Starvation Mode- Myth or Reality?

The first week of the competition went great for me. I was psyched that I actually saw progress, and it was really great progress for me. I decided to take it up a notch further- I worked out even harder and longer. I was very very careful to keep my calories to around 1150-1400 a day, but mostly around 1150-1200. According to MyFitnessPal, I should be having around 1200 calories a day to lose weight. If I exercise, it gave me more, but I noticed that if I exercise, it gave me more to burn. If I didn't use it, it predicted faster weight loss. Awesome.

I was devastated to watch my weight creep back up each day. I worked even harder. It continued to climb. I didn't cheat at all. It still climbed.

Friday night, I grumbled about it to my husband, who went on about starvation mode, and he thought that was my problem. He told me he thought I should be using every single calorie budgeted to me, even the extra exercise calories. Then bragged about he gets twice as many calories as me. Meany.

Yesterday, I didn't go totally crazy, but I'm sure I went over on my calories by several hundred. It was awesome. I did feel a little uncomfortably full at the end of the day.

This morning, I was down .8 from yesterday.

This whole "starvation mode" in a way makes sense, but it also doesn't. It seems like it should be a simple math equation- if I burn 1500 calories a day just by existing, and if I only eat 1100 calories, I should lose weight, right? I can also see the body learning to conserve calories as a survival technique, but even so, it should draw from the abundant fat stores, right?

Apparently not.

So, this week, I'm going to make sure that I don't go below 1200 calories on a non-exercise day, and eat half of the exercise calories earned. We'll see how this goes.