How to starve yourself to death in two easy steps

For people who do not live in regions of this planet that are regularly hit by famine, it seems almost imaginable that anyone around them or they themselves would become nutritionally deficient in any way. Despite this, incidents of scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) are becoming ever more prevalent in rich nations, seemingly due to poor dietary choices.

When I found myself struggling with what appeared to be extreme abdominal swelling over the past years, I was initially unsure what to think of it, and the different GPs and other doctors whom I consulted couldn't tell me anything useful either. Some suggestions being offered included eating less, or cutting gluten and lactose out of my diet and see what happens. At the time I suspected it to be ascites [1], based on the 'ripple' effect across my abdomen, indicating the swelling to be due to fluids. Ascites hereby is of course a symptoms, not a cause.

During last year and until earlier this year, I found myself dealing with an ever increasing swelling of the abdomen, combined with significant weight gain, a feeling of lethargy, regular diarrhoea and weird patches on my skin. When a new GP earlier this year told me to take some medication against gas in the abdomen and a second GP at the same clinic told that he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary on an ultrasound of the abdomen, I decided that it had to be something in my diet.

I tried low-salt, no gluten, no lactose. I reduced my calorific intake to a bare minimum and saw a drop in my weight. Yet I began to feel worse and worse. I got frequent headaches, my stool got all watery and pale and at some points I basically felt like I was dying.


This all continued until it hit me that I had seen this symptom of a grotesquely distended abdomen before: on photographs of starving children, with pot bellies and not a shred of fat left on their bodies. Googling this led me to the form of malnutrition called Kwashiorkor, named after the Ga language from Ghana. It describes a type of selective starvation, where a lack of protein intake among other factors result in a gradual breaking down of various of the body's systems. This includes the lymph system and the ability to regulate the water in the body.

As a result you get an excess of water collecting in the body, usually in the abdomen, between the organs, but also in the limbs. It also affects your body's ability to maintain itself. I began to notice weird muscle pains, extreme weakness, as well as chest pains after even mild exercise, presumably from my body increasingly harvesting itself to maintain critical systems. Muscles are highly optional resources of protein and such, after all.

It seems that by the time I figured out what was going on, I had been moving into Kwashiorkor territory for years. I could pinpoint my reduced protein intake to around 2015, when my personal situation led me to stop cooking proper meals at homes and my work moved to a new office without the Chinese restaurant right next door with their tofu-filled dishes. It was around that time that I had begun to notice some abdominal swelling, which would gradually worsen over the next few years.

As a result of then reducing my calorific diet in a desperate attempt to get some grip on the situation, I seem to have been coaxing my body into a marasmus [3] state of calorific deficiency. Basically I was starving myself to death.


Since realising this now about a month ago, I have begun to pay proper attention to getting every single nutrient which my body requires. While me taking multivitamins is a good start, they do not contain essential amino-acids, and not all food sources are complete sources of protein. I had been neglecting to eat significant amounts of legumes and soy, which are the two main sources for people who are vegetarians, like myself. The animal protein which I consumed via yoghurt and milk was not enough to stave off the inevitable, nor were the peanut butter sandwiches. The latter are not a complete enough source of protein, even though they are generally a good source in addition to regular intake of legumes, soy and animal protein from dairy and meat (for those who are so inclined).

Since drastically changing my diet this way, the headaches have ceased, the abdominal swelling is reducing along with my weight, while I'm still eating three full meals a day. Which is much more than I used to eat over the past years. I also have a lot more energy during the day, my thoughts aren't hazy and slow any more, and after getting a proper workout on my bicycle on a grocery shopping run through the hilly terrain around here, my chest doesn't hurt and I feel like I could go for another run.


I will have to see over the coming months whether this fully fixes the ascites, or whether there are more underlying causes that didn't get addressed yet. Nevertheless, this has been a highly educational experience for me. Through a combination of stress, depression, homelessness and other unpleasantness happening around me I neglected to get the nutrition which my body needs. Perhaps worse is that not even the doctors whom I consulted over those five years noticed what was going on.

To me it serves as a warning. To always put your body first, because it is so easy to neglect it. And much like an abused machine it can continue without proper maintenance for a long time. Until suddenly it doesn't.


Be kind to yourself.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascites
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marasmus