The New Year’s diet is going well. So far, so good. I’ve been told that “you burn more calories eating celery than the celery has.” Therefore, is it possible to “starve to death” eating a diet of nothing but celery?
With God as my witness, I thought turkey’s could fly.
Let’s say that it takes about 2400 calories per day to support your body.
That’s a rough number, but it’s not far off, and it makes the math easier.
That’s about 100 calories per hour you burn up by doing nothing other than being alive.
Celery has about 100 calories per pound.
So, if you had nothing to eat but celery, you’d have to eat 24 pounds a day just to maintain your weight.
I have no idea how you measure how much your body takes to actually metabolize it–if that’s even possible–but there are a number of other foods also that are so low in calories, that I don’t think you could stomach (literally and figuratively) eating enough in one day even for just daily maintenace.
I was all ready to say “Yes, you can starve to death eating only celery,” because I thought celery was largely cellulose and humans can’t digest cellulose. I thought we ate celery largely for its roughage value.
But looking around, I found this site: Sam Celery
Apparently celery does have some nutritional value.
Do you really burn more calories eating it than are in it? I think that would depend largely on how vigorously you chew.
Cecil had a column about living “by bread alone” that discussed some of the bad things about a single food diet. The bottom line is you’ll wish you’re dead before you actually die. The hard part isn’t avoiding starvation but avoiding diseases from the lack of essential nutrients.
With celery I guess you’d be pretty well off in the vitamin department although I’m sure there would be shortages of some. Probably the biggest problem would be the lack of protein (amino acids) and your body does need some fat in order to stay healthy.
“To do her justice, I can’t see that she could have found anything nastier to say if she’d thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.”
Dorothy L. Sayers Busman’s Honeymoon