Is there any particular order to what happens to the body when you stop eating?
Do you stop having hunger pangs at any point?
Assuming you are in good physical shape to begin with, does your body fat go first? or do the organs?
What happens to you mentally? Hallucinations? Delusions?
At what point is it too late to save yourself by eating again?
Just curious since I see people who go on hunger strikes as a means of protest and they seem to last a few weeks to a couple of months.
Now don’t be getting any silly ideas.
Many people inthe world are starving. These people do not eat enough calories or, less often, eat enough calories but do not eat enough protein and therefore slowly resorb their own body’s supply. These lead to two diseases on the same spectrum called “kwashiokor” and “marasmus” which makes them look either bloated or skinny, doubtless familiar to you from religious charity commercials.
Not eating altogether? This can be approximated by advanced anorexia, I suppose. I’d wager the precise order of events depend on the body. But one does not stop feeling hungry, to my knowledge, at any point. In fact, one becomes obsessed with thoughts of food. Body fat goes before the organs, but this produces a ketosis even more severe than that of Atkinophiles. The blood becomes acidotic and since the brain depends mainly on glucose as an energy source, the mind becomes somewhat dulled. It starts to obsess about food and obtaining food which may or may not lead to actual hallucinations. Remember, you can get “fat from sweets, but you cannot get sweet from fat”.
The body would begin to break down muscle to obtain protein, and this would lead to wasting and myoglobinemia, making the blood more acidotic. As the body starts to get protein by digesting the very enzymes it uses to digest food, nutrition is very difficult to reverse, and nearly impossible if you define nutrition as “feeding people through the mouth in the conventional sense”.
The “New York Times” from November 21 has a great article on this. Investigating a Different Kind of Suicide Mission.
“your body can last longer without food or water than it can without sleep”
with that said, as long as you drink water and nap from time to time you can actually last quite a while, going through periods of hunger pangs and nausia and when you do start to eat again it will not sound like a good idea and you will probably be sick.
muscles provide the largest energy source, therefore your body would break them down first. your heart is a muscle, so is your brain, and many of your organs are similar in nature. the fat isn’t a beneficial to the energy level, but it will get broken down too.
never have i heard of hallucinations from lack of food, but definitely from lack of sleep.
i’ve learned most of this studying anorexia and methamphetamine addictions, this is all i can remember at present. i hope someone else can help to answer all of your questions.
2)Most accounts say that the pangs never stop, but that after the third day they are much reduced.
3)Irrespective of physical condition and barring a few oddball diseases the organs are always the last thing to go. They’re kind of vital for life. Your fat reserves exist solely for the purpose of seeing you through lean times. They’re invariably the first thing to go, followed by muscle tissue. If the organs were digested before fat then dieting would be useless as you would lose organ tissue before any fat loss occured.
4)This is highly variable, probably because very few people undergo starvation exactly the same way. Most people have access to some food, but nowhere near enough. Added to this very few people die of starvation. A lack of nutrients makes the body very susceptible to disease. Without antibiotics you would be almost garaunteed to succumb to infection before you died of nutrient deficiency, and disease leads to fever and fever leads to hallucinations. Hallucinations are reported in some cases but are by no means universal.
5)No one knows because as noted above disease is the primary killer. If someone has massive skin ulcers from malnutrition and you feed them, they may well die from the infection all the same, in fact in many cases increased nutrition makes the infection worse. This doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been saved from the effects of starvation. To find the answer you would need to starve a number of people and place them on massive amounts of antibiotics in an isolation chamber, then start feeding them again at different intervals. I’m sure the Nazis would have done it if they’d had antiobiotics but hopefully we’ll never know the answer.
I’ll see if I can find the cite, but years ago researchers found evidence that three days with no food causes irreparable brain damage in at least some people. Not significant but noticeable and it gets worse the longer you go without eating. This is apparantly a side effect of the brain’s fussy dietary needs and inability to use many ‘recycled’ energy sources in some areas.
People on hunger strike are never on no food AFAIK. All the cases I know of have been given IV drips once their condition becomes to weakened, and many will accept glucose tablets etc. in the interests of prolonging the process for a better result. I seriously doubt that a human could last months without food.
Muscles don’t necessarily provide the largest energy source, that’s very dependant on the person. Fat has a far higher calorific value in people, and bearing in mind that it’s not unheard of for women to be carrying 40% body fat by volume muscle would be nowhere near the largest energy source.
Muscles are pretty far down the list of emergency energy sources. If muscles were digested first then the first effect of dieting would be loss of muscle. Muscle in an animal is essential in obtaining food. Any species that sacrificed all its muscle and so was unable to carry the 20 kg of fat it had would be an evolutionary dead end very fast. As Doc Paprika said the body will sacrifice muscle to obtain essential protein, but its utilisation as an energy source is pretty close to a last resort.
Your heart is certainly a muscle. Your brain contains no muscle whatsoever. Its makeup is primarily nerve tissue which is itself largely fat. While the gut and uterus are fairly muscular organs they wouldn’t be described as similar in nature to either the heart or brian, while the other organs that spring to mind contain either no or very, very little muscle.
Fat is the single most concentrated energy source in the human body (unless refined ATP or similar outdoes it). In humans it exists almost exclusively as an energy reserve, to maintain energy levels in times of crisis. It gets broken down exclusively to maintain energy levels.
No offence intended jkbelle, but if you suffer from anorexia or an addiction for Gods sake get some better information. What you’re working with will kill you.