the ideal weight for survival

after reading a little about survival i was wondering who has more of an advantage in the initial and long term stages should situation x occur.... with so much emphasis on being skinny and slim, will those people (especially young women like myself) be at a distinct disadvantage in such a situation?....... but does it mean obese people have more of a chance? ...... is there an ideal weight and an ideal amount of fat to have for...

A woman between the age of 16-55
A man between the age of 16-55
And children aged 7-16

.....i hope it doesnt sound like im just looking for any excuse not to be a size 0!

I would say having fat reserves for any age and weight would be optimal for situation X.

However in this day and age if you carry a little extra baggage you could be frowned upon.

Be healthy eat a balanced diet if possible if you know situation X is coming in advance then you should fatten up.

Just do your best.

LOL !

Take care.

Regards
Lee





[edit on 19-4-2008 by h3akalee]

Keep in mind that muscle weighs more than fat... so really a bodybuilder has a good chance of weighing more than an obese person of the same weight.

Rather than weight, you should probably go by your BMI. Anywhere between 19 and 25 is perfect. Under 10 and you start running into problems... harder for your body to keep warm so you can get pneumonia much easier, I think it's harder on your organs too. A BMI over 30 and you will likely find it hard to be physically active in a survival sense, such as walking for an entire day straight.

Fat reserves won't be a big help. After you haven't eaten for 1-2 weeks straight, your body is going to start shutting down no matter what your weight is.

Rather than focusing on weight, just eat properly sized meals (most people, including myself, eat way oversized meals compared to what we need in a day), and exercise every day. If you do those two things, the weight will take care of itself and automatically find your optimal balance.

I dont think weight has much to do with it as much as just being in shape. If a situation x occurs, who knows what you might have to do, it would just be wise to already be able to jog a few miles without getting too winded. And, being smaller, could be to your advantage since it takes less to feed you, and if you ration yourself you wont have to eat much anyways, the body is very efficient.

I think the only people that would have difficulty, would be disabled people, in which cases us young strong folks will help them out. You never know, sit x might having you running, swimming, jumping fences, digging, and all sorts of extreme things you might not do everyday.

Be prepared for the worst and hope for the best right!?

There is an official government website for calculating this:

Body Mass Index Calculator (BMI).

reply to post by Chakotay

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thanks but i dont listen to anything the government say lol

.... but thankyou

From my military experience the big super muscular guys tend to run out of energy after a few days of intense training. They have a lot of body mass to drag around, and their muscles are used to being well fueled and eat up a lot of energy. There are exceptions to that though.

Average army rangers size is about 5'10-11" and 165-75 pounds. That size range is a good balance of size and efficiency to go day after day. I've also seen some really little guys that were very impressive with what they could do.

Just some personal experiences, not sure how it would work out in a survival situation. The more important factor I think are mental. Not making stupid panic moves, and staying focused on survival, not bogging down in depression.

I also think that people who weigh less,have more chances because anyway they are used to less food,we usually overestimate the amount of food we need.

You want to be fit and strong, with extra padding all over. Eat some burgers and bacon. The extra 10 or 15 lbs of extra fat will go a long way.

Yeah I'd be worrying about how fit and strong you are, not how much you weigh.

Whatever weight you are if you can trek it easy for a day or jog for a couple of hours. You've got a supreme advantage over someone who weighs the same and cant do that.

I think that being fit is way more important than weight when it comes to sitx, but you also can't be huge either. You will need to be fit should you need to travel for long periods of time or surviving in a rugged area. Also I believe that skinny people can supress hunger alot easier than a large person. I am overweight and pretty non-active so I have been working out and getting in shape.

Also skinny people with no food just may turn to the big ones for a bite to eat. I don't want to be anyones dinner.

reasonably fit ...with a little body fat and the mind set for endurance!!..
Above all its the mindset...the will to survive...you have that in sit X thats the best thing that anyone can have...

