In the ensuing forty hours I have survived on water, herb tea and coke (the drink, in diet form). I haven't run out of money, I just thought it would be interesting to see how it feels to be temporarily starving.
Those who have known me for some time are familiar with my questionable dietary practices and willingness to sacrifice a little health for an informative experience. Having always had a hummingbird metabolism, in 2009 I thought it would be fun to try to hit 200 lbs by stuffing my face around the clock and lifting weights like a crazy person. It was fascinating but it wasn't that fun and the results weren't that pretty. In the photo below I am the one on the left with the chins and big hair.
Before I start, 3 health warnings:
1. I have little expertise in nutrition or physiology, but I did talk to friends who have more. I'm going to try to put my experiences in the context of what is happening to my body. Please correct me if I get anything wrong.
2. My brain is out of fuel. Please make allowances if this starts to read like Sarah Palin trying to talk.
3. Don't try this at home.
After my midnight rice pudding I slept for about five and a half hours. During this time my body was processing food in the normal way, using glucose as its primary energy source and running down the glycogen stores in my liver and muscles.
On waking I was very hungry, but this is normal. Given the amount I ate the night before, it's likely that I hadn't yet depleted my glycogen stores.
Around 10:30am I started to feel much more hungry. By this point my body should have entered a different metabolic state and started burning fat.
All of us have fatty acid reserves stored around the body (some of us have more than others), and the body now switches to breaking down fat as its main source of fuel. Atkins diet adherents are familiar with this state as "ketosis", named after the ketone molecules that are products of fatty acid metabolism.
During this process I focused my mental energy on redirecting fat-burning activity from the butt to the love handles. I don't think it worked.
By early afternoon, not only was I starving and obsessing about food, but my brain had slowed and my attention span had shortened. I'm told that this is a result of the brain being unable to use fatty acids as a fuel since they are molecularly too large to penetrate the membrane between blood and brain. At this stage my brain is running on the last few drops of glycogen while the rest of the body relies on ketosis.
In the next 24 hours I noticed only small differences in comfort and ability to focus. I remain incredibly hungry and this hunger is beginning to evolve from discomfort to pain. My brain feels compromised, but no worse than yesterday.
My body should now start to cannibalize itself, breaking down muscle into amino acids that the liver then converts to glucose. This allows my brain to function at full force again while my body wastes away.
If I continued, I would run up against the problem that my fuel sources are finite. I've used up the glycogen stores, my subcutaneous fat stores are limited (unlucky for somebody who is starving; lucky for somebody who is going to be without-shirt on the beaches of South America in a few weeks), and I'm now burning through my muscles. This ends in death.
A friend who works at Oxfam in Africa mentioned to me that aid workers are often puzzled by the indifference that the starving have to their own survival and the survival of their children. This is the result of the brain and body shutting down. It's common to see starving people sit and stare at nothing, barely reacting as an aid worker helps them feed their child and then dropping the spoon as the aid worker walks away. As the brain dies you lose interest in everything, even your baby dying next to you.
Now that I've cheered you up, let me assure you that you don't need to worry about me. I just landed in Austin, Texas, and am about to head to a work-funded steak dinner.
Having not reached a state of great Gandhian enlightenment, this could be criticized as a pointless exercise. But at least I saved some money and diminished my subcutaneous fatty acid stores!
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