What happens if you starve?
Hello everyone, welcome back to one day at a time, take it seriously. Today, two studies and I've covered them before, in a bit of detail, but I want to go into them again because they're super, super important. The first one, Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Yes, it sounds crazy. Basically, the experiment was led by Ansel Keyes and to understand the physical and psychological effects of starvation to help farming victims after World War two.
Speaker 1:So got some stats in front of me, and I'm gonna read some of them out because it's crazy. So it's a 12 control. They ate usually, they were eating 3,000 calories a day. Now they're eating 1,500 calories a day. So that's a 50% calorie deficit.
Speaker 1:Massive. Huge. Then they went to a semi starvation period, twenty four weeks, so the calorie intake was cut to just over 1,500 a day with a goal of losing 25% of their body weight. So the first part was just eating normally 3,000, second part was the semi starvation, which is basically half the calories or 50% calorie deficit, mainly eating carbohydrates, and then it was a refeeding of twenty weeks after that, and it was split into twelve weeks of restricted refeeding just to make sure they could keep it, you know, to control that part to see what happens. Uncontrolled, refeeding, so you could eat as much as you wanted after twelve weeks.
Speaker 1:Sorry, eight weeks. So basically, hey, we're not gonna be in 1,500 calories a day anymore, 50% deficit, we're gonna move into this, like, healthier calorie intake and then we're gonna leave you on your own for eight weeks, see what happens. Here's the key things that happened from a study. Resting heart rate dropped from an average of 55 to 35 because the body was trying to conserve energy right, proper in a starvation state. Physical changes, lost a huge amount of body fat dropping 30% of, body fat dropped to 30%, lost over 20% of their strength, and shrinking heart size, decreased blood volume, hair loss.
Speaker 1:They reported feeling cold, uncoordinated, mental and emotional distress. Participants complained of feeling old and tired, became irritable, hungry, high rates of depression. They had food obsession, always looking at pictures of food, decreased sex drive, drinking 15 cups of coffee a day, chewing 40 packs of gum a day. One participant had to be removed for having cannibalistic dreams and cheating on the diet and threatening the researchers. Wow, that was a lot.
Speaker 1:And binge eating. Once allowed to eat freely, participants ate uncontrollably with some consuming an estimate 11,000 calories in one day. And the long term effects of this was there was abnormal eating patterns in many of these men with food insecurity for many years after the study, so this study was hardcore. Right, so body composition overshoot. 1997 analysis of the data found that during the refeeding, the men regained their body fat much faster than their muscle because they lost a lot of muscle mass remember now because the drive to overheat continued until a muscle mass was restored.
Speaker 1:They ultimately ended up with more body fat, nearly 180% of pre study levels than they began. Now you might be saying, can we put it into context? Yes. So say now you got 30 kilograms of fat. Say now you're a hundred kilogram man or a hundred kilogram woman, you got 30 kilograms of fat, 30% body fat.
Speaker 1:Lost all the lost a lot of fat in the in the in the starvation part, lost a lot of muscle, and they start eating again. The body fat goes up not from not back to 30 kilograms of body fat, goes up to 54 kilograms of body fat, a 180% overshoot until muscle was regained. So it takes that amount of gain in if you're not adding resistance training and things like that to get that muscle back to when the body then starts reducing its kind of desire to eat. Isn't that crazy? Let me think about it.
Speaker 1:You you think you're starting these low calorie diets. You think you're starting these things to in to speed up your progress. You think it's for your own good to make things go quicker. But you can only do the quicker one, the more rapid fat loss, if you really really understand what's happening and really really have a program for the fat loss, the maintenance and afterwards. And if you don't, which most of you won't, you're in trouble because you're gonna lose a hell of a lot of muscle mass like proven in this research study.
Speaker 1:You're only gonna stop overshooting on fat gain until your muscle is restored and it took 24 kilograms of extra fat it took before the muscle was restored, 24 kilos of fat it took for the on average you were to compare 100 person, 180% overshoot until you eventually got that muscle back. That is crazy stuff and that's what's happening when you do these like super restrictive diets and you don't understand what's going on. I'm not here to say that everyone should understand all of the physiology, the psychology of of this stuff because this, you know, everyone's got their own lives they go on with. We tend to get our information from social social media. Maybe some of you will see this podcast clip on TikTok or social media, But the point is, there are ways that people have done super low calorie diets, rapid weight loss, and in some cases has been successful long term.
