weight because you ate too little.
As a side note, there was more to the experiment, in terms of both the physical and mental effects, but they’re outside the scope of this post. I encourage anyone interested in nutrition to read up on it as it’s fascinating.
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