A starvation diet in my mind is any diet where you are starving yourself. I know that when we are dieting usually we will restrict our calories so that we are burning more calories than we eat but on a starvation diet we are actually restricting calories to such a point that we affect our metabolism and force our bodies to jump into a phase below dieting where we are not able to lose anymore.
To understand a starvation diet we need to look at what we are doing to our body when if we decide not to eat at all for a few days. First of all our bodies will think that we are just between meals and our body will start to use up blood sugar and then start burning up carbs until they are gone.
Once we have run out of carbs our body should use fat and muscle tissue for energy but instead will start to lower our metabolism in a fight to protect our bodies…this is the starvation phase. Eventually if we did not eat our bodies would start to burn off our fat and muscle and our metabolism would slow to a point where we would become very lethargic and our organs would start to slow down and eventually shut down and we would die.
There are not many people that would go this far bad as we see in people with bulimia this definitely does happen sometimes.
Instead of using a starvation diet to lose what most diets tend to do is to confuse the mind and body so that our metabolism well stay up and will continue to burn fat while at the same time hopefully not burning the muscle that we have nearly as quickly. If we look at bodybuilders in their dieting phase before a competition they must lose all of their fat so they have to diet fairly hard and expect to lose some of their muscle – actually quite a bit of muscle.