Ep 82- The Shocking Study That Proves Why Diets Don’t Work (Minnesota Starvation Experiment)

September 04, 2025

You’ve heard not to restrict… but what exactly happens if you do?

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment is the most well known study that shows the biological & psychological impacts of calorie restriction and why diets don’t work.

You’ll learn:

• What is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and why is it so important?

• The science of why restriction leads to binge eating & food obsession

• The surprising physical, mental, and emotional effects of eating too little (from hair loss to depression)

• How long it really takes to feel normal around food again

• 4 takeaways from the study you can use to stop binge eating

Transcript:

Hello, confident Eaters. Today we're talking about the concept of restriction. Who has ever been told that in order to stop binge eating, we just need to stop restricting? I know I sure was, but do you know why it is actually important to not be under eating if you want to stop overeating, it doesn't always make sense.

Like if I'm overeating, I just need to eat less. But there is a study called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment that everyone needs to hear, so we are going to be talking about this study today. Again, I highly recommend even if you don't really like listening to the sciencey stuff, sometimes,  even if you're just like learning more about the mindset stuff of binge eating.

If you do not have this foundational understanding, you will not be able to get to where you want to go as a confident eater. So if you are someone who has ever in your entire life gone on a diet or has cut back your calories, or has intentionally tried to undereat and eat less than your body needs. This study will help you understand why that has led you to feeling out of control around food, to feeling obsessed around food, to feeling like you are just this crazy person who cannot stop eating. This is one of the most well cited studies to date on the psychological impacts of restriction.

Now, what's interesting is this study, the Minnesota starvation experiment, it wasn't even done to study dieting. It was a study that was run in the 1940s during World War II to understand what happens to the human body and mind during prolonged restriction. So through their results, they have used it in a lot of studies to show why diets don't work and why 97% of people who lose weight on a diet will gain it all back and more. This study explains why.

This is a little side note too, but just with all of the talk around ozempic and GLP ones recently too, I wanna mention that the studies are also starting to show that they have a very similar success rate, or should I say failure rate as diets. Where 95% of people when they come off of GLP ones will gain all the weight back or more. Okay, so that was just a little bit of an aside, but there's this biological reason around why this is going on. And hint, hint, it has nothing to do with willpower or you need to try harder, or there's being something broken in your brain. This is a biological thing that happens to everyone when they restrict.  Okay, so let me dive right into it. How the Minnesota starvation experiment worked is they took 36 healthy men. Healthy men being, there was nothing wrong with them. They were in tip top shape and mental health. They were extensively screened to make sure that there was nothing else going on. Okay, so completely normal healthy men. They had a normal relationship with food. They were just your average Joe.

Then they took these healthy men and for almost six months, they were given 1600 calories a day. To some of us, that might not sound like that low. It might sound like 1600 calories a day is what my fitness pal told me to eat this week, every day. So keep that in mind too, that in your brain, if this sounds like that's not that little, let's see what plays out. And yes, they were men. Maybe you are a woman, but still, it's not like they were putting them on 500 calories a day. They're eating 1600 calories a day for six months.

And here are the results that happened throughout that time. I want you to see how many of these you can relate to if you have ever felt any of these things when you were dieting or cutting calories.

So first, let's go with the physical effects. First, they felt extreme fatigue. They was tired all the time, they had a hard time focusing. What's interesting is their heart size actually shrink. Their pulse slowed. They felt weakness. And cold, even in warm weather, a loss of strength, swelling in ankles, knees, face. So if you lose weight but you're not eating enough, you'll actually look more bloated and more puffy because your body's retaining more water. They had hair loss. Their skin was pale and roughened, and their eyes were modu more dull. Doesn't sound like a very attractive thing. Right? And they did lose weight, of course. But look at all these other symptoms that came with it. Now let's get onto the psychological effects, which are the most interesting ones.

