14 AMERICAN SURVIVAL GUIDE [OCTOBER 2019]
W
hen the world ended,
you were fortunate
enough to get yourself
and your family into
the SUV along with
your bug-out gear and hit the road before your
little suburb descended into hell. It has been
a long rough two weeks. Now it seems there is
trouble in paradise.
There are five of you total, but only you,
your wife, and your 16-year-old son are up
to standing watch. That means everybody
is sleep-deprived. Additionally, you didn’t
really expect this to be an open-ended affair,
so food and water are necessarily rationed.
With each passing day, your stash of supplies
grows smaller and those you encounter want
it worse. It’s time to apply a little science to
the problem.PROTRACTED SURVIVAL
Nobody knows when or under what circum-
stances you might be called upon to show a
little self-reliance. Our connection to what we
perceive as civilization is tenuous at best. If
you didn’t believe that at least a little bit, you
would not be clutching this hallowed tome.
Many to most survival situations will see
their resolution in a day or three tops. The
storm will pass, the fire will go out, the power
will come back on, or Uncle Sam will roll in
with trucks and tents and make everything
whole again. However, what if that’s not the
case?
It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination
to conjure some scenario that might demand
that you keep your brood above the daisies
for a protracted period in the face of dire
circumstances. To best prepare for such sordid
eventualities, one should understand how
these wonderful machines we live in respond
to hardship. The three major players are food,
water, and sleep.COMESTIBLES
So long as he or she has plenty of water,
a typical healthy adult human can indeed
survive 30 to 45 days or more without food.
However, that oft-reported statistic is terribly
misleading. There is a broad gulf between life
and quality of life. Going without food for a
protracted period will make that difference
patently obvious.
The body’s metabolic response to a lack of
food goes through several predictable stages.
In the near term, the body switches from
carbohydrate metabolism to fat metabolism.‹ Left: Nature
is beautiful, but
if you cannot
sustain yourself
appropriately, it can
also be extremely
dangerous.While this transition is the desirable end state for anybody who has ever tried to diet, as we all
know that is a fairly unpleasant state of affairs. Once those initial glycogen stores are depleted,
your body starts feeding on glycerol and amino acids.
Eventually, decreased insulin levels along with effects from stress hormones like cortisol and› Above: The lack
of food, water and
sleep in a survival
situation quickly
makes a bad
situation worse.
Understanding how
our bodies react
to these stressful
circumstances
can make us more
capable in a crisis.“NOBODY KNOWS WHEN OR UNDER WHAT
CIRCUMSTANCES YOU MIGHT BE CALLED
UPON TO SHOW A LITTLE SELF-RELIANCE.
OUR CONNECTION TO WHAT WE PERCEIVE
AS CIVILIZATION IS TENUOUS AT BEST.”