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...with predictable results


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Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reports that a woman starved to death after embarking on a spiritual diet that required her to stop eating or drinking and live off sunlight alone.

The Zurich newspaper reported Wednesday that the unnamed Swiss woman in her fifties decided to follow the radical fast in 2010 after viewing an Austrian documentary about an Indian guru who claims to have lived this way for 70 years.

Tages-Anzeiger says there have been similar cases of self-starvation in Germany, Britain and Australia.

The prosecutors' office in the Swiss canton (state) of Aargau confirmed Wednesday that the woman died in January 2011 in the town of Wolfhalden in eastern Switzerland.

WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT? DO THE MATH

Spokeswoman Jennifer Rissi says prosecutors haven't opened a criminal investigation over the woman's death.

I think we may have found this year's Darwin Award winner.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Walking on sunshine, she most definitely was not.

Obviously some sceptic slipped in a source of kryptonite, where the kryptonite radiation forced the yellow sunlight from her cells leading to her current state. Oh wait, thats Superman who gets "high on the Earth's yellow sun. Humans have to actually eat. Silly me.

It's amazing though that she managed to essentially will herself to die.

While starving yourself to death is quite possible and has been done before, it still takes lots of willpower to do so. It says a lot about the power of the mind.

...although not in a way all those quacks would like

This reminds me of Jasmuheen, the main figurehead for this whole "living on light" thing. Despite all her bluster about how she'd lived on nothing but sunlight for decades, when they tried filming her 24/7 for a documentary she only lasted four days before her condition deteriorated to the point where she had to be hospitalised.

DaveJB wrote:This reminds me of Jasmuheen, the main figurehead for this whole "living on light" thing. Despite all her bluster about how she'd lived on nothing but sunlight for decades, when they tried filming her 24/7 for a documentary she only lasted four days before her condition deteriorated to the point where she had to be hospitalised.

I've seen that smug sack of crap in interviews before, going on about she only eats 'because she likes the taste of food'. I read this thread headline and REALLY hoped it was her.

On that matter:

(okay, technically on a different person doing so, but eh).

Social Darwinism-Applies to everybody, like it or not.

Wasn't there an indian guru found raping a refridgerator during a controlled study which was supposed to prove he can live without food?

Funny how "humans need food" is one of those things we can say with absolute certainty, but some people keep acting as if it can be overcome despite humans not posessing any of the chemical tools necessary to photosynthesize sugar (we can syntheisze vitamin D, though, which is awesome all by itself...)

If it was possible for a human to life off sunlight (and retain full physical capacity), then the first group which figured it out would quickly dominate everybody else, because...they wouldn't need any food.

PeZook wrote:If it was possible for a human to life off sunlight (and retain full physical capacity), then the first group which figured it out would quickly dominate everybody else, because...they wouldn't need any food.

This. Even David Blaine slowly gets thinner every time he locks himself in a transparent cube for 2 months.

When I was a kid, I watched a documentary in which a Wudang temple master claimed to have discovered the secret to living forever. He would simply eat very little, and stay in good physical condition, and figured that, so long as nothing violent happened to him, there would be no reason for him to die. I actually considered following in his footsteps. Fortunately, my parents convinced me otherwise.

Stop eating and you die... go figure. Not really interested compared to this austrian fuckwit that claims to have done it for 70 years.
Apparantly some people can be so monumentally dense that if someone said you could breath underwater you would have a rash of people drowning.

Who is this magical guru... why do these idiots not get publicly shamed into being full of shit by taking them to task on their garbage.

You claim you can live on sunshine... heres a camera... prove it then we will talk otherwise fuck off and if anyone dies because you spread this bullshit your the one that takes the blame. Then again... why not weed out the morons that would fall for it.

PREDATOR490 wrote:Apparantly some people can be so monumentally dense that if someone said you could breath underwater you would have a rash of people drowning.

Who is this magical guru... why do these idiots not get publicly shamed into being full of shit by taking them to task on their garbage.

Probably because society is dominated by people who believe things just as illogical, if not usually as fatal. People are taught from birth to believe priests, preachers and gurus, and to not apply logic to their beliefs. The same habits of thought that leads people to buy into all the nonsense in mainstream religions leads them to buy into the nonsense pushed by ;less mainstream movements like this one. And it also means people are afraid to point out how illogical and baseless claims like "living on sunlight" are, because they don't want the same standards applied to their equally illogical and baseless religion.

Luke Skywalker wrote:When I was a kid, I watched a documentary in which a Wudang temple master claimed to have discovered the secret to living forever. He would simply eat very little, and stay in good physical condition, and figured that, so long as nothing violent happened to him, there would be no reason for him to die. I actually considered following in his footsteps. Fortunately, my parents convinced me otherwise.

You could certainly live a long time that way- good physical condition helps enormously, and as long as you're not actively suffering malnutrition eating relatively little is a good idea too. Avoiding violence is smart too if you want to live a long time- because even if you win fights, you get injured, which hurts your long term health.

But you won't be immortal. Just old and in relatively good shape for someone of such immense oldness.

umm, experiments on mice with starvation level diets show something like a threefold increase in longevity:

could be the wudang master has pulled it off:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction

Living three times longer than normal still isn't "immortal".

If you want to restrict your own intake within sane limits it likely will make your healthier and it could lead to a good long life - but "sane limits" include sufficient calories to maintain vital processes and sufficient nutrients for good health/warding off malnutrition. That requires a certain amount of eating.

all i have to do is live long enough for the singularity to shine out of my arse, and medical problems will be solved as fast as they are discovered...

an extra hundred years or so is more then most people can imagine now anyway.

Mice are inherently short-lived: their evolutionary strategy revolves around breeding quickly, not living long.

It's doubtful that humans would benefit as much from this sort of thing, or we would have noticed. It's not like there haven't been plenty of times and places where people don't get enough to eat, and there's a real shortage of 200 year old men around.

It's not just calorie-restriction alone that does the trick, it's calorie restriction done in a manner that supplies sufficient nutrients for optimum health while restricting calories severely. All too often during times of famine there is also malnutrition, which would tend to counter-act the life-lengthening of less calories. The life-extending can only be done when there is also high quality food available. It also needs to be in effect over a considerable period of the lifespan.

And yes, it's possible humans would benefit less than some other species. We already live abnormally long for what we are. Based on normal life cycles of closely related mammals we should be expiring somewhere between 30 and 50, yet humans routinely live to 70-80, and it's not unheard of for lives to be measured in triple digits even if that's not common.