So over these six months, they developed an extreme food obsession. They talked about food constantly. Many of them started collecting cookbooks and recipes, and these men had never cared about cooking or been obsessed with it in their life. They had no prior interest in cooking. Now, they were hoarding recipes. They would read menus for pleasure, for fun. They started stealing and sneaking food from shops because they were only  allotted a certain amount of calories through this experiment. So they were sneaking it outside of it. They were cutting food into tiny pieces, trying to eat it as slowly as possible, licking their plates, even diluting their potatoes with water to try to elongate this experience and get the most out of the food.

They were holding the food in their mouth for a long time. Chewing gum excessively. Some of their mood changes. They were irritable, depressed, and developed anxiety again, none of these symptoms existed before. These were not depressed or anxious men before until they did this experiment. They lost their sense of humor withdrawing from their social lives, preferred to be alone, loss of libido and romantic interest, and a loss of interest in anything except eating. How many of you can relate to this where it seems like your whole food is just consum your whole life is just consumed with thoughts about food and nothing else seems like it matters.

A couple of men even dropped out because they had such severe emotional breakdowns from the intensity of the starvation. They just couldn't do it anymore, even though they really wanted to help with the study. Okay. And you might think, great, I am no longer eating a thousand calories a day, so those things aren't happening to me anymore. Or maybe you're like, oh no, I am eating a thousand calories a day, or whatever is your too low amount, and I am getting these symptoms that I'm not feeling good.

But what's interesting is not just what happened while they were in this starvation experiment, but what happened after? So when they went into the refeeding phase where they were getting more calories, again, initially they were given anywhere between 2030 200 calories a day,  depending on the man that they were working with.

And even that was not enough for full recovery. Many men still felt starved in lethargic, so then they decided to give them unlimited access to food as the study was coming to a close. Many of the men ate 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day. Some of them ate until they were physically sick, reporting stomach pain, but continuing to eat.  One man even reported eating a meal out where he had several milkshakes, several sundaes, and a huge steak dinner, and then immediately went out for another dinner on top of all of that, they described this feeling of insatiable hunger even when full. How many of you have said  that even though I feel full, I just feel like I'm still hungry?

And what's interesting is that even as their physical health improved, as they started to gain back weight, till their normal weight that they were before their mental state continued to decline, where they continued these odd food behaviors, this odd food obsession. And even after the study in the months and the years after the study, many of them continued binging to the point of sickness.

In one case, after the study was done, a participant consumed so much food in a single sitting that he had to be hospitalized and have his stomach pumped. So for many of them, it took months, two years of refeeding to feel normal with food again. And I just sit here thinking like these poor men, you know, like they went into this experiment wanting to just help with this study to understand what the men had gone through in  World II a bit more.

And they came out of it with this  horrible physical effects and mental effects. And yet millions and millions of men and women are doing this to themself every single day. They are putting themself through this starvation experiment for no reason, and it is causing all of these horrible side effects and long-term psychological effects too.

Dieting and restriction, even if it's not to the extreme of the experiment, can trigger these same cycles. So in this case, the men's calories I believe, was cut by about half. Like their normal baseline calories was about 3,200, and then they're eating 1600. But for most women, we actually need over 2000 calories a day.

So let's just make a guess that in order to maintain your body weight right now, you need 2,500 calories a day. If you are eating 1250 calories, which is half of that. Essentially, you are putting yourself in the same starvation mode. It is way too little of a calorie amount for your body.

From the research that I've done on a safe calorie deficit, it is around one to 200 calories less a day than your normal baseline. And that is not what a lot of us are taught. A lot of us are taught it needs to be 500 calories less or a thousand calories less a day in order to get to where we wanna go, but really that just makes us crazy around food and gives us these extreme binge eating behaviors.

Now you don't even need to count calories to say, okay, how am I gonna get to a hundred calorie a day less deficit? What's interesting is if you learn how to tune into your hunger and fullness, your body will put you into that deficit naturally because it wants you to be at your ideal, healthy, happy body weight. It does not want you to be overweight, and this is how I lost 30 pounds. It wasn't because I was tracking my calories and saying, okay, I need to eat exactly 500 calories less a day. Maybe some days I did, but a lot of days it was probably a hundred or 200 calories less a day. But I did it by listening to my Hunger in fullness, and this is what I teach you inside of my Confident Eater program, how to use your built-in calorie counter to find  your natural body weight, to feel normal around food, to not  trigger this restrictive cycle that naturally happens in our biology.

