You Are Going to Die If You Don’t Eat Something – Clever Subtitle
Every day your body consumes about 2 pounds of steak(at least), in order to continue to allow you to exist. Whether you’ve eaten that steak or not isn’t particularly relevant. Take your current weight, subtract your absolute minimum on the verge of death weight(say 70-100 pounds or so, depending on your height) divide it by two, that’s how long you have to live. If you work out a lot and you’re actually absurdly muscular on the cover of fitness magazines style, divide it by four instead(or 6-8 if you intend to keep it up). If you’ve spent the last 3 weeks lounging in bed only getting up to shovel in mashed potatoes, go ahead and multiply it by two instead.
Here’s a handy chart to demonstrate the effect. For this example, you’re 5’5″, and the right two columns indicate how many days you have to live. Oh yeah, and there’s nothing to eat and you never move.
| Mostly unimportant | You are made up of, and will die in | |||
| Scale says | “Excess” weight | Pure fat | Pure muscle | T-bone steak |
| 200 lbs | 119 lbs | 260 days | 30 days | 60 days |
| 190 lbs | 109 lbs | 238 days | 27 days | 55 days |
| 180 lbs | 99 lbs | 217 days | 25 days | 50 days |
| 170 lbs | 89 lbs | 195 days | 22 days | 45 days |
| 160 lbs | 79 lbs | 173 days | 20 days | 40 days |
| 150 lbs | 69 lbs | 151 days | 17 days | 35 days |
| 140 lbs | 59 lbs | 129 days | 15 days | 30 days |
| 130 lbs | 49 lbs | 107 days | 12 days | 25 days |
| 120 lbs | 39 lbs | 85 days | 10 days | 20 days |
| 110 lbs | 29 lbs | 63 days | 7 days | 15 days |
| 100 lbs | 19 lbs | 42 days | 5 days | 10 days |
| 90 lbs | 9 lbs | 20 days | 2 days | 5 days |
These are rough estimates based on a completely arbitrary 1600 calorie per day metabolic rate. For this height and weight range, it could actually go as low as 1,234(only a pound and a half of steak), which would let you live 30% longer, or as high as 2,269(THREE pounds of steak!). The maximum is actually pretty much determined by your height, since muscle requires much more to maintain than fat, in addition to not contributing near as much to a starvation situation, and you can only have so much of it, which is why the chart ends where it does.
You might notice there’s a problem with these numbers if you’re trying to diet, and yet you, like your body, are a fan of not dying. The problem is, your mind wants you to be absurdly skinny and/or made entirely of muscle, while your body’s ideal long term survival projection is contingent on being a roughly spheroid body consisting entirely of fat.
Of course, how long you can go without eating isn’t everything. After all, a month or so is plenty of time to hunt and kill a few deer to last the winter or whatever it is people did before supermarkets, and being able to punch them to death and carry them home afterward is a pretty useful trait to have if you act before it all gets burned through trying to sustain your life. Also there’s all sorts of nutrients and protein and whatnot that you’d still have to consume to actually live as a lipidsphere for more than a month or so anyway, which is why chances are you’re actually not at either of those extremes.
But whenever you make a decision about what you’re going to eat, a good portion of that decision is being unconsciously influenced by how long you have to live when Ragnarok arrives and food becomes a thing of the past, or if you’re already on the cover of a magazine, whether you’re going to make it through the week.
