I just can't get into eating the morning

I also never eat breakfast, I have my coffee, in the AM, and then I exercise. And do not eat till about 12:30 or 1:00. Everybody is different and you have to find what works for you. And that means thinking outside "The Box".

Anorexics lose weight because they burn off muscle instead of fat. It's possible to be thin and still be obese because of your body fat percentage.

Folks, Starvation Mode is not a myth, there is plenty of documentation that by pushing yourself hard on an empty stomach you begin to catabolize your muscles instead of your fat stores. I've had conversations with some VERY smart people about this.

That's not to say that skipping breakfast causes this inherently..the biggest cause of being catabolic is getting to low blood sugar without anything in your body's gas tank for it to feed off of. Your body basically knows when there is no food in the system to digest and if you throw a really hard workout at it in that circumstance your blood sugar stores are threatened. Blood sugar are the only stores that your brain cells can live off of, and your brain knows that, so it reaches for the fastest source of sugars in your body: Muscle.

If you have just a little something caloric in your system before working out, it tells your body you are getting close to being empty and to start metabolizing fat cells. In other words your body has time to prep for being out of gas. No gas..no time to prep for it..panic for your brain cells... catabolize muscle for sugar. That's starvation mode.

Again, am I saying not eating breakfast causes this? No. Not eating breakfast and doing an intense workout on an empty stomach can cause this. Drastic undereating for an extended period causes this. I've seen it a lot; people think a little calorie deficit is good, so a huge one must be great. Their weight loss stalls, and then they start eating enough, and the weight starts to drop off.

Muscle protein catabolism for gluconeogenesis isn't the preferred pathway. This is what glycogen is for, after all. As glycogen is depleted - which depends in part on the size of your calorie deficit, activity level, and dietary carbohydrate - then muscle protein catabolism is a concern. It will generally take at least a couple of days to get to that point, however.

In any event, the catabolism of muscle protein to maintain blood glucose doesn't stop lipolysis, and extreme calorie deficits don't stop it either. Moreover, if you're catabolising muscle for energy, that wouldn't stop weight loss by itself - a pound of muscle yields only about 600 calories of energy. If anything, muscle catabolism would result in faster weight loss.

Having said all that, changes in the scale can indeed slow down significantly at extreme deficits - but not because we're simply catabolising muscle instead of fat. It's more about the retention of labile mass. Often just water.

But this is a semantic issue anyway. You're defining "starvation mode" to mean a state of net negative muscle protein catabolism, which is certainly not a myth. I think "starvation mode" is commonly thought of as something like "your metabolism slows down so much that you are not in a negative energy balance, even on a very low calorie diet." That definition, however, is basically a myth.

If you don't feel like eating, then don't as long as your stomach won't get hungry.

Excellent response, and I agree with your points. For me, in my own experience, I see muscle catabolism, or at least a high risk for it, in people who do intense workouts first thing in the morning without putting any food in their system. Since they're coming off of an 8 hour fast (if they get the recommended amount of sleep) at the least, then their body has nothing with which to replenish blood sugars as they start to get depleted in an intense workout (the workouts I do, P90X, Insanity, Asylum, Body Beast, etc. are all intense and become anaerobic quickly). So for that reason alone I always suggest people eat at least a little something to prime their body to burn fat stores instead of just kicking themselves into a low blood sugar state and risking catabolism of muscle tissue.

And yes, I do consider putting yourself in a state where you are burning muscle instead of the preferred fat stores, for energy, to be "starvation mode."