16 ms·

Insatiable: A life without eating

159 points by samclemens 2y ago

marmaduke 2y ago
Well, certainly puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
- ericmcer 2y ago
  If I had been born ~90 years earlier I would have died before I formed my first memory. That thought comforts me when I feel like life is unfair or difficult. The whole thing is a bonus for me… I should be dead. Maybe similar feelings provide some comfort for people who have to manage their lives with diseases like Crohns.
  - jessriedel 2y ago
    OK, but note that Crohn's (and ulcerative colitis) are nearly unknown in the developing world. For reasons we don't understand, they are caused by modernity. So 90 years ago having Crohn's would be much less likely. (Symptoms from both Crohn's and ulcerative colitis don't usually present until the teens or early twenties, so this is not a case of infants with the disease simply dying early in the developing world.)
    - Retric 2y ago
      Mild cases of Crohn’s are less likely to be diagnosed in the developing world and far more likely to be deadly when combined with something else like Malaria or TB. So it’s almost impossible to compare statistics between such wildly different countries. Essentially unless the healthcare system is good enough and population healthy enough you only capture severe casss.
      - jessriedel 2y ago
        I don’t think that’s the expert consensus at all, unless you’re using a much more expansive definition of CD and UC (vague “IBS-like symptoms”). People have studied this question very carefully, and the strong consensus is that these diseases, which are very often deadly if left untreated (and sometimes even if treated), occur at vastly lower rates in the developing world. It’s not mere measurement error.
        Retric 2y ago
        I’ve heard both views from experts. If you look at the methodology used to collect data, and consider how different health system would what was available for review, it’s easy to question the validity of these studies. Ex: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(19)30333-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1... “To model IBD mortality, we used the causes of death database, which includes data from vital registration and verbal autopsy data.” “To estimate the non-fatal burden of IBD, we used two separate databases, one for Crohn's disease and another for ulcerative colitis. Both included data from literature, hospital discharges, and claims data (the latter available only from the USA in 2000, 2010, and 2012; further information on IBD data is provided in the appendix, p 21). ”
        jessriedel 2y ago
        Do you have links to papers that argue for your position, or are you just saying you personally talked to a researcher who held it? The paper you link reports a 60 fold difference in prevalence of a deadly illness, which is not the sort of thing that can be easily obscured by the measurement issues you bring up.
        Retric 2y ago
        Researcher, I don’t know if they published anything on the topic. As to the 60 fold difference, I’m not sure if you realize just how vast the difference in healthcare systems are worldwide. Chad for example has 1/60th the doctors per person as the US, how many colonoscopies do you expect they preform per year?
theonlyjesus 2y ago
I'm a fellow Crohnie. Crohn's disease is a long, exhausting disease. I hope we see a cure in our lifetime.
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  Same and same. It broke my heart a little to read that this essayist got diagnosed at age 11... it's bad enough as an adult, but I can't even imagine dealing with it as a little kid :(
- notshift 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - reverius42 2y ago
    Is it banning glyphosate?
  - drekipus 2y ago
    I'm ready for mass downvotes, let's hear it
  - knodi123 2y ago
    Is there a cure that has been shown to be real in a double-blind trial? Or maybe that has widespread agreement among the medical community? I'm ready to hear it, but I've gone down this road a lot with people saying things like "just stop eating chemicals!" or whatever.
    - swatcoder 2y ago
      Chron's wasn't an issue I struggled with myself, but I've successfully resolved many wellness and comfort issues through personal experimentation. Science is slow in general and medical science mostly examines population-wide efficacy rather than individual efficacy, as its these population-wide conclusions that help form guidance for practicioners serving a population. For any given potential treatment or remedy, an individual may be an outlier whose specific attributes weren't represented or analyzed in that kind of research or whose response would have fallen into the noise floor. You can certainly choose to only accept those population-scale conclusions, but many of us only have so many decades to try to sort ourselves out. And further, because of the feedback loop between thought and many autonomic processes in the body, one can even experience real remedy from formally invalid treatments. For an individual, that's all you need.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
I've always thought we should have a digestive system bypass in the esophagus. Give us the joy of tasting, chewing, and swallowing food, but then have it go into an external bag before it hits the stomach.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Unfortunately, we also sense the mechanical filling of the stomach, and the movement through the bowels. Unless you stop the hunger altogether I don't think you'll feel satisfied without the whole process.
  - mateo1 2y ago
    It's not just that. I'm pretty sure your stomach and gut also provide information regarding caloric intake, on top of other sensors detecting the raise in blood sugars/lipids/aminoacids. And even if it didn't, you'll get hungry when your body/brain detects you've switched to using reserve power. If eating doesn't satiate the hunger by providing energy, the response would likely be to make you hungrier and hungrier.
    - arghwhat 2y ago
