During Brief Food Shortages Eating Very Small Amounts of Food Frequently Can Save Your Life

The severe winter storms of past years (including the Texas power crisis) and the 2005 Katrina tragedy exposed millions of Americans to temporary food shortages. A rudimentary grasp of the physiology of severe nutritional deprivation will help you get through any brief food shortage. Brief is the keyword here. For longer periods, you should have an emergency food supply you can tap into to get you through critical food shortages.

Complete starving speeds up your metabolism, whereas "diets" slow it down for the first seven days. When you eat nothing at all, your body burns calories at an accelerated rate.

That is, it is preferable to nibble rather than skip meals if at all possible.

The explanation behind this is as follows.

Our bodies are designed to deal with the food resources available to us. They'll adapt their metabolic rates to deal with the reduced food supply if we just consume less calories.

However, if we don't eat anything, the adrenal glands release stress hormones that signal the liver to convert glycogen into glucose so we can locate food. The irony is that if we don't eat at all, our systems burn through their glucose and fat stores even quicker, giving us an advantage in dealing with stress. When glycogen and fat are depleted, the body consumes its own tissues to produce glucose for brain function.

Would a complete famine diet help you lose weight quickly? Most definitely, but the trouble is that you'll probably lose more muscle than fat, as well as suffer from vitamin, mineral, and essential fatty acid deficits, as well as all the side effects that come with them. So, if at all feasible, eat as little as possible as often as possible when food is scarce.