darthjeff replied to your post: darthjeff replied to your post: mustac…

hm.. you have a point, but I am sure the human body is incredibly complex (well, maybe not complex, just very unique per situation) and describing how it behaves is near impossible, especially in the context of a tumblr blog between 2 non-biologists

Well, yeah. That’s a vastly simplified version. But if you want to google around, I’m sure you can find material on it. A useful search term is “starvation mode”.

The actual mechanisms aren’t understood well, and indeed most of it isn’t understood at all, but it is a demonstrable fact that some bodies (including mine) do this, and indeed gain weight while eating a very low calorie diet, although many people choose to ignore and discount the actual documented evidence of this, so a lot of people don’t agree with the conclusion. I think it’s a pretty good conclusion, as long as you actually accept the evidence, and don’t just immediately go, “No, that’s impossible, my preconceived notions say so, therefor those fatties must be lying about how much they eat.”

Other facts that are demonstrated to be true: Most bodies gain back all the weight they’ve lost after a period of dieting even if they are still on that diet, and about a third will gain back even more, suggesting that bodies that have been deprived of nutrients, including calories (yes, calories are nutrients), will attempt to store them up again in case there’s another shortage coming; and babies born of people who dieted or were otherwise calorie-deprived during pregnancy are not only more likely to be fat, but there’s an actual, measurable epigenetic effect – that is, their genes undergo a change due to prenatal circumstances.

I am not a biologist, but I can read, and I do know enough scientific method to understand that the process is evidence –> theory, not theory –> evidence. I know biologists, physicists, and scientists of various kinds with lots of experience with statistic, and I go ask them when I don’t get it. I was first introduced to the starvation mode theory by a biologist, actually. Myself, I study food chemistry as a hobby.

-MG