Me and my SO need help settling a discussion! The basis for the discussion is the short story Survivor Type by Stephen King, where a man smuggling heroin is stranded on an isolated island. There’s nothing to eat except for a seagull he manages to catch and kill. The man, who is also a doctor, ends up amputating his own limbs and eating them to survive. I can’t remember how the story ends.
The question is - hypothetically of course - what would make you survive the longest? Do like the man in the story and start munching on yourself, or just let your body take care of itself? Let’s assume there’s water available, so that it’s a question of starvation and not dehydration.
My standpoint was that the body will start metabolizing fat and muscle tissue anyway, so chopping an arm off and eating it wouldn’t be much more efficient. I also thought that the body might need more nutrition than normal to recover from shock or infection, so you’d effectively increase the amount of sustenance you need.
My S.O:s standpoint was that the digestive system is so efficient that eating an arm would yield more nutrition, and thus make you survive longer than if you hadn’t.
We did this question a few years ago, based on the same SK story.
Of course you’ll die sooner if you start eating yourself. Digestion is about 30% efficient at best, and the mobilization of energy and resources to deal with autoamputation trauma would burn a ton of calories.
A close analysis of Cecil’s Column entitled How many calories are in the average male ejaculation? suggests one would require more ejaculations than is feasible to survive on a diet of semen.
(80% of the column consists of Cecil defending his honour against an outrageous attack from a woman called Lynne W. from Chicago. That’s worth a look as well.)
At the end of Skeleton Crew, when King mentions the original publishing credits of the different stories, he says that he originally asked his neighbor, a doctor, if it were possible to eat oneself. (As in, literally). Said doctor told him yes, because basically your body is just stored energy, and then, he gave him the opening sentence, it’s all based on how badly you want to survive.
(Imagine being a doctor and living next door to Stephen King. Hmmmmm)
Eating the first leg made sense, though, since he had to amputate it after it became infected. Although I’m not sure how healthy eating infected flesh is.
I don’t see how it could be a draw. A person who starves slowly ends up as essentially nothing but skin and bones because your body eats itself from the inside. Eating yourself from the outside does not yield much in the way of extra nutrition (in fact, it wastes both nutrition and the energy needed to digest it), and it causes severe injuries that can double or triple your metabolic rate while you heal. Less nutrition + higher metabolism = faster death.
I would think that the…uh ‘vigorous’ activity would probably cause you to lose more water to sweat than you’d get back. Someone willing to test that out is encouraged to keep results to themselves.
Its probably worth adding that there’s not going to be a whole lot of ejaculate under normal circumstances, an average 2-3mL but up to a possible 11mL according to the NSFW Wikipedia link. The consistency also doesn’t seem as if it lends itself to drinking easily, but I’ll admit I haven’t really study media portraying the drinking of a glassful.
As for female ejaculation (this one is safe for work), there’s more volume on average and the consistency is pretty watery. Still, there’s probably not enough to make much of a difference and the effort you put into making it seems like a net water loss. Also, in both cases, dehydration would probably cut into the volume and make the remainder less drinkable.
