10 Things That Happen If You Only Drink Water

Top Ten Things That Would Happen If You Only Drank Water

They say we should drink more water. But what if that’s all we took in? This is Unveiled, and today we’re counting down the Top Ten Things That Would Happen If You Only Drank Water.

For this list, we’ll be looking at ten things that would happen to your body, both physically and mentally, if you stopped eating food and only drank water.

#10: You’ll Be Irritable

You know how it goes. You skip breakfast and lunch, and then you spend the rest of the day rolling your eyes and screaming at the simplest of life's complications. We know this phenomenon as being “hangry,” and it’s our brains’ way of telling us that it needs energy, pronto. The brain uses the glucose we make from food as its primary energy source, and without this necessary brain fuel, it has trouble regulating emotions. Anger is a difficult emotion to control on a good day, but without the necessary glucose, we may find ourselves flying off the handle at record speed.

#9: Headaches & General Discomfort

Your mood won't improve much when the headaches kick in. If your body doesn’t receive a suitable number of carbohydrates – which it wouldn’t be – your blood sugar drops, and that is bad news. When your blood sugar falls, your organs don’t receive enough glucose and you begin to experience a wide variety of uncomfortable symptoms, including headaches, nausea, sweating, and a feeling of faintness. If you plan on doing some water fasting, it’s best you just stay in bed, because not only will you be snapping at everyone you come across, but you’ll also feel absolutely horrendous.

#8: You’ll Stop Feeling Hungry

The first few days of a water fast would feel torturous, between the migraines and the unbearable hunger, in addition to the screaming at inanimate objects. But a strange thing happens around day three or four – you suddenly stop feeling hungry. Once your body runs out of energy and flips the emergency gas light, it starts to feed on fat, and your liver turns this fat into something called ketones. These ketone bodies then travel through your bloodstream and serve as an emergency fuel source for the organs. Your body really needs energy, and it will do anything in its power to get it, including eating its own fat.

#7: You’ll Quickly Lose Weight

Water fasting is clearly a very dangerous weight loss technique, although after some days you will lose weight. For one thing, drinking a lot of water will quickly move all remaining waste through your digestive system… But, after the initial affects, water fasters could lose between 1-2 pounds per day, depending on their pre-fast diet. But while two pounds a day certainly sounds great for weight watchers, water fasting is not an ideal regime for permanent weight loss. The body’s metabolism slows once it enters conservation mode, so you’ll gain even more weight once you start eating food again.

#6: You’ll Enter a Fasting High

After around a week of a water fasting, you could begin to feel elated. The body has adjusted to your pretty ill-advised experiment, and it no longer needs to expend energy on digesting. For that matter, the body is no longer plagued with the nastiness of poor nutritional choices, like excessive salt, fats, and sugars. At this point, water fasters occassionally report a wide variety of benefits, including a faster, clearer mind and dramatically increased energy levels.

#5: Healthy Blood Sugar & Pressure

While your blood sugar may initially drop, resulting in headaches and irritability, water fasts may eventually regulate blood sugar levels. Entering ketosis balances the glucose, as your liver naturally converts stored fats into the necessary amounts of sugar and energy. A longer fast of two weeks may also see decreased blood pressure levels. One study, conducted back in 2002 and published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, tested 68 people who had high blood pressure. After a nearly two-week water fast, 82% of the subjects reported healthy blood pressure levels.

#4: Orthostatic Hypotension

What’s that? Well, those that suffer from low blood pressure know that orthostatic hypotension is medical speak for feeling faint after standing up. This occurs because gravity pulls on our blood, causing a sudden decrease in cardiac output and blood flow to the brain. We’ve just seen how fasting will dramatically lower your blood pressure, so it only makes sense that fasters should be prone to this - meaning that even the healthiest among us would feel seriously faint. It turns out your body gets very weak when it doesn’t have energy.

#3: It May Worsen Existing Medical Conditions

Water fasting is never advised, but even less so if you’re already ill or unhealthy. In fact, fasting may only work if the subject practices a strict, healthy diet both before and after the fast. Pregnant women, those with weakened immune systems, and those suffering from heart problems are typically advised to refrain from fasting at all. But, even for everyone else, if you cut out food entirely, existing medical conditions are likely to get worse. For example, fasting can significantly worsen the side effects of diabetes and cause extensive damage to the kidneys, among many other concerns.

#2: Your Body Will Eventually Enter Starvation Mode

The even faintly positive news ends here. It doesn’t matter how much water you drink – your body needs food. If it doesn’t get food, it will eventually enter survival mode, and that's as good as it sounds. After multiple weeks without food, the body will deplete its fat reserves and begin eating away at the muscles for protein, resulting in extreme weight loss. You will also become withdrawn, not to mention incredibly frail. After all, you’re dying. At this point, your body is doing everything in its power just to stay alive, including cannibalizing itself.

#1: You Will Eventually Die

This shouldn't surprise you, but if you do not eat food you will die. Starvation deteriorates the body’s immune system, resulting in an increased vulnerability to infectious and deadly diseases. Severe malnourishment may also result in death, as the body depletes its finite resources and dies from a lack of energy. But the most likely form of starvation-related death is cardiac arrhythmia (or other related conditions where the heart doesn’t get the electrolytes it requires), and the resulting imbalance leads to a fatal heart attack. Whatever water fasting promises, is it really worth that risk?