      Well, "reserve power" is from starvation, intense exercise, or weird diets, not hunger. From brain perspective, "reserve power" would be when it ends up relying on ketone bodies, which start to be produced in higher numbers when you have been in high glucagon, low insulin condition for a longer period of time. Long enough that the liver burned through its glycogen stores and the liver cells redirect oxaloacetate to gluconeogenesis (producing glucose from stuff in the blood) to the point where the cells become unable to finish its own metabolism of free fatty acids. It then turns the intermediate products it can't use itself into ketone bodies. That part can be regulated with nutrition, glucagon and insulin, but having plenty of glucose won't replace sensations from the digestive system itself.
    - mcmoor 2y ago
      Yeah I've heard that the reason artificial sweetener makes people fatter instead is that the body feels robbed when they don't get the supposed caloric intake they should get when eating something sweet. So they crave more. I actually do feel it, I still feel hungry if I eat lots of something that has little caloric value. So eating lots of vegetable and water doesn't fool my body into satisfaction.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
arghwhat 2y ago
The post says that the TPN solution is fed slowly and that the body barely reacts. What if it was intentionally fed with periodic bursts, simulating strong blood sugar, fat and protein spikes from eating and triggering stronger insulin responses with resulting lows? I wonder if that would substantially change the experience. Maybe tuning the nutrition mixture. I vaguely remember the journey of the Soylent guy experimenting with the composition and hitting various snags along the way before he finally got to a point where it made him feel satisfied and not crave any other foods. Soylent still has the mechanical feeding sensation though... Sometimes medical developments plateau when it reaches a point of working, before it reaches the point of being good.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  I think the whole framing was that the reason the problem space is hard, is that if you deliver too much at once, your body notices and treats it much like if it found splinters stuck in you - invasion of foreign mass to trigger inflammatory response.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    I am not sure if the burning was related to inflammation. I recall the sensation of marker fluid aburning as it moves towards the heart, but it might just be a sensation rather than a reaction. Wasn't clear from the post at least. Maybe one could burst only some convenient nutrition that is easier to deliver in higher doses like glucose, while still drip-feeding the bulkier macronutrients. Another crazy idea could be to intentionally introduce glucagon and insulin to artificially induce highs and lows. I'm sure it's a very hard problem space, but it might be one looking for a creative patient willing to put effort into further research...
    - rincebrain 2y ago
      The explicit quote from the article was "believing it required so much liquid, and such a high concentration of chemical nutrients, that it would cause inflammation and burning when administered.", and I am assuming that the former was not just redundant with the latter. Directly mucking with glucagon and insulin for anything short of directly demonstrable life and death is going to be a fraught proposal in almost any circumstance, I would speculate, given that the risk is not just wasting away from malnutrition but much more direct tissue damage and death. (Much like I suspect something with a risk profile like Accutane's would not get approved again _now_ with the body of evidence we have for what happens if you introduce something that's "almost, but not quite, vitamin A" into rapidly growing bodies...)
John_da 2y ago
[flagged]
Night_Thastus 2y ago
Very dark, but also very insightful. We take a lot of simple pleasures in our lives for granted. The feeling of stretching, scratching an itch, relaxing our muscles, sleep, the taste of food, the smells around us, feeling warmth or cold on our skin, etc. I've wondered a lot about what a life would be like without these things - even if you were otherwise completely healthy.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  It can be a strange experience, to try and describe to people, something missing from your shared vocabulary. I had a number of rounds of an IV drug treatment 4 or 5 years ago, and on one and only one of them, shortly after being treated, I found myself feeling a strange sensation, one that I couldn't place, but that I definitely remembered having experienced before. After 5 minutes or so of wondering and racking my brain, I placed it. It was hunger. At some point in my early teenage years, that particular piece of wiring stopped working, and I didn't really pay much attention at the time, so I can't place precisely when, but I had no severe injuries or medical maladies crop up. The two likely causes of that are apparently a brain tumor or hormone problems, but my bloodwork and brain scans turned up nothing exciting then or since, so ...who knows. (I did, many years after this started, start drinking caffeine sometimes, but it doesn't stop happening if I stop drinking caffeine for months, so I don't think it's related. I'm not on anything stimulant-like or adjacent either.) But it's a difficult thing to explain, the absence of that - and the knock-on effects, the absence of motivation to avoid it that results, the absence of satisfaction from eating causing it to vanish. How you can sincerely ask "why am I having a pounding headache - oh I forgot to eat for 2 days", and not have had any sign unless you set deliberate calendar events and phone alarms to serve as a reminder that this basic feedback system is broken. (I usually don't need them, these days, because habit is a powerful thing, but I keep them around so that I don't become sufficiently sick or taxed by life that something breaks down and I forget...again.) I can't exactly offer an A-B comparison of the difference, my memories of my childhood are not clear enough for that at this point, but while I will be sad if I end up not eating something especially tasty or unusual, there's not a visceral absence of satiation in it, it's an intellectual lament.
  - 2y ago
PunchTornado 2y ago
One of those reads that changes your perspective on life in a way.
smeej 2y ago
