Mea culpa, I have also talked about it in previous articles: speaking of the fact that diets lead us to slow down our metabolism, I have often mentioned a phenomenon in an improper way. I’m talking about the “starvation mode” or a starvation mechanism whereby the body, when it receives few nutrients, defends itself by slowing down the metabolism, because it reaches a “starvation” mode. You have often heard things like:
– if you eat very little, or skip the meal, the body goes into hunger mode, etc. etc.
Well. This is not quite the case. 
Nothing happens if you miss a meal. Don’t go into hunger mode and your metabolism doesn’t slow down. 

In reality, starvation mode is a mechanism whereby we are starving the body continuously, for example by introducing far fewer calories than we need to live for an extended period of time. Many experiments have been conducted on this mechanism in the past, both on humans and animals: the most famous of these is undoubtedly the Minnesota Starvation Experiment ., where a group of volunteers were led to halve their calorie intake by 50% and at the same time were subjected to continuous and grueling cardio training sessions. The authors, including Ancel Keys (the one who theorized the Mediterranean diet) then analyzed all the consequences of this diet with training on volunteers. When they returned to eating, they regained weight, with changes in their body composition: they tended to take more fat than muscle.

What does this tell us and why should we care? 
1) Long-term low-calorie diets lead us to slow down our metabolism and are much more dangerous than an occasional fast (fasting means skipping a meal) or a restrictive three-day diet. Paradoxically, the three-day diet leads to fewer health consequences than a 1200-calorie low-calorie diet that we may have been carrying on for months.
2) The starvation mode is a state of malnutrition : we could translate it like this instead of saying “hunger mode” and think that this stage is reached in one or two days. What we interpret as “starvation mode” is generally a simple metabolic slowdown. 3)