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What Happens to the Body if You Starve Yourself for a Week?
How long can your body stay without food?
Food and water are essential to life. For your body to survive, it needs energy from different food sources. Hydration from clean water is also crucial for proper body functioning.
But it is also important to note that our body can survive for days without water. The human body can also live without food for days and, in some cases, weeks, due to adjustments to our energy consumption and metabolism.
Why the variation in the period?
Eliminating water and food intake for a significant period is starvation. After one or two days without water or food, your body switches into starvation mode. At that time, the body’s function changes to reduce the amount of energy it expends. Prolonged starvation eventually leads to death.
Here’s the thing: there is no “rule of thumb” for how long the body can survive without food. There is a lack of data on starvation studies because studying starvation in human subjects is highly unethical.
A few studies explore old research on starvation while also examining more recent incidences of starvation in the real world. These instances include religious fasts, hunger strikes, and other similar cases.
