Even the classic hunger strike is difficult for the human body to endure. Although it is assumed that a person can survive for about 30 to 50 days without food, after a short time the body goes into a kind of survival mode, lowers the body temperature, lowers the heart rate and also lowers the blood pressure.
Even more extreme is the dry hunger strike: in this, the strikers not only abstain from eating, but also from drinking. By consuming neither solid nor liquid food, they want to achieve passive resistance and stand up for their goals and ideas.
This is currently the case with the climate activists around Wolfgang Metzeler-Kick: Two of them have gone on a dry hunger strike to put pressure on the Chancellor and to achieve “unrestricted climate honesty”.
But what happens to the body when you suddenly stop drinking? Without fluids, your chances of survival drop rapidly after just three days. After just one day, symptoms such as headaches, confusion, dizziness and difficulty concentrating become noticeable.
If you don’t drink anything, you may also experience seizures, kidney failure or shock. The body loses additional water every day through sweating and breathing. If no new fluids are supplied, it becomes dehydrated.
If the loss of water in the body is too high, it literally dries out – what follows is unconsciousness and death.