Speaker 1:Even the NHS advocates like 800 calorie plans, they're called very low calorie diets, and they are proven in this research studies time frame to be super super effective, obviously, because they're super low calorie. But then when you look at what it actually means to be to have a successful low very low calorie diet, Your protein intake is gonna have to be very high, a lot higher than you probably even know. You're gonna have to add in resistance training and it doesn't end when the fat's gone, then you're going to go to maintenance. You've to go to maintenance and if you've held on to that muscle mass during the fat loss phase, this rebound, this extreme rebound shown in the Minnesota starvation experiment is less, way less likely to happen. Think about it, this fat overshoot happened because they lost a huge amount of muscle mass.
Speaker 1:If they didn't lose that muscle mass, the fat overshoot would have been way less or the psychological and psychological drive to eat more food would have been way less. So the fat gain would have been way less. And that's why it's important that we look at, we're looking to lose fat, not muscle because we're gonna go to maintenance one day. You know what mean? Like, we're not trying to lose fat forever.
Speaker 1:So when we go to maintenance one day, are we gonna go into maintenance where the body's going, hold the hell on, where's the muscle gone that I had before this? Right? Or is it going, awesome, muscles retain, same place, less body fat, let's just get adjusted to this new kind of, like, maintenance level. You're gonna have to obviously have a lower maintenance when you've lost all your weight and when you have a higher weight, less weight to move around the body and it's gonna be far easier for you, so take it seriously and this is what LeanShield is about, this is what LeanShield is all about, can we lose fat without losing muscle, So that's important. I wanna reiterate that because I think some of you are thinking I'm going slow, it's not good for me, everyone else is losing fat rapidly around me or losing weight rapidly around me, good for them.
Speaker 1:Are they losing fat and are they maintaining muscle? Because if not, Minnesota's coming for them. Well, it's a bit extreme, but you know what I mean, it could be something that happens. So don't worry that you're going slower because what you're doing is you're enabling yourself to do maintenance later on without this huge overshoot, And this thing is called skinny fat for a reason. You lose all the fat, you lose a lot of muscle, you regain all the fat and more.
Speaker 1:You maybe never regain all the muscle and you go back into another diet. Happens over and over and over. So you've got to be careful. And on another note, this is like another study that is quite brutal, I want to share this because when it comes to how we approach this, it's important not beat yourself up, be negative and stuff and the psychological impact. You've got to love yourself no matter what size you are because you're more than your weight and maybe you've got a bit more weight on right now than you want.
Speaker 1:All you've done is consumed too much energy over a certain amount of time. Doesn't mean you're a horrible person, doesn't mean you're an idiot, doesn't mean you're lazy. That's just the fact that's happened. And for you to get less stored energy down, you're gonna have to eat less energy, and you're gonna have to hopefully do some resistance training, eat more protein, so it's mainly fat that comes off. But the psychological stress we put on ourselves, I mentioned in another podcast last week, is very, very stressful.
Speaker 1:The psychological element of stress, the one we can put on ourselves all day every day is really, really bad. And obviously, can do stressful scenarios when you're in physical danger, it's needed, but to prolong it every day is really, really harsh on the body. And there's a real insight into this in Robert Sapolsky's book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and it's called, the topic on the topic is called stress dwarfism. So I'm going to read this from the book because it is fascinating, and I'm not here to say it's gonna happen to you as an adult, but just to show you the difference some love and care can make, some nice words and physicals, some nice care can make to infants, two kids as they grow up. Obviously, it's going impact us in our life as well in different ways because we've already grown up, but just think about the impact it has and then think about how I'd wanna speak to myself to to give myself the inner environment to blossom, to glow, to fulfill my life.
Speaker 1:And if you're not gonna give out to yourself today just because you're holding too much energy, that's the wrong mindset. You can do it no matter what, and every day is one day at a time, and you'll eventually lose that stored energy and then boom. But you do the work now. So when you do lose the stored energy, it's not like a huge wow of lost energy. Now I deserve to be happy.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. You deserve now, and you've gotta be working on it from then. But here's here's here's from the book, okay?
Speaker 1:Stress dwarfism involves extremely low growth hormone levels in circulation. The sensitivity of growth hormone to psychological state has rarely been shown as clearly as in a paper that followed a single child with stress dwarfism. When brought to the hospital he was assigned to a nurse who spent a great deal of time with him and to whom he became very attached. Row A in the table below shows us physiological profile upon entering the hospital, extremely low growth hormone levels and a low rate of growth. Row B shows a profile after a few months later while still in the hospital, growth hormone levels have more than doubled without his having received any synthetic hormones, and the growth rate hasn't more than tripled.
