[BobaFloutist]

I think that the claim is that what you're experiencing absolutely does happen, and your body responds by cutting corners on your baseline when you're sleeping or sitting around on the couch to avoid you starving to death (because it doesn't know that you can trivially increase your food intake if needs must).

[Izkata]

Yes, it's in what they're responding to:

> The authors hypothesized that it could be that the body reduces caloric spend on other things, like stress responses