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How long?
Food and water consumption is essential to human life. Your body needs
energy from food sources and hydration from water to function properly.
The many systems in your body work optimally with a varied diet and
adequate water intake daily.
But our bodies are also able to survive for days without water. We can go
days or sometimes weeks without food because of adjustments to our
metabolism and energy consumption. SUBSCRIBE
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There is no hard and fast “rule of thumb” for how long you can live
without food. There’s a lack of scientific research on starvation because
it’s now considered unethical to study starvation in human subjects.
There are some studies that explore old research on starvation, as well as
examine more recent occurrences of starvation in the real world. These
instances include hunger strikes, religious fasts, and other situations.
An article in Archiv Fur Kriminologie states the body can survive for
8 to 21 days without food and water and up to two months if there’s
access to an adequate water intake.
Your body actually adjusts itself if you engage in a short-term fast or are
unable to access food and water for very long stretches of time. This
allows people to engage in religious fasts and even try “fasting” diets like
the eat-stop-eat approach without doing irreparable damage to their
bodies.
It takes about eight hours without eating for your body to change how it
operates. Before that, it functions as if you were eating regularly.
Under normal circumstances, your body breaks down food into glucose.
The glucose provides energy to the body.
Once the body hasn’t had access to food for 8 to 12 hours, your glucose
storage is depleted. Your body will begin to convert glycogen from your
liver and muscles into glucose.
After your glucose and glycogen are depleted, your body will begin to
use amino acids to provide energy. This process will affect your muscles
and can carry your body along for about three days of starvation before
metabolism makes a major shift to preserve lean body tissue.
To prevent excessive muscle loss, the body begins to rely on fat stores to
create ketones for energy, a process known as ketosis. You will
experience significant weight loss during this time. One of the reasons
women are able to sustain starvation longer than men is that their bodies
have a higher fat composition. Females are also able to hold on to protein
and lean muscle tissue better than males during starvation.
The more fat stores available, the longer a person can typically survive
during starvation. Once the fat stores have been completely metabolized,
the body then reverts back to muscle breakdown for energy, since it’s the
only remaining fuel source in the body.
You’ll begin to experience severe adverse symptoms during the stage of
starvation where your body is using its muscle reserves for energy. A
study in the British Medical Journal states that those undergoing a
hunger strike should be monitored closely for severe side effects of
starvation after losing 10 percent of their body weight. It also says that
very serious conditions will occur when an individual loses 18 percent of
their body weight.
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One study that looked at hunger strikes suggested that a person needs
to drink at least 1.5 liters of water a day to survive starvation for a longer
period of time. The study also suggested adding a half teaspoon of salt a
day to the water to help with kidney function.
faintness
dizziness
hypotension
weakness
dehydration
thyroid malfunction
abdominal pain
low potassium
body temperature fluctuation
organ failure
heart conditions
neurological conditions
swelling of the body’s tissue
Your body can maintain itself for a week or two without access to food
and water and possibly even longer if you consume water. Those who
experience starvation will need to be monitored by a doctor to get back
to health following the time period without nourishment to avoid
refeeding syndrome.
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