Liz Haberkorn
Not Otherwise Specified
A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.
--“Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
I am dreaming. In my dream I am in the forest, with tall, lean trees that meet at the top of the sky to form an umbrella of leaves over me. It is a forest that belongs in a fairy tale, home to salivating wolves that slump in the shadows and lost children who have been dumped here by malicious stepmothers. Suddenly I am in a clearing where a white, vintage stove sits off to the side, like an exotic mushroom, a soft light emitting from the oven window. Peering through the window I see the puffiest pastries about to explode with cheese filling and cherry preserves, and white icing drizzled over the golden, crusty sides. Am I hungry? No. I am starving.
Actually, according to medical definition of the term, I’m not really starving. My body will enter starvation mode if I consume less than 1,200 calories a day for an extended period of time, usually weeks or months. Your body will do this under these conditions, too. The non-vital functions will shut down to conserve energy and store any incoming food. In the absence of food, the body will start to consume its own muscle, along with electrolytes. Without electrolytes, the nervous system cannot transmit necessary impulses or communicate with the rest of the body, causing the whole miraculous system to malfunction and eventually implode (although others will see it as flaking skin, protruding bones, bad breath, and thinning hair. The hair that is lost on your head will reinvent itself as a soft layer of thin, light hair called lanugo that will embrace your body, in an attempt to regulate body temperature, making you look like a yeti).
And although I may not be starving according to medical dictionaries and definitions, I am sick. I have been sick since I was 12, when I decided food was embarrassing.
Even before that, though, my relationship with food had always been odd. In the first grade, a teacher publicly humiliated me for throwing out a bag of unopened cheese doodles. “There are starving children in China,” she had said about that unopened bag of cheese doodles. In the second grade, a friend tattled on me to my mother, reporting that I occasionally threw out my sandwiches in the cafeteria, uneaten. “That better not be true, Elizabeth,” my mother scolded. This was also the same year I went on my first diet, which lasted about half a day.