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Woman Foregoes Food and Attempts to Live off Sunlight for 5 Weeks

By Christine Hsu | Update Date: Jun 07, 2013 05:15 PM EDT

A 65-year-old Seattle woman is subjecting herself to a bizarre self-experiment by seeing if she can survive five weeks living on nothing but light and water.

Navenna Shine reportedly stopped eating on May 3 to test out the theory of "breatharianism"- a concept that the sunlight can provide all the nourishment the body needs.

Shine has been documenting her experience via Facebook and Youtube. In her latest video update, she claims that she feels "very well" and only occasionally gets "twinges of what feels like hunger," according to the Daily Mail.

However, she has also suffered some negative side effects like "sensations of bile" at the back of her throat, sickness, nausea and constipation. Shine, who was born in the UK, said that her extreme self-experiment has also affected her social life.

On day seven she wrote on Facebook: "My friends had a barbeque tonight! I could not actually smell it but I could hear them all having a good time. They did send me their love but no steak!"

"Food is such a social connection that to give up the addiction to food also requires learning how to interact in a non-food situation," she wrote. "Imagine going to a wedding or a party or a buffet and not eating! I don't even want to think of it!"

She intends to stay on the extreme fast for "at least 40 days," and perhaps even four to six months according to the Daily News.

Shine's experiment is reportedly tied to her New Age beliefs about the universe. She tells Seattle's Fox affillate KCPQ that some Yogis called "breatharians" have also attempted to live off only water and sunlight.

"Plants live on light, then we eat plants," she wrote May 3 in a post on Facebook. "Are we simply not accessing our inherent ability to live on light? ... After hearing of the possibility that this might be true, I received a 'calling' from within, from the Universe, to find out if it is so."

She stressed that the experiment isn't a diet, adding that anyone who wants to try the fast for weight loss would gain the weight back once they started eating again.

Shine has set up eight cameras in her home to track her progress and to ensure that she doesn't sneak any snacks, according to the Daily Mail.

She spends her day watching movies, exercising and sleeping.

"I normally do 20 minutes on the treadmill twice a day," she wrote on May 28. "After that I often need to lie down for a while to recover. Today I went to sleep right after and seem to have spent half the day sleeping. Really pleasant on a rainy day in Seattle."

So far Shine is down to 130 pounds from about 160. She said she lost the weight from her stomach, and that her skin "feels better".

"I have the feeling that my body has reached a point where it has used up all its stored fats and is now looking around for what next to consume," she wrote on June 3.

While she is not entirely sure that she will be able to last, she says she intends to try her best.

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