The Damage of Chronically Starving Yourself

Taking a different approach to your weight loss to help you live your life again

I know how frustrating it can be to struggle with weight loss, especially when nothing seems to work. You might feel like you’re doing everything right, but the scale doesn’t budge. You might wonder if there’s something wrong with your metabolism, your hormones, or your lifestyle. You might feel hopeless and give up on your goals. But don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people face the same challenges, especially with the current food culture in America where it seems to be an all-or-nothing mentality with it. My focus is to reach people who seemingly eat nothing and can’t seem to get their weight to budge. Those who feel lethargic and no energy and feel like their life is just passing them by. I want to thoroughly discuss my thoughts on what is going on for many of these people in an understandable fashion, how we can prevent this thought process, and actionable steps you can take to begin improving the relationship that you have with food and reclaiming the life that you want to be living.

Let me start by defining the relationship that I have seen with food habits in America that appear to be getting more and more prevalent. It begins with a lack of attention to the quality of food we are putting into our body, going for convenience and speed over beginning a habit of prepping ahead of time, with the illusion that it is also cheaper to do so. This then causes the typical excess gain as we as a society begin to slow down and move less and less. It is all too common for people in their late 20s into early 30s to think that they can’t be participating in movement, group sports, or anything like that as they are “too old.” This then further perpetuates the problem of eating too much and moving too little. Once this stage is approached we begin to tip the scales so radically in the other direction where we increase our workload to unsustainable levels (think about the last post!) and begin to look up some stuff on how to lose weight and get more healthy. The common cover all advice is to eat less and move more. This is when we start cutting and cutting calories, with no end in sight and skipping meals since that causes us to eat less calories. See some initial progress as a lot of the energy stores within our muscles begin to deplete and shed a lot of water mass but then we hit an abrupt stoppage. Then we try to keep this going on forever as we “need to eat less.” In reality typically what we see is your body tries to fight back against the sudden and sustained change as it doesn’t know when the calories are going to come back in again. It wants to make sure the energy will be present for you to hunt down the food and catch it. Remember, food at the end of the day is fuel for your body to run. An engine with no fuel is not going to be running, so forcing your body to try and run and move when you’re starving it of a fuel source isn’t going to make it go full bore with its engines. 

The other factor that we need to understand is what your body does with muscle when it is in this starvation state. I believe it sets in significantly faster than we are currently led to believe. As you enter this starvation state, your body begins to metabolically downregulate, causing you to limit your fidgeting, limit your overall movement, make you feel less energetic, and it wants you to move your muscles less. It also begins to peel the protein off of your muscles to make essential proteins that your body needs in order to function, without a constant source of protein intake then your body will just continue to pull from your muscles taking away from the big calorically expensive muscles, making them smaller and less expensive, further reducing our total caloric expenditure making it even harder to get under the total caloric number to lose weight. This is when we begin to enter that no energy, watching life pass us by and not truly living, as you’re forcing your body into an essentially anorexic state with a layer of fat around. The work that has put in has brought down the total daily expenditure so low that it is almost impossible to sustain it any further.

Now this may sound very doom and gloom but thankfully, this is all very preventable and reversible! It does take time for the process to reverse as we just need to restore confidence within your body to burn energy and build up some base of muscle again. Actions for reversing it and preventing it are very similar so let us discuss those. One of the biggest things that I have found working with people in this situation is that the focus on the weight number itself becomes something we can be very focused with as we want to see it decrease at all costs. However, if we begin by focusing on restoring life to our body, through the means of bringing our caloric intake up with a big focus on protein (roughly 1g per pound of body weight). It is often found that energy levels drastically increase, that the body wants to move and continue moving, and all at the same time they don’t increase weight. But then, often they get frustrated with the lack of progress on the scale, even though we have a plethora of other factors showing progress is being made, eating significantly more calories (often times that 2,000 number we hear is a great starting place!), feeling more energetic to move, and fully participate in what the activities that life is throwing you as opposed to needing to take after one moderately intense activity. Giving your body time to go through the healing process, grow back a bit of muscle, gain the ability for that engine to heat up and start to burn. Once that is fully established, we can then focus back in on cutting down some calories slightly, only around 5-10% and monitoring how our body reacts and developing the rest of the gameplan from there. Again big focus on maintaining that protein intake, increasing the size of the engine, and keeping the activity levels up, which will be much easier as you are giving your body the fuel that it wants!

To quickly summarize, it is all too common for people nowadays to feel like they are eating almost nothing and have no hope of losing weight. People accusing them of lying and nothing seeming to work can build up some true resentment and make it feel like everything is working against them. In reality, it was some poorly worded advice and the culture surrounding the world of food that has perpetuated the problem, putting all too many people into an essentially anorexic state with little to no understanding of how they got there. Taking some steps to prevent it during your weight loss journey or the steps to recovery can be so simple in practice but mentally can create quite the hurdle itself. If you follow the steps, of increasing the amount of muscle you have from exercise and increased protein intake, and improve your body’s confidence in using energy by giving it more fuel to burn, you can increase the body's ability to burn calories and get to the body state that we want to be in. This then makes it significantly easier to make long-term sustainable change and be an active figure in our life not just watching our life pass by. Remember, at the end of the day, nothing changes unless you do. 

If you found this useful and provided some insight please share it around to somebody who might need to hear it. If you have any questions, need clarity, or a topic that you want me to discuss send it my way. You can contact me by email at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com

Until next time,

Sidney Bartlett, CSCS