Fig. 1: Changes in body weight (W), body fat (FAT) and fat-free mass (FFM) in response to semistarvation (SS) and subsequent refeeding (RF); time 0, 1 and 2 represent ‘prior to semistarvation’, at the ‘end of the semistarvation’ period, and at the end of the refeeding period when body weight has been completely recovered, respectively.

The dynamics of body composition recovery are depicted with FAT and FFM recoveries being desynchronized and resulting in fat overshooting (upper panel) or synchronized so as to reach 100% recoveries at the same time without fat overshooting (lower panel). All values are expressed as a difference from the corresponding values during the control (time 0) period. More precisely, the values are defined as \(FAT_{{\mathrm{time}}} - FAT_0\) for FAT (red circle, dotted line), \(FFM_{{\mathrm{time}}} - FFM_0\) for FFM (blue triangle, dashed line) and \(W_{{\mathrm{time}}} - W_0\) for W (black square, solid line).