I do regular fasts, usually for two weeks at a time. My record is 37 days. Most people can go 30 days without lasting effect, and can survive for up to 60 days without consuming a bite. In DDA, the amount of food you need to eat is astounding and ridiculous. I eat AN ENTIRE MOOSE a day. My suggestion is to make eating and starvation more akin to real life.
For the first few days without food, you get increasingly hungry and distracted. By day three, it’s all you can think about. But starting somewhere between three and five days without eating, the hunger disappears as your digestive system shuts down to conserve energy. At this point you get very weak and any hard work is likely to make you feel faint or dizzy. At around a week without food, however, your body shifts over entirely to starvation mode, which has two effects. First, your energy use drops, which means your body becomes super-efficient. Second, you start getting a lot of energy as your body prepares you to do whatever is necessary to get more food. At this point, you feel very good, very strong, and your mood is great. This will continue until you begin running out of muscle mass to cannibalize (for tissue repair), at which point you will become too weak to do anything and soon perish.
Currently in DDA, food requirements are so ridiculous that we wake up starving to death from every sleep. I would like to see food use cranked down, and starvation handled in a more realistic way. Making food much rarer and allowing for long-term starvation would increase rather than decrease the post-apocalyptic mood.
