>As someone who has fasted for a week, I can attest that much of the physical discomfort disappears rather quickly. Though, I can't speak directly to near-death

>As someone who has fasted for a week, I can attest that much of the physical discomfort disappears rather quickly. Though, I can't speak directly to near-death starvation, nor to dehydration. There are quite alot of reports from prisoners on hunger strikes, some of whom died. The ones I read about agreed with you. The discomfort disappears after the first week of so, after that you just get weaker and weaker to the point were you are no longer able to eat normal food. Dehydration is much more problematic with slipping into a delirium and going into spasm. Sadly there are also examples of prisoners experiencing this, as some countries have had the concept of "dry cells". They were first used as punishment and later to break hunger strikers. Baader of the German Baader-Meinhof group for example retained kidney damage from his stay in such a cell during a hunger strike.