Could one somehow load up on food and water before being dropped off for the 21 days of Naked and Afraid? Would this help you survive at least the first few days? It seems like you would just pee out the extra water.
My WAG is that if you drop two people off at the same time in the same place and one of them preloaded on food and water it wouldn’t make a big difference. The water would probably only give the person a few extra hours before they needed more water and the food might give them a day. If you really wanted to load up, I’d think they’d do better to eat higher fat foods over the weeks preceding the challenge since their body would store the extra energy and use it as needed. But that’s a total WAG.
Some of the contestants do load before hand. I read an article expressing the opinion that the shock of several days without food and little water is what hits the people the hardest no matter what reserves they have (and water reserves don’t last long). If I lost my mind and decided to do something like that I’d practice fasting for days at a time.
You’d have to make sure you do it WAY in advance. Those people end up losing 10 or 20 pounds in the three weeks. You’d want to be dropped on the location a little overweight, not underweight.
When I was a ballerina, I used to occasionally do 2-3 day fasts to keep my appetite small, and thinking it would train my body to burn fat. When you do that once per month or so, your body does seem to get better at dealing with it. Eventually it stopped feeling like much at all. I would be hungry for about 12 hours,a nd then my body just seemed to accept the situation and stop bugging me about it.
I’m not sure how much of that is psychological, but then the Naked and Afraid challenge is largely psychological in itself.
If all you did was eat normally for the full year before and then go on a big binge for 24 hours before you left, I’m guessing you’d be seriously miserable for the first day of the challenge. The reason is that your binge would increase your insulin production, and then your body would be way off-kilter until it got used up and the production slowed down again. And too-much-insulin-off-kilter is seriously unpleasant off-kilterness.
I have heard that marathoners take salt pills in order to “bank” fluids and electrolytes before a race. If that truly works then I’d say definitely do that before the show. In fact, in general I’d research what veteran marathoners find helpful and do that.
Definitely. I’d want a month to pack on weight if I could. But I don’t think there’s much you can to do load on water.
I remember reading somewhere that the ancient Polynesians used to train themselves for months to live on very little food or water before they set of ib a dugout canoe on one of their epic journeys. This suggests that ‘loading’ is the wrong way to go.
I read that the French Foreign Legion tried to make their soldiers drink only small amounts of water while in camp, thinking that their bodies would adjust and be better able to survive when they went out into the desert but this “underdrink” strategy gradually was proven ineffective. So they came up with the “overdrink” strategy where all the soldiers were encouraged to drink more water than they actually needed while in camp, giving them a head start when they went out into the desert. The overdrink strategy was marginally successful, IIRC.
You’d probably want to carb load so your muscle glycogen stores are as full as possible. That will give you a bit more energy the first day or two, but more importantly, the glycogen also binds a lot of water that gets released as glycogen is used up.
Making sure you have a decent tan to avoid excessive sunburn would also be helpful, and I think that girl from last week was pretty smart to try to get used to the cold.
My wife and I both run marathons and ultramarathons. I’ve never heard of this practice, although it’s certainly common for people to gradually eat and drink more in the days before a race.
I’d say that most road marathon runners simply avail themselves of the plentiful aid stations along the way - plenty of fluids (water and sports drinks) and often little snacks (pretzels, fruit, gels). Not an option for a 3 week survival show, I’m sure 
Long trail ultras have aid stations but they’re often farther apart and due to the long duration of the run (you can be out there for 10-30 hours, depending on distance) many participants carry some level of food & water with them and that may certainly include salt tablets, but you’re taking those along the way to replenish the salts you sweat out.
I do remember reading one woman’s account of getting ready to climb Mount Everest. She said that she had a great time at parties because she would basically hang out by the food, packing on a lot of extra weight; high altitude mountaineering burns a ton of calories (more than you can comfortably replace during the climb) so she “fattened herself up” (and then dropped something like 30lbs during her expedition). But that’s just banking calories as body fat, it’s not storing up water or salts, I don’t know that you can store much of those things in advance.