I just listened to the podcast Maintenance Phase and it is making me seriously reconsider things. Like a lot of women I have spent basically my whole life "on a diet" or "making healthy lifestyle changes." I have done cardio (marathons), weight-lifting, HIIT, yoga, pilates, etc. I have done CICO, keto, IIFYM, ABCDEFGH. You name it, I have tried it.
The only thing that ever worked was going on a crash diet. In 2019 I went through a personal crisis and basically stopped eating. I ate <500 calories a day every day for about 3 months and I went from 152 pounds to 121 pounds. And TBH, I looked and felt fucking great. I felt like I had cracked the code.
Around that time my life stabilized and I decided to try being less ridiculous. I hired a personal trainer and ate ~1000 calories/day (mostly protein). I lost about 5 more pounds over the next 2 months. I looked great but my body was starting to struggle.
I came down with what should have been a minor cold but turned into a pretty severe lung infection. And I lost about 5 pounds (not sure exactly what my low weight was because I was too weak to weigh myself).
I've spent the last 2 years bouncing between 113 and 125 pounds. Whenever I get down to <115 my body really struggles (infections, migraines). And it seems like the only thing that works to lose weight and keep it off is to eat very little and to be hungry almost all of the time. Whenever I am eating what feels like "enough" my weight slowly creeps up.
So I listened to this podcast today (Maintenance Phase) and they basically described my life. I always thought "starvation mode" was a myth and I was living proof that CICO is the only way. But I had been ignoring the fact that the calories DO NOT ADD UP for me and the only way to get CICO to work is to go extreme with it. I think maybe the podcast is right and that all of these years of dieting have shot my metabolism, so yeah CICO technically works but I have to eat so little that I'm going to be hungry all the time forever.
Is the podcast right? Is starvation mode real? Is there any way to get a working metabolism back??
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/v5jbpj/is_the_starvation_mode_myth_actually_a_myth_just/
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