During starvation, the body begins to atrophy and it is said the body is digesting itself for sustenance. What is actually happening cellularly to digest your muscles for energy?
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The process of cell death is called **apoptosis** – this can be triggered by a number of situations, including cellular age or cellular stress. Once it starts, there are a sequence of cellular processes that lead to the collapse of the cell. These changes include blebbing (cell membrane deformation and internal structure collapse), cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, DNA fragmentation, and mRNA decay. The fragments than get carried in the blood to organs such as the liver where the fragments can be broken down and reused, or to the kidneys where they are filtered out. However, larger protein fragments can clog the kidneys, causing reduced kidney function and possibly renal failure if a large number of cells are undergoing apoptosis.
Note that most adults lose between 50 and 70 billion cells each day due to apoptosis in normal circumstances. During starvation, it is not so much that more cells die, but that there are insufficient resources to replace those that undergo apoptosis.
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