Speaker 1:The stress dwarfism is not a problem of insufficient food, the boy was eating more at the time he entered the hospital than a few months later. When his growth resumed, a demonstration of sensitivity of growth to emotional state condition was shown in food intake A entering the hospital, so this is shown in graph right. So it goes on to explain that the reason why this kid had three times the growth rate in hospital and two times more growth hormone was because the nurse that was caring for him was giving him love and affection and care. Then there was another study showing this nurse going off work and replaced by a nurse that didn't have hands on approach and the growth hormone level plummeted again, a huge amount and then it spiked again when she came back from holiday, like three, four times the spike in growth hormone, a three times growth rate. And there's other studies about it in this book and the lesson from that is like, as an infant, as a child, if you're not given love and care, physical touch, just a bit each day, it stunts your growth massively.
Speaker 1:It's a stressful environment, stunts your growth. Now when you put yourself in your own stressful environment as an adult because you're putting yourself in your own jail by judging yourself, hating yourself all the time because you're not skinny, you're not this, you're not that, you're not that, you're put in the similar environment inside you whilst we've grown up and stuff is different, we're not gonna shrink into dwarves, you know I mean? But it's important that we we we realize the importance of it, So we take things one day at a time, smile on your face, from now to bedtime, do what you can. And I'm telling you, if you focus on the fundamentals, you're going to get there, things are going to move along, don't try and rapidly speed things up. And another, I'm going to leave you on this one, it's quite a disturbing story if you love Peter Pan, but this is a true story.
Speaker 1:So a final and truly disturbing example comes to mind if you ever find yourself reading chapter after chapter about growth endocrinology, which I don't recommend, you will note an occasional odd reference to Peter Pan, this is from the book by the way, perhaps a quotation from the play or a snide comment about tick a bell. I'd long noted the phenomenon and finally in the chapter in one textbook I found the explanation for it. The chapter reviewed the regulation of growth in children and the capacity for severe psychological stress to trigger psychogenic dwarfism. It gave an example that occurred in a British Victorian family. A son aged 13, the beloved favourite of the mother is killed in an accident.
Speaker 1:The mother, despairing and bereaved, takes to her bed in grief for years afterwards, utterly ignoring the other six year old son. Horrible scenes ensue. For example, the boy on one occasion enters her darkened room. The mother, in a delusion state, briefly believes it's the dead son. David, is that you?
Speaker 1:Could that be you? Before realizing, oh, it is only you. Growing up being only you, on the rare instances when the mother interacts with a younger son, she repeatedly expresses the same obsessive thought. The only sorrow she feels is that David died when he was still perfect, still a boy, never to be ruined by growing up and growing away from his mother. The younger boy, ignored, the stern distant father obviously wasn't there, Seized upon this idea by remaining a boy forever, by not growing up.
Speaker 1:He will at least have some chance of pleasing his mother, winning her love. Although there is no evidence of disease or malnutrition in his well-to-do family, he ceases growing. As an adult, he's just barely five feet in height, and his marriage is unconsumated. And then the chapter informs us that the boy becoming the boy became the author of the much beloved children's classic Peter Pan. JM Barrie's writings are filled with children who don't grow up, who were fortunate enough to die in childhood, who came back as ghosts to visit their mothers.
Speaker 1:Wow. So that's the story of the writer of Peter Pan and why obsessed with being a boy child forever. So yeah, that is it for today. Hopefully you can take that on, but basically to be serious, we need to look after ourselves physically and psychologically obviously, and there's a lot of things we can help with. Stoicism helps a lot.
Speaker 1:Quotes like, it's not events that disturb us, it's a word opinion about events. That's a a certain even very important one. We're taking things one day at a time. This is an old ancient philosophy, and it's important that we take it on not to overload ourselves. Then each step we take on, we can bear the day, enjoy the day, seize the day as they say, and just kind of make the progress we need to do.
Speaker 1:And the last thing to say, guys, you've been probably trying to lose weight for decades, a lot of you, and you're still trying to lose weight now. This kind of like rapid diet or jumping from diet to diet just doesn't work. Just follow those fundamentals one day at a time and you get there. And have a good day.
