I see many people on here deriding low calorie diets as “starving.” As someone who was 100+lbs overweight I can attest that low-carb, diet, exercise, weight training were not sufficient to help.
For whatever reason, genetics combined with work and lifestyle, I was unsuccessful with any commonly recommended diet for reducing body mass, I tried for years.
Recently, I lost 40lbs using intermittent fasting and then continuos fasting. The experience was night and day, I have written about my experience here: http://rexstjohn.com/thoughts-fasting-part-iv-lost-40-lbs-tw....
Starving is the wrong way to frame this diet approach. I want people to change their minds about how they frame the problem of obesity. If you have 10 lbs of excess body fat, that represents 35,000 stored calories. Your body is used to doing much more work and exerting much more energy to locate food than what we do in modern society. If you wanted an Apple 100 years ago, chances are you had to walk for 30 minutes.
Furthermore, our bodies are adapted to numerous days of fasting. If you are hunting a wounded deer over rough terrain, you don’t have room to carry a refrigerator with you - you burn stored reserves. If your crop fails and you have to wait three months to eat again subsisting off of grass and worms for vitamins, your body can do that too (I don’t recommend it).
In my research I have found numerous examples, personal blog accounts and scientific studies backing them of people fasting for a week or greater and suffering no ill effects. The real issues with fasting occur only after many weeks, with low vitamin / potassium / electrolyte consumption or when you fast while having low body fat resulting in true starvation.
In the example of the man who fasted 360 days and lost 350+lbs, doctors had him eating supplements and brewers yeast (protein, low calories) and they documented very few noticeable negative side effects which were addressed by adjustments to supplementation.
Starvation is when your body consumes itself. This happens when you completely exhaust your stored fats. Fasting becomes riskier after the first 21 days, the really dangerous effects such as referring syndrome only occur in extreme situations where you had indeed been starving for a period of time before eating.
I have lost 40lbs in the last year using these approaches and recommend them to everyone I meet. Fasting is a skill anyone can learn.
I believe fasting is the best way to lose weight, don’t call it starving.