72 Hour Starvation Experiment

Have you ever gone a full day without eating? Well I can tell you that I have not. Over the past few months the zombie survival team and I have been doing extreme challenges to push ourselves both mentally and physically and to put ourselves in the mindset of what actual survival situations would look and feel like. We’ve spent years researching and discussing the best ways to survive the zombie apocalypse but we wanted to know first hand how these situations would make us feel. So far we have hiked 50km over two days, jumped into an icy cold river and this past weekend we went 72 hours without eating.

“You can read a hundred books about skiing but until you start going down a hill, you’re not a skier.”

4 Hours In:

There is a saying in the survival community: “You are only 9 meals away from crazy.” I’m currently four hours into my experiment, so I am far from crazy, but I am already finding myself thinking about food constantly. I don’t know if it is from boredom or if it is simply because I know I’m not allowed to have anything. There is no actual hunger at this point, but I know the stomach pains are on the horizon.

I’m hoping to widen my perspective from this experience. I’ve never had to worry about where my next meal is going to come from. A lot of my friends think I am nuts for voluntarily going three whole days without food but I’m excited to get a better understanding of the desperation felt after enduring such a long time without anything to eat. After this experience I will know what to expect if I’m found in a situation without food. How much energy will I have, what kind of pain can I expect, and how desperate does a human get after three days without eating. I would much rather sweat it out in peacetime than bleed during wartime.

I plan on checking up with my fellow soldiers tomorrow around the 24 hour mark to see how they are coping.

24 Hours In:

I can’t believe how good I’m feeling at this point. I wake up this morning and read comments on our group from members about the difficulties they are dealing with; the hunger, the headaches the low energy. I got up this morning feeling great, actually better than I normally do. There is a moment around noon when my stomach growls furiously and I feel a panic throughout my body. Two more days of this I think to myself. I understand how the sting of hunger can bring about stress.

I take a deep breathe to calm down and tell myself to relax, you are in this for two more days and food will be waiting for you on the other side. This knowledge alone makes the whole thing manageable and I wonder how I would feel if there was no light at the end of the tunnel. This is a game to me, instead of life and death, and the rest of the day I almost forget that I haven’t eaten anything for a whole day.

I spend my day like any other. I wake up I run some errands, do some work and watch a movie in the middle of the afternoon. Driving home I instinctually go to pick something up for food. I wasn’t overly hungry and I had very little cravings but the habit of eating is still very strong. I have a strange thought: “Am I addicted to eating?”

48 Hours In:

No headache, no aches and pains (out of the ordinary anyways). I am almost weirded out by how easy this challenge is to me. I start thinking about the person who came up with the notion of three meals a day. Where did he or she come up with that number? How long can I safely keep this up? At this point I feel like I could easily go another week.

I start reading my book and long for a coffee. I normally have several cups while I’m reading. No coffee allowed, so I grab a big glass of water and read my book. After several hours I get up and begin walking. I immediately find my vision begin to tunnel. I sit down on my stairs so I don’t faint. I wait a couple of seconds until it passes and walk into the kitchen.

My roommate is cooking dinner. It is a beautiful stir fry with rice, vegetables and chicken. The fragrance is intoxicating, I start imagining myself scooping up handfuls of rice and shoving them into my mouth like an animal. I try to shake the image from my head and move to the tap to fill my glass. I down three tall glasses of water as quickly as I can and walk to the living room. The images subside but a wave of exhaustion washes over me. I go to my room and continue reading.

Just Before 72 Hours:

This morning I wake up with more energy than I have had the entire experiment. There were about two hours of exhaustion and physical fatigue last night but I wake up feeling like an upgraded version of myself. I meet up with with Che, the founder of the Ontario Preppers Survival Network and some of the other participants and we share stories of hunger from the week-end. We had two people drop out and I’m surprised by the degree of frustration and pain with this challenge. I seem to have had an easier experience than most of the others.

It is now close to 4pm (2 hours past the 72 hour mark) and we are so wrapped up in the discussion we almost forget about eating! I realize how refreshing it feels to be around all these wonderful people in the woods and I feel like I could easily go another round.

We have a nurse in the group who has wonderfully volunteered to assist us. She tests our blood sugar. We are all, not surprisingly, very low. She brought us Timbits, coffee, and sports drinks. We all begin slowly eating.

I take a chocolate Timbit out of the box and slowly place it into my mouth. I have not tasted anything in over three days. The sweetness coats my entire mouth. I've forgotten how wonderful it was just to taste something. I wait ten minutes to see if my stomach would hurt… but I feel nothing out of the ordinary. I have a granola bar, some coffee and then finally open up an MRE I bought from our store zombiesurvivalshop.ca - It was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

What Comes Next?

This was a great experiment. If I ever find myself in a situation where I can’t find food, I can relax, because I know that I will have lots of reserved energy and time before I’m actually in trouble. I love pushing my mind and body to its limits, always pushing past the point of comfort in order to uncover the big lessons in life. I am incredibly excited for our next big challenge; we have some exciting plans for the year to come. If anyone reading this has any suggestions please comment or email us, but in the meantime I'm going home and having a big panzerotti to myself ☺.