For how many days do you need to starve yourself before you die?

[srk003]

It's a common theory that doesn't tend to hold up in practice. In my 40 day water fast, I didn't even get cramps. I'd be extremely surprised if I couldn't have gone another 200+ days any differently. Ketone levels stayed elevated and fuelled the brain while the body ran on fat stores. The severely underweight Youtube guy who went 19 weeks didn't get cramps either. There are water fasting centres all over the world that take thousands of people through water fasts over many months with close to zero lives lost. My hunch is if you are normal weight, you'd be lucky to be dead by the end of the year water fasting. You'd have to get below 2% body fat.

That said, you might be able to induce deficiencies deliberately. Given most people like me are intending to survive the process we tend to drink slowly and consistently so the water actually hydrates rather than getting flushed straight out. If you were to drink a lot very quickly, you might be able to flush out electrolytes and hope for a sudden heart attack like occasionally happens to marathon runners. Also if you fasted long enough (minimum 2 months), and then ate an enormous meal straight away, you'd have some hope of killing yourself with refeeding syndrome like what happened to some holocaust survivors. But I think in both cases you're more likely to do severe damage and stay alive. It's just not a prudent method.

That's interesting, I thought it was more like 1-3 months - based upon reading up on people who did hunger strikes.
When I looked up people who hunger strike for political reasons, they nearly always die after 50-80 days. An example - the 1981 Irish hunger strike:

Name	Paramilitary affiliation	Strike started	Length of strike	Date of death	Age of death
Bobby Sands	IRA	1 March	66 days	5 May	27
Francis Hughes	IRA	15 March	59 days	12 May	25
Raymond McCreesh	IRA	22 March	61 days	21 May	24
Patsy O'Hara	INLA	22 March	61 days	21 May	23
Joe McDonnell	IRA	8 May	61 days	8 July	29
Martin Hurson	IRA	28 May	46 days	13 July	24
Kevin Lynch	INLA	23 May	71 days	1 August	25
Kieran Doherty	IRA	22 May	73 days	2 August	25
Thomas McElwee	IRA	8 June	62 days	8 August	23
Michael Devine	INLA	22 June	60 days	20 August	27

These were young people, and assuming they were in 'reasonable' health and normal weight despite being in prison. Do vitamins prolong life to a significant extent? Being in prison, I assume they weren't taking any supplements.

Other sources in the wiki article for hunger strike report similar time frames for other people who went on these strikes - up to 70-80 days.

Looking up water fasting, most people who report '100 day fasts' do in batches rather than one continuous fast. I found some exceptions, notably a person who went a year with only water and vitamins but this person was morbidly obese. I'm skeptical that a severely underweight person i.e. someone with very little muscle or fat stores, likely in ill health can survive 130 consecutive days without food.

 

[Apathy79]

I'll see if I can find it again. The guy had recently been diagnosed with testicular cancer and fasted to heal it. He wanted to keep going after 19 weeks but his instructor, some guy in Costa Rica whose name escapes me but supervises these things all the time and runs a centre for it there, advised against it. He started out underweight and finished looking like a holocaust survivor but claimed it worked to cure the cancer. Consumed only water, no vitamins or anything else.

Just as I'm looking now, I've come across others going for example 150 days, although they are mostly overweight to start with. One of the beauties of Youtube now is these people make themselves guinea pigs for the rest of us to learn from - most of them are filming regularly, even daily, explaining what's going on for them. Many are water only, like mine and the cancer guy, some take electrolytes and/or salt and/or vitamins.

The prison hunger strikes are interesting. The conditions vary - in the case of the 1981 strike where 10 died, I believe many of the cells had been covered with poop as part of the protest and water was often refused to hasten death at the end in line with the strikes of the 20s, so I suspect the final days/weeks were exceedingly painful. There's a few excerpts from a diary Bobby Sands kept in news articles, but there's a whole book dedicated to it if you really wanted to find out all the details - I haven't read it.

If you water fasted for 2 months, then stopped drinking water, you might die reasonably quickly, but it would be a painful way to go. What's not talked about as much about those strikes was the numerous survivors that created all sorts of long term issues for themselves, although how much of that is to do with the extremely unhygienic conditions and other factors is hard to say, the same could be said of the deaths themselves. In any event, it's a heck of a gamble.

If I find the 19 week Youtube guy again, I'll post it here.

 

[1DayItWillBover]

Takes lots of self power and even self hatred to starve yourself to death.

 

[Sk1n1M1n]

But also starving will give you time to reconsider and your situation will give you time