Man of average height: 173 lbs. at 18% body fat
Woman of average height: 147lbs. at 25% body fat

Jon

[edit on 4.25.2008 by Voxel]

reply to post by Voxel

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thanks! just what i was looking for!

Fit with a good percentage of body fat will go a long way. As we all may know in our daily lives with bad diet routines that if you don't eat, your body will react at first by storing fat for later use......why that form of diet never works......

Considering Sit X, you may not have any access to food for a while so your body will use the fat stored for energy.

In reality though its clean drinking water you need to worry about the most.

"A person can live without food for quite some time, usually for many weeks.
The body will use its fat and protein stores (muscles) to help it survive.
If a person has a lot of fat stores (is very heavy), they will live longer than a
person who has very little fat (very thin), so how long a person can survive
depends a lot of the person. Of course, if you go without food for a few weeks,
you will be very weak since you have been using your own muscles for energy.

Water is a different story. A person will die within 3-4 days without water. The size of the person really doesn't make much difference."


Jill Irvin
Ohio State University

I'm 5'9" with a BMI of 20.7, I work out 4 days a week at the gym. Body fat is 10%. I may not have many fat stores but I also dont require much food to maintain where I am at. I am however working on gaining 10 lbs. So my current diet consist of 3200 calories per day until I reach my desired weight, I can however get by on as little as 1500 calories a day if necessary, possibly even less.

I'm not to worried in a sit X, I just bought a new home in november (fist one!) and came to find out both of my dogs EXCEL at catching wildlife I feel with their skills I can obtain enough game to feed myself and the two of them, not to mention they both have the ability to bring down larger game. (Pitbull and German Shepherd)

[edit on 10-5-2008 by BluByWho]

In the majority of cases, how much one weighs, or their BMI, or their 'obesity' level is a load of pure bunk developed by a lazy profession to get everyone to fit into a nice little mold so they're easier to diagnose/treat for whatever the disease du jour happens to be. I know there is true obesity, but it is not as common as most will tell you it is.

Your ideal weight is where you feel the most comfortable, where you can perform physical activity at the optimum level with minimal discomfort. I stand 6'-2" and right now weigh in at 180. That's the highest I have ever weighed, yet I could eat three times what my friends could in my younger days. My daughter used to be a bit on the pudgy side when she was younger and wanted to diet. I told her 'no', and that I would shove a funnel in her mouth and pour bacon down her if she tried it. Now, without dieting, she has slimmed down to a perfect weight (very attractive, even if I do say so myself), and did it all naturally without any dietary intervention. She will now remain at that weight indefinitely, barring any future dieting attempts. Fat doesn't make you fat, diets make you fat.

I had a friend when I was younger who was obese, over 500 pounds and a couple inches shorter than I was. He ate like a bird. I ate like a starving horse. He did just fine (although I was a bit concerned about him at that level). Another friend was in the 250-300 range and it was perfect for him. He was perfectly happy and healthy, and ate a lot less than I did. Every person has a built-in metabolism that works for them, and as long as it does not get out of control, leave it be.

As far as SitX, if you can walk for several hours without overly tiring, if you can run a half-mile, if you can perform moderately strenuous activity for a few hours, you are fine physically. What will get you through is your mind, your mental outlook and ability to plan ahead and outsmart others. You don't have to be a super-hero or super-model to survive.

There is no ideal weight, just an ideal attitude.

TheRedneck

reply to post by TheRedneck

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I couldn't agree with you more that your mental state is most important. I would think by having a proper weight would help to eliminate any additional mental strains. Survival is definetly not about comfort or staying in a comfort level however. If you a larger fellow and used to eating a lot, your going to have a lot more mental anguish when the food is scarce than someone who doesnt eat as much. I would tend to think that would create some additional mental instability in a survival situation.

I don't buy into the BMI completely either, but being in a healthy range can't be unhealthy thats for sure.

Speak for yourself. In situation X I'm not going to risk my neck for no cripple or retard. In reality when the # kicks off its the disabled who will be left behind. They are just dead weight which at the moment are society can carry.

