Ishie
Guest
Gidds:
If you're dealing with Survivor style semi-starvation, you're almost certainly going to get some weight back because a lot of what you lost will be water weight.
Once an individual has become accustomed to this 'starvation' style, they can likely maintain much of the weight loss by simply maintaining healthy eating habits rather than jumping into food head first because they've been semi-starved. The metabolism will likely have suffered a blow, but there are ways of keeping it up while not pigging out.
First, eating low calorie meals multiple times a day, as others have mentioned, helps keep a steady metabolism.
Second, emphasizing weight training as well as cardio in the after time. Exercise is crucial. Though the muscle tone would likely take a hit too during the semi-starvation period (depending on what the person is doing), building muscle forces the system to burn more calories since muscle is very inefficient compared to fat and far more of an energy investment. If you aren't using much muscle during or after the semi-starvation period, the body will readily decrease muscle mass because even when sleeping, a more muscular person burns more calories. After semi-starvation, exercise will likely seem more difficult, since the body is insufficiently fueled, and you are more prone to things like cramps and fatigue, but when exercising, the body really has no choice but to burn calories. Even with a low metabolism, it's gotta go.
Clearly, the starvation diets aren't the way to go, but the poster seems just curious and there are many situations where this occurs without a deliberate effort. I just read something recently from a guy describing his starvation-mode weight loss because he was a med student on Grenada during Ivan, and afterwards was part of an intensive relief and clean up effort that involved little food (lot of resources destroyed) and hard physical labor. So if you're going to have to suffer through whatever is causing the starvation in the first place, though you're naturally going to have an initial gain of SOME of it back, changing certain lifestyles will aid in keeping it off, so why not try for it?
Starvation diets don't tend to work not just because of the above factors (drop in metabolism, loss of water weight, etc), but because of the flawed premise of a "diet" in general, which is that when you're on some type of deprivation diet, extreme or otherwise, the second you return to normal eating, you end up right back where you started, and the tail end of semi-starvation, deliberate or otherwise, can cause people to really pig out from hunger and deprivation when their metabolism is at its lowest.
I've been quite successful since I stopped dieting and changed the way I eat as a lifetime plan. I slip back from time to time (vacations being a prime source), but by not depriving myself of anything for the "length of the diet", but watching my net calorie intake, increasing exercise and consumption of a higher daily percentage of fruits and veggies I like anyway, I've dropped over 30 lbs.
