subject: What Happens When You Starve? [print this page] What Happens When You Starve? What Happens When You Starve?
There are a lot of people out there determined to lose weight as fast as possible and no matter what. They are willing to do anything to lose weight, even if it means starving themselves. But what happens when your body is actually deprived of all nutrition? What happens when you are consuming zero nutrients? Is this actually a good way to lose weight? The answer is yes, starving is an excellent way to lose weight, but it's an awful diet if your goal is to just lose fat. Read on to learn why, as we take a closer look at the biology of starvation.
First of all, we need to make a distinction between losing weight and losing fat. Your body is made up of a wide variety of tissues. You are made of bone, fat, blood, muscle, organs, water and much more. When you lose weight, you could be losing any one of these. Cutting off a leg is effectively a way to lose weight. However, losing fat weight is very different, because you are trying to conserve your lean body weight while only burning fat. This is a crucial distinction when it comes to starvation.
When you starve, this is what happens. Within a couple of hours your body turns to your live for new glucose, which is what your carbs are turned into when you eat them, and are your primary source of fuel. Gluconeogenesis is the process through which your liver creates new glucose from stored supplies of glycogen, and so at first everything is fine. But within 12-18 hours (less, depending on how much exercise you do), your body will run out of glycogen, and instead begin to create glucose from other sources, mainly protein.
That means that within a day of starving your body begins to cannibalize your muscles. Your body will thus sustain itself by consuming itself, turning your muscles into fuel. Over time, it will switch over to something else known as ketones, which are a source of fat, but even so, your protein loss is significant and will eventually result in death as your body consumes itself utterly.
So is starvation a good way to lose weight? Sure, if you don't mind losing muscle as well as fat. In fact, you will lose tons of weight that way, until you die. Now, if you want to lose just fat? Then starvation is the absolutely worst thing you can do.