Because even if you're saying, okay, I'm just trying to get healthy, I'm trying to lose  some weight, your brain is still interpreting that restriction as starvation, so your survival instincts are going to kick in driving this obsessive thoughts and behavior around food. So this really explains why just eat less advice, never works long term, or just cut out calories, doesn't work.

A few takeaways from this study. The biggest one that I want you to leave with from learning this is that you are normal. Let me say this again. You are normal. You are not a broken human being because you are struggling with these food behaviors. In fact, you are even more normal because this is what a healthy brain and body does in the face of restriction.

Even in this study where they took perfectly healthy men who are carefully screened with no prior food issues ever in their life, they developed binge behaviors when they were restricted, and we wonder why more women than men struggle with binge eating. Men do struggle too, but I truly believe it is because women are pressured into doing so many of these restrictive diets at such a young age when our bodies need more fuel than ever to continue growing into a grown woman's body. And when we're put into this restrictive diet, then of course we're going to spend a lifetime obsessing over food because our brain and body are so scared of us not being able to get enough food at.

The second takeaway here is food obsession is learned. It is not permanent. Just like how the men fixated on the recipes and the food rituals. Restriction is fueling obsession, but when you start to nourish your body consistently, the obsession will quiet down. If it has been a learned behavior, it can be unlearned as long as you're supporting your body by fueling it throughout this time too.

Third takeaway. If you have been restricting for a long time, permission to eating is the path out. You need to allow yourself enough food regularly, and without guilt in order to rewire this survival alarm. Now if you are not sure, well, do I need to allow more permission for food or do I need to say no to food more often? This can be kind of a gray area and when you work with me one-on-one, I have you do a very simple food diary for a couple weeks, so I can let you know that.

I do regularly tell my clients to increase their meal size. I would say that is like one of my biggest recommendations is make your meals bigger. Another common recommendation I give to people is to start eating breakfast if they are not already, because that is showing your body that food is coming again soon, that we are no longer dieting. Because  know that sometimes when we are binge eating,  what our day looks like is little teeny baby meals throughout the day, and then a giant binge at night. And I think, well, if I binge every night, I don't wanna keep eating more during the day, but eating more during the day is the way out to stop binge eating at night.

And then once you're eating enough, that's where we can start to look at how do we sit with some of these cravings? Because what will happen is people come to me and they're like, okay, Amber, I am eating three regular meals a day. I am having a snack. I am eating plenty at those meals. Like I'm feeling really full and satisfied after each and every meal, and yet I'm still binge eating. Why is that? Well, that is because habit comes into play here.

Where when we are binge eating many times over many years our brain starts to learn that this might be something that we need for survival because we're clearly doing it so often, so we must wanna keep this habit. So once it becomes a habit, then the solution is not usually to keep eating more food. The solution is to work on your urges.  But this concept around not restricting is the number one first step that you have to start out before you can move into the work around urges and your hunger and fullness and confidence in your body and weight loss. That does not come until you are properly fueling your body. Otherwise, nothing else works in this process.

And finally, healing takes time. Many of these participants needed months or years of eating before feeling normal again. And that's not to say it's going to take you that long, but I do want you to be patient with yourself as your body is refueling and as you're relearning how you want to be around food and having support around this can be helpful too, and definitely speeds up the process, but remind yourself that you're not behind here, you're healing, and that everything that has come so far from restricting and dieting is normal. It is your body's normal response to restriction. And the more that it happens, the more that it becomes a habit so that even if you stop restricting, it's still there.

So I hope this study gave you some clarity today and really some motivation on why we need to leave dieting behind. And dieting again is not just like doing some crazy cabbage soup diet. Dieting can be when you cut your calories back by 500 calories a day. That can sometimes be too much for our body.

Okay have a  great week. Fuel your bodies. Talk to you next week.