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Amazing Feats

The Man Who Didn't Eat for 382 Days

Angus Barbieri went 382 days without solid food in 1965-66 under medical supervision. Here's how the fast worked and what doctors found.

By Written Facts StaffOctober 21, 20267 min read

You probably know the feeling from Thanksgiving: you skip lunch to save room, and by mid-afternoon you're picking at the stuffing before the turkey is out of the oven. One missed meal makes most people irritable. In 1965 a 27-year-old Scot named Angus Barbieri stopped eating solid food and didn't start again for 382 days. He did it under medical supervision, lost about 276 lb, and ended up in medical literature and in Guinness World Records.

The short answer

Angus Barbieri ate no solid food from June 1965 to July 1966. That is 382 days, more than a full year. During that time he drank tea, coffee and sparkling water and took vitamins. Doctors in Dundee, Scotland, watched him the whole way through, and blood tests confirmed he wasn't eating in secret.

He began at about 456 lb (207 kg) and reached his target weight of 180 lb (82 kg), a loss of roughly 276 lb (125 kg). Guinness gives slightly different numbers: 214 kg (33 st 10 lb) at the start and 80.74 kg (12 st 10 lb) at the end.

Guinness first listed the fast in its 1971 edition, and the record still stands as "the longest period for which anyone has gone without solid food." That raises some obvious questions: who he was, how anyone survives that long, and what it did to his body.

Who he was and why he started

Barbieri came from Tayport, a small town in Fife across the River Tay from Dundee. In his mid-twenties he weighed around 456 lb, and he went to Maryfield Hospital in Dundee to get treatment for his obesity.

The doctors at the University Department of Medicine in Dundee put him on a "therapeutic fast." That was the name for a medically supervised period of eating nothing, used at the time as a way to make severely obese patients lose weight. The plan was meant to be short.

Barbieri adjusted to it better than anyone expected. He wanted to reach his "ideal weight" of 180 lb, so he asked to keep going. The doctors agreed to continue as long as they could monitor him, and the short fast stretched to more than a year. Because the case was so unusual, two of the physicians involved later published a detailed report on it.

How it worked

For most of the fast Barbieri was not in a hospital bed. He lived at home and came back to the hospital as an outpatient for checkups, which included regular blood and urine tests.

He kept to a strict routine:

Drinks with no calories: tea, coffee and sparkling water
Vitamins: to cover what food would normally supply
No solid food: none at all for the whole 382 days

In the last few weeks he sometimes put a little milk or sugar in his tea. Apart from that, he took in essentially no calories.

The obvious doubt is whether he was eating on the sly, and the doctors had a way to check. Regular blood-sugar tests showed whether he was eating, because food, and especially carbohydrate, pushes blood glucose up. His readings stayed low.

They were very low. According to the case report, his blood glucose sat near 30 mg per 100 ml for the last eight months of the fast. Even so, he kept walking around and making his outpatient visits. His body was running on its stored fat, and he had a lot of it.

What the doctors found

In 1973 W.K. Stewart and L.W. Fleming published the case in the Postgraduate Medical Journal under the title "Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration." It is the main medical record of what happened to him.

Their main findings:

Normal glucose handling: His glucose and tolbutamide tolerance tests came back normal, even after months without food.
A fading glucagon response: Glucagon is a hormone that normally raises blood sugar. Over time his blood sugar responded to it less and less, until it stopped responding at all. The response came back to normal once he was given carbohydrates again.
Low magnesium: His magnesium levels were low from the first month.
A late calcium spike: His calcium was briefly high near the end of the fast.
A shift around day 100: After about 100 days, the amount of minerals (cations and phosphate) leaving his body in his urine rose sharply. The authors thought this probably came from his body breaking down excess soft tissue and bone.

The authors concluded that the long fast had done him no harm. That was a judgment about one closely watched patient. It was not a general verdict that going a year without food is safe.

The ending and the aftermath

A fast this long can't just stop with a big dinner. One account says his doctors gave him salt and then sugar for about ten days before he ate solid food again.

His first real meal was a boiled egg and a slice of buttered bread. ScienceAlert says he also had a cup of black coffee. It also quotes him telling a Chicago Tribune reporter that he had "thoroly enjoyed my egg." After more than a year, a single egg was enough to make the news.

Sources give slightly different dates. One account says the fast ran from 14 June 1965 to 30 June 1966 and was officially ended on 1 July, with the first meal on 11 July. Another says the fast ended on 11 July. Guinness just says June 1965 to July 1966. Some newspaper reports at the time also gave a figure of 392 days, but the medical paper and Guinness both say 382.

The weight mostly stayed off. Five years later he weighed 196 lb (89 kg), only a little above his target.

According to Wikipedia, he later moved to Warwick, England, married and had two sons. He died on 7 September 1990, aged about 51, after a short illness.

Why you shouldn't try it, and where the record stands

Barbieri's fast was a one-off. It is also not a template for anyone else. Several conditions came together in his case: he was a young man with very large fat reserves, and a university medical team tested his blood and urine throughout. Even with all that, the doctors recorded low magnesium, an unusual calcium spike and a sharp loss of minerals.

Other fasts have gone badly. ScienceAlert notes that fasts longer than 40 days are considered dangerous, and that doctors eventually gave up starvation as a treatment because it was likely to kill patients. It also reports that one patient on another medical fast died during refeeding, the stage when food is brought back. That is why Barbieri's doctors brought food back so slowly.

The record is still in place. Guinness lists Barbieri's 382 days as the longest time anyone has gone without solid food. Guinness has reportedly said it doesn't encourage fasting attempts because it is concerned about unsafe behavior, so nobody should expect it to welcome a challenger.

This post doesn't give medical advice. If you're thinking about any kind of extended fast, talk to a doctor first. Barbieri's story shows the extreme edge of what the human body can do, and it is not a diet plan.

Sources (4)

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