starvation levels? serious question.

[LENDADDY]

OK, I have been thinking about this (scary, I know) and I have a couple of questions for the more educated or studied, whatever. I have seen the posting of 12x body weight to establish your daily caloric needs to sustain a status quo. I have read many times that going 1000 calories below this a day will throw you into metabolic slowdown. However, most of you guys are serious body builders with a scary amount of lean body tissue. Now doesn't lean body mass require a much greater amount of energy to sustain itself than adipose tissue? Isn't there a better formula that takes into consideration lean versus fat body mass? Maybe I'm off base here but it's gotta be different for a guy thats 6' 250lbs with 8% BF and a guy thats 6' 250lbs 29% BF right? For instance I am 6'2" 250 right now, in the last 45 days I have dropped 25 lbs buy eating about 1700 calories a day and some cardio. Now I feel fine, plenty of energy etc. I'm not able to estimate my BF% but I'm relatively average build maybe a liitle big. I don't lift but last time I did I was benching 255 (Iknow, Iknow flame away) I'm just trying to give you a rough idea of my build. My question is why am I not experiencing this slowdown, or am I and I just can't tell? Thanks in advance.

 

[elijah]

Two considerations

The 12 cal / lb is usually associated with the TKD,Ckd type diet. At least on this board most people use it. Under that circumstance two things come into play.

Those diets are usually not used by people looking to loose 50 or 60 pounds, more likely its a fairly cut guy/gal looking to drop 10 or so at which point it doesn't make to large of a difference. Also in association with that, said dieter is well enough informed, or will assume that its best to use that estimate based on lbm.

Or at least thats how I'm doing it and going great to loose about 15lb or so. Even using my full mass 200 compared to lbm of about 160/165 the calorie estimate is still shedding fat very well. (Wanted to use the full body weight to see if it would still work cause my metabolism is crazy fast anyhow, and didn't wanna loose any muscle not much there to begin with hehe)

But had I been like 80 lb over then I would have to use the 12 cal / lb of lbm. Which would never change as long as I dieted smart and didn't loose muscle.