Rochester Hills Native Survives Fijian Jungle on '72 Hours' Reality-TV Series

Rochester Hills native Shelby Mahoney had no clue that when she'd respond to a Facebook advertisement seeking adventurers, she'd wind up a reality TV star.

Mahoney, who was living in Chicago at the time, saw a post shared by a friend that simply asked, "Are you an adventurer? Apply here," and applied on her lunch break from her job as a financial analyst. 

Soon, the 2007 Rochester High School graduate found herself dropped in the dense jungles of Fiji as part of a three-person team competing against two other squads for $100,000 on the TNT reality-TV series 72 Hours. 

In each episode of the show, three teams are dropped in different locales armed solely with a GPS and a single bottle of water and required to navigate to designated "supply drops" to get useful—or useless—tools to help with the team's survival.

"And hopefully in the end you make it," Mahoney said. "If you don't suffer through the exhaustion and heat."

Mahoney said the experience, filmed in October 2012, offered her first real taste of what it takes to survive in the wild.

"It was definitely my first time in the wilderness, let alone in the wilderness with no food or water," Mahoney said. "I've never been camping or anything at all."

In preparing for the journey, Mahoney said she went about it all wrong.

"As much as I prepared for it, I prepared completely wrong," she said. "I worked on my tan and getting my wardrobe planned for the show instead of learning how to make a fire."

To cope throughout the 72 hours without food, Mahoney said her body went into "survival mode."

"We definitely drank from the river," she said, which carries a risk of parasites.

As for food, she said the team went without eating over the 72 hours.

"Your body just doesn't get hungry," she said. And when a teammate tried to eat some indigenous plant life, it backfired.

"One time a team member ate a raw plant and started vomiting profusely," Mahoney said. 

While reality-TV series often are criticized for stretching truths or scripting scenes, Mahoney said 72 Hours is absolutely real.

"It's 100 percent authentic," she said. "I thought maybe some stuff will be, but nothing was scripted. If you weren't properly prepared, you weren't properly prepared."

In one scene, Mahoney said, she is sleeping outside wearing a bikini and covering herself with mud for shelter from the cold.

While viewers will have to wait until Friday's 10 p.m. airtime on TNT to see how her team fared, Mahoney said she survived the experience without running into any truly life-threatening dangers. The dehydration and starvation, however, did wreak havoc on her body.

"It took nine days for the soreness to go away and get back to my normal body weight," she said. "I lost a lot of water weight, my stomach shrunk, so it was hard for me to eat meals when I did get back."

Mahoney, who now lives in San Francisco, said that despite the physical and emotional toll of her three days in the jungle, she would do it again if she were to be dropped in Fiji tomorrow. 

"I would do it, 100 percent," she said. "It was the best 72 hours of my life because it was so challenging."

72 Hours airs Friday, July 19, on TNT.