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You would be surprised how many people have gone trough their life without experiencing real hunger.

I was doing short weekend hike with a friend and the shop we intended to visit was closed. We had to walk six hours without eating. My fried started to panic and would have called emergency services because he was feeling so weak that his hands started shaking. I had to explain it to him several times that if you sit down for a 15-20 minutes the shaking goes away as the body converts fat to glucose. He was convinced that he would die from walking hungry. Yes, physical exercise while hungry sucks, but you don't die in several days.

> He was convinced that he would die from walking hungry.

Do you think that this is a cultural phenomenon? I cannot imagine a person having constant access to food, everywhere, so that he never walked a few hours without eating. You would have to carry a backpack full a snacks everywhere, or you would somehow make sure that a store or some food place is near you, which seems pretty inconvenient.

> I cannot imagine a person having constant access to food, everywhere

I think it's very common in urban environment with middle class people. You may feel little hungry but you eat within hour or so, never hunger pangs or real weakness. When you do hard exercise, you carry sport drinks and snacks. It's not that hard.

It can be different for poor people in the same culture. Maybe the lack of shared experience contributes to the lack of empathy. When people see poor person walking on the street with hunger pain expression in their face, how do people interpret it? If they don't have a shared experience, hungry person may look just angry.

I've easily done 48hrs without food many times in my 20-30s, but usually over weekend, lunch Friday, out on the beer Friday night and no dinner for some reason or other (shit or too fancy restaurant or weird people wanting to eat Sushi on a friday night). Saturday a football game or horse racing but you missed the breakfast start party due to hangover and can't be arsed with the sit down meal some have planned for the evening so roll on to nightclub with the next group. Sunday hangover, rollout of bed late afternoon and fast food (first solids in 48hrs), a few ibuprofen a bit later or sometimes codeine tablets if my back-pain suffering mate had too many spares, sleep, back to work Monday. Sure i'll reach 60 still. Not saying it's smart but people are too bloody scared about everything.

Same. I sometimes go for 36-48 hours without eating because I am busy and forget or because it is inconvenient. It is a small thing and I feel fine when it happens, it doesn't slow me down at all. It would be a stretch to suggest that human biology isn't well adapted to long periods of not eating, since that is a normal state of nature.

I do know people that seemingly need to eat constantly but their diet consists of mountains of refined carbs and are borderline diabetic, so that probably is a factor. Refined carbs have been a negligible part of my diet for a long time.

That would be me if I wasn't married. In college, I'd do just like you did because I'm lazy and don't like eating out (waste of time and money). In high school, when my parents left town in my teens, I would often go an entire weekend without eating because I didn't want to bother even using the microwave and instead played video games or worked on projects.

Now I'm married with kids, and my wife loves food, so I eat regularly. When she left for a month to visit far away family, I reverted to my old self and ate one meal a day, if that. I just don't see food as being as important as other things, so I neglect it unless providing it for someone else (kids or wife).

And my wife is still surprised when I have no preference for a meal (I usually default to fried eggs or cereal, occasionally with a spinach smoothie when she's gone because they're cheap, easy, and reasonably healthy).

> Days, weeks or even months without food was pretty much the norm until ~150 years ago.

People also died younger 150 years ago. Humans as a population are much healthier today overall—we shouldn't look to how we lived 100+ years ago for health guidance.

(I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the crux of your post, as I don't feel knowledgable enough to weigh in)

That seems rather short sighted. Much of the increase in mean lifespan from 150 years ago comes from lower number of deaths at infancy (aka doctors washing their hands). You can probably attribute most of the rest to improved nutrition and antibiotics.

The philosophy behind "paleo" and various fasting regimens (as well as different modalities of physical training) is that living close to what our primate ancestors lived like is probably something like optimal. Starving yourself from time to time, something which is actually practiced by almost all agricultural societies as a form of religious devotion, is probably a good idea. The whole "3 square meals" thing is mostly a product of marketing departments rather than any scientific research.

^ this.

You may be underestimating the snacking then. Your body starts missing a lot of nutrients after going without food for so long

You might have misunderstood me: 48 hours without food were 48 hours without food. I ate the snacks on days when there was food in the house. Or do you already consider 1 meal a day + snacks fasting?

Most people find that hard to believe. IMHO I think we eat mostly out of habit. I found out what hunger really is after fasting a lot.

Is it really that hard to believe that a CS student in his mid-twenties is too lazy to shower, put on clothes and leave the house? :)

nope.

I have been there (literally), I agree that eat mostly of habit and hunger can be easily replaced by water/coffee. My blood sugar would drop significantly though after 24h-36h and I would feel dizzy. Were you drinking sweetened drinks?

Your blood sugar really shouldn't drop while fasting, unless you do aerobic exercise, have a genetic mutation that prevents you from producing glycogen, or have some other kind of glycemic disease.

No, water and coffee.

Coffee with milk or cream, or black coffee?

that's very interesting and quite impressive.