I've been as small as 180lbs and as large as 380lbs when i was injured and gained weight doing nothing.

It depends on what region i'd be surviving in and what terrain as to size, and even then, there's no ideal size, as mentioned above, it's really all about fitness and mentality.

For me, 180lbs is scrawny, i'm 6' and big boned, not fat, but really big boned. My hands and feet are huge, wrists that no watches fit on, and generally a rugged and heavy bone structure. I've got a lot of extra bone also, places where previous breaks have formed masses of calcium, and now don't break as easily anymore. A couple more breaks in my right hand and my knuckles will probably all just fuse together.

At 180-190lbs i'm fast, superagile, and can swing through the trees like a monkey. If i lived in the trees or had a job as a ninja, this is what i'd weigh

at 200-220 I'm fast, agile, and can go for long distances easily, being able to cover 40-50 miles a night on foot if need. If i needed to live on the ground and be fast, as well as cover a wide range, this would be the weight i'd like to be.

At 230-250 I'm still fast, fairly agile, i can still go long distances, but at a bit morea price of fatigue. I've got some weight which i know how to use to my advantage. With the weight, it's like having a longer lever in a lot of situations, and i can accomplish tasks a lighter animal couldn't. If i had to do heavy work within a small range, i'd like to be about 240lbs, then it's easy to do rugged heavy lifting work for a long time

At 260-280 I'm a bit slower, but not slow, agility is decreased, but not to any debilitating degree. Dealing with situations using brute force becomes easy. At this weight, disadvantages start showing themselves. Climbing trees isn't easy, as branches snap and it's hard to fit through smaller places. If i was dealing with large powerful animals i'd like to be this weight. At 280lbs i can tackle large hooved mammals like horses, Xibu, smallo cattle, large deer, and bring them down, keeping them pinned. I can also stand a good chance of dealing with preadtors. If a cat like a mountain lion bit into my fat, i have puncture wounds and it has a broken neck, and i'll be chowing on cat as i dress my flesh wounds. Same for a bear, i it's under 350lbs, at this weight i can pin it quickly. Gators up to 10 feet are easy to handle without getting swung around. I'm still fast enough to chase down a deer.

At 300 to 340, during most of this time i only had use of my left hand, as my right was undergoing reconstructive surgery to put my middle finger back on, and doing moist things was a fair effort. I could use my weight with so much force though, that i didn't need my right hand for most strenuous tasks. I could take 6' gators and handle them easily with only one hand, although jawcatching was a bit sketchy without 2 hands, it was doable, and once i got a good catch it was no problem. I could tackle large deer with ease, without even having to pin 'em. I could just grab 'em by the back of the neck and they're captured solid.

At 340-380 it wasn't easy or fun to do anything fast, but there were a few times i still had to run down an animal occasionally. One day an Axis deer got loose, i chased it, it jumped a 4' fence, and so did i, and caught it in a field as it ran for the treeline. I had no problem snatching it by the back of the neck in a full run and stopping it dead in it's tracks without me so much as being affected by it's inertia as i stopped it. It's not good to be this heavy though, but there are advantages. We shot a 400lb pig one day and it dropped in the deep mud, i had to drag it about 100 yards through the sticky deep mud, and had i not weighed what i had, i wouldn't have been able to drag it home or hang it to dress it out.


For me though, i'd pick a weight of between 200 and 250, depending on the terrain. Lighter in hotter climates, heavier in colder. If i was living in the trees(in the canopy like monkeys) i'd go for lighter.

I don't think there's an ideal weight though, and it does have more to do with fitness. I was weightlifting pretty seriously for a while, i got up to 240lbs from 190, added 50lbs of muscle, and i was beastly strong, but it was useless. I could deadlift 700lbs but i never found myself needing to on a regular basis, so being that strong was just useless.

Whatever weight you're at, make sure you're fit. Even at 380lbs my doctors were puzzled, they said i had the internal health of a top athlete.