ok, so i keep hearing how people who have plateaud can lose weight by increasing their caloric intake from 1200 and higher...i know that you are supposed to keep your body guessing and that is why change in diet and excersize is a way to avoid plateauing but how does it work? why does your body respond the opposite way it should when you add more food in these cases??? i am puzzled, and i know that i at some point will reach a plateau... so could someone help me answer this?

My take on it is this: the body can go into starvation mode if your calories are too low. Sometimes if you raise them (either briefly to mainenance, or just a little up for longer), you remind your body that you're not starving, that it doesn't need to conserve, and encouraging it to shed excess.

The information I've read about this is more complicated scientifically, but that seems to be the basic gist.

The other thing is that sometimes any change will kick you out of a plateau - if dropping from 1200 down to 1000 will do the same trick as raising from 1200 to 1400/1500, I don't know why anyone would want to drop. Dropping has a far greater chance of shoving you into starvation mode, and anyway, if you go down to 1000 and then plateau again, dropping again seems crazy. And then there's the added issue of getting all the nutrients you need - hard to do on less than 1200~