What’s the way to survive on limited food: gorge or ration?

Factual Questions
1

Suppose someone is lost in the wild and nearing starvation. They come across a moderate amount of food. Most sources I’ve read advise rationing the food over as long a period as possible but what is the basis for this advise? What is the downside of eating the lot in one go? The excess would be stored as fat, there’s no chance of losing the food through spoilage and there’s a greater chance that you’ll have enough energy to find the next source of food.

With rationing, you might linger on for awhile but maybe not have the energy to hunt for food or walk to safety. The only advantage I can think of is that perhaps there is a physiological response to undereating that greatly increases efficiency of energy use in which case maybe you could survive substantially longer.

Is it known what early humans did in these situations? I’ve heard the theory that obesity is partially due to an evolutionary trait of overeating when food is in abundance, which would suggest that our ancestors survived by gorging not rationing.

2

Some of it would be, surely, but some of it would also just pass right through you. And eating it will prevent spoilage, but most human food nowadays doesn’t spoil all that readily. So you should gorge to whatever degree is necessary to finish off the perishable food before it spoils, but ration out any nonperishable food.

3

Isn’t it dangerous to gorge or even eat a normal amount of food if you’ve been starving?

4

No doubt this had a lot to do with the difficulty of preserving food. Nowadays we tend to regard long-term food storage as easy, cheap and reliable, but that’s a rather recent thing.

If the goal is to survive the longest possible time on a certain total amount of food and if the food will not spoil, rationing is clearly the way to go. This could profitably be modified by eating enough to ensure you’re strong enough to take advantage of the next likely food opportunity.

5

I have heard on Survivorman I think that people have been found dead in deserts with a canteen half filled with water. Implying that you should drink a lot of water if you have it. I am not sure if the same goes for food though.

6

Having spent quite some time hungry in the bush, I’d opt for strict rationing. Mostly for psychological reasons. Knowing you have something to wait helps a a lot. Knowing you have nothing is a downer. The brain needs a steady supply of energy to function well. Gorging one’s rations in one go might give a nice ‘high’ that wouldn’t last long. After the sugar wore off, you might feel worse than before, both mentally and physically.

7

Rationing without a doubt.

  1. As already mentioned, if you eat a lot of food in one go it gets passed through the gut much faster and is digested much less thoroughly. If there are vegetables in the food that can represent a whole lot of lost calories.

  2. The excess food isn’t stored as fat unless it already exists as fat. That’s because converting protein or carbohydrate to fat requires considerable energy, and that represents a pointless and significant energy loss. Linked to that

  3. Converting stored body fat to usable energy represents a second major energy loss. IOW you lose when you convert food to fat, and you lose when you try to convert fat back to food. IIRC the total loss is something in the order of 20% of available calories for carbohydrates and somewhat higher for protein. That’s why your body runs fat sparing reactions. Which brings us to point 4

  4. The body runs fat sparing reactions. What that means is that when you gorge your body tries to burn any alcohol first, then it burns protein, then it burns any carbohydrates, then as a last resort it will burn any fat. It wants to save the fat to lay down as a fat reserve precisely because it take so much energy to convert other foods to fat. The trouble is that this will leave you with absolutely no available protein or carbohydrate 24 hours after you’ve gorged. Unfortunately your body needs protein to repair damage, and the brain can not run on fat at all. So to keep the itself operational the body begins digesting your muscle tissue within 3 days of your last meal. In a survival situation your don’t really want to be losing muscle tissue needlessly anyway, but this also leads to problems of ketosis and dehydration. And all needlessly because the maintainance amounts of protein and carbohydrate are tiny, and easily satisfied through rationing.

  5. Your body has a starvation mode that it can switch to very rapidly, but only if it’s actually starving. Under this mode your metabolic rate drops, you stop wasting energy fidgeting, you sleep for longer periods and you generally move into a low gear, slow burn state. In your scenario you will already be in this state when you find the food, and if you put yourself on rations you will stay there. But if you gorge your body will shift out of that mode and won’t go back in for at least 2 days and probably a week. During that week you will be burning between 10 and 40% more calories.

There are several other reasons for not gorging, but those are the main reasons I can think of, and certainly more than sufficient to demonstrate it’s a bad idea. My SWAG would be that if you found the equivalent of 4 days food, which is probably all that you could physically gorge, then you would waste half of it by gorging and then fasting for the next two weeks, compared to if you divided it into on ¼ rations.

If you are a competent hunter/forager then you will have already found food before you come near to starvation. If you are near starvation when you find the cache then you have been wandering the wilderness for at least 2weeks without finding any food, or else been wandering the woods for month and finding less than half the calories needed to survive. It’s time to admit that you are not Dan’l Boone and that you will not find sufficient food out here. Being realistic in these situations is very important. The odds that you have wandered the woods for 14 days without seeing any game or finding any plant material but are going to find some within the next 7 days are so remote as to be impossible.

The same goes walking for safety. You have walked for two weeks and haven’t found help. Unless you are within the arctic/Antarctic circles that almost certainly means you are hopelessly lost. In other parts of the world two weeks walk will have already taken you to a road.

So now it’s time t follow that good advice you got at cub scouts: when you are lost the best thing to do is tighten your belt and sit and wait, preferably somewhere where people might find you. Given that this food cache is the first sign of human habitation you’ve seen in over a fortnight the sensible course of action is to divvy up the rations and sit and wait to be rescued. You have proven beyond any doubt that you are incapable of rescuing yourself. Wandering around lost and starving will only make it harder for anyone to find you and increase your chance of injury.

Worrying about walking to safety or hunting for food at this juncture is like worrying about how your hair looks. Sit tight and hope for rescue.

We can only extrapolate from contemporary HGS, but the likely answer is that it never happened. Early humans were better than Daniel Boone. If the couldn’t find food before they reached the point of starvation then there was no food to be got. It’s not like, in an area with absolutely no small game and no tubers or nuts, they were going to run across a single elephant carcase or a single loaded fruit tree.

Sure HGs starved, In some locales it was an annual event. But they starved because there was no food available, and when the game returned or the floodwaters retreated or they made it to the next oasis there was an abundance of food. I can’t imagine a scenario where a HG could ever be seriously hungry, find a surplus of food, and yet have no prospect of finding even more food tomorrow.

That is true, but the gorging occurred in conditions of plenty, not in conditions of famine. IOW when the buffalo herds arrived or the bunya nuts ripened people would gorge, but they would gorge and make merry for weeks on end. They weren’t using gorging as a way of struggling through to the next food source. They gorged when they could gorge every day. They weren’t using gorging as a way of storing food to see them through the next week like you are. They were gorging as a way of storing food to get them through the next year. Completely different scenarios. When you don’t have to worry about where your body will get its protein and carbohydrate survival needs then you can gorge all you like because your only concern is laying down as much fat as possible.

8

Rationing is also valuable from a trace nutrient or vitamin standpoint. Many vitamins are water soluble (C for example) and so are nutrients like salt (which we’re used to thinking of as a bad thing, but which is essential). If you gorge, you’ll excrete any excess very quickly. Eating small rations makes sure you get at least a little of these things every day.

Likewise, eating a little means some glucose is being made available to the brain, which it much prefers over the ketones it uses when you run on fat.