This really puts the two years my UC and I could only eat one meal for every meal in perspective. I eventually got used to being the weirdo who brought my own food, or just declined everything if we made spontaneous plans while we were already out. But at least I could eat.
DoreenMichele 2y ago
Everything was vigorously wiped with alcohol because any bacteria would be injected straight into my heart. Anyone with a serious medical condition that requires home care on par with hospital care deals with this -- often, while at their very worst. It's probably one of the scarier aspects of living with a serious chronic condition.
gwern 2y ago
I wonder how much appetite suppressants like GLP-1s could help here? They seem to hit appetite at a high level and curiously reduce other cravings or addictions, so they might be able to deal with the hunger here.
TheCapeGreek 2y ago
The bit about the 1944 study and how they rebounded eating way more food after their starvation really struck an emotional chord with me. I had a few years of financial struggle as a high schooler and student, to the point where I was constantly hungry and very skinny. It was a bit of a traumatic time for me for other reasons, and this article gave me more insight into another dimension of it. Since I hit a career stride and haven't been walking nearly as much, I've been at my largest ever. A kind of eternal overcompensation. My father also sometimes excused wasteful grocery expenditure saying "I've gone without before; I refuse to do it again".
- mlinhares 2y ago
  Been there as well. Took me a while to recognize I did not have to finish every plate of food, that i could either save it for later when i was hungry again or just throw it away.
  - rikthevik 2y ago
    I don't want to waste food, but I need to regularly remind myself that overeating is also wasting food.
    - mikestew 2y ago
      It’s just as wasteful to put the food on my ass as it is to put it in the trash, as I tell my spouse on occasion.
    - LorenDB 2y ago
      If it's not going to waste, it's going to waist.
    - sourcecodeplz 2y ago
      I try to waste as little as possible. Would have been nice to live in a house with a yard and some chickens. Would give them leftovers. Otherwise just turn it into compost.
    - 2y ago
davidkuennen 2y ago
I'm amazed Stanley Dudrick didn't win the Nobel Prize for inventing TPN.
Ductapemaster 2y ago
There’s an excellent Radiolab episode that ends with a similar story of someone on TPN. If you found this interesting, it’s worth a listen. https://radiolab.org/podcast/197112-guts https://radiolab.org/podcast/197112-guts
gcanyon 2y ago
The best meal I've ever had was clear chicken broth and it's not even close. Let me explain: in my 20s I was in a motorcycle accident. I was in a forced coma for over a week, and in the ICU for four weeks. No food, only an NG (nasogastric) tube. When they took the tube out, the first thing they gave me was a toothbrush. I brushed for something like five minutes, it was indescribably pleasant. Then they gave me a cup of clear chicken broth: basically salty water with something to color it yellow. It. Was. Heavenly. I have literally never in my life enjoyed eating anything as much as I enjoyed sipping that broth.
- DoreenMichele 2y ago
  That falls under the saying "No spice like hunger." It's just kind of an extreme situation for it. I can relate, actually. I had a terrible first pregnancy and threw up constantly for most of it. Once the baby was born, my husband rushed off to Burger King to get me a burger and fries and I wolfed it down. It was half gone before I realized what was "weird": I had been picking at my food for months. I don't even usually eat burgers, but was also all "Wow, soooo good!"
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    What I always say: "When you're really hungry -- I mean really hungry -- nothing satisfies like food."
omoikane 2y ago
The idea that taking away food also takes away what's human reminds me of Dazai Osamu's "Ningen Shikkaku"[1], where the narrator wrote in the first chapter that he had no idea what being hungry means, that he never understood what it means to feel hungry. People must eat to survive and thus must work in order to eat, but because the narrator never felt hungry, he does not understand how humans operated at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human "No Longer Human" seem to be the official English title, although a more literal translation would be "disqualified as human".
mise_en_place 2y ago
> As the experiment progressed, Ancel Keys, the nutritionist running the study, noticed odd psychological effects. As we know now, Keys was a truly unscrupulous fellow. He took bribes from the AHA to lie about the effects of saturated fats and animal fats on heart disease.
- Varriount 2y ago
  Can you provide a source for this assertion?
bruce343434 2y ago
I wonder if a hunger inhibitor like ozempic would help
tonnydourado 2y ago
Well, that was some nightmare fuel early in the morning. I've been diagnosed with Crohn's almost 20 years ago, had two surgeries, and am currently on meds. No fistulas, thankfully, but the whole thing is a Damocles sword, nevertheless. Reading this made it a little extra sharp.
RCitronsBroker 2y ago
This is what pulled me out of an eating disorder as a teen. Got diagnosed with Crohn’s, also was put onto a mush-diet for almost half a year, and got so pissed over that timespan, that the primal joy of eating just straight up overpowered any sort of disordered obsessiveness i was fighting with before. Life is so damn strange.
Koshkin 2y ago
When I was younger, I thought that we eat in order to live. Growing older, I realized that the opposite is true.

159 points by samclemens 2y ago

marmaduke 2y ago

Well, certainly puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

ericmcer 2y ago
If I had been born ~90 years earlier I would have died before I formed my first memory. That thought comforts me when I feel like life is unfair or difficult. The whole thing is a bonus for me… I should be dead. Maybe similar feelings provide some comfort for people who have to manage their lives with diseases like Crohns.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  OK, but note that Crohn's (and ulcerative colitis) are nearly unknown in the developing world. For reasons we don't understand, they are caused by modernity. So 90 years ago having Crohn's would be much less likely. (Symptoms from both Crohn's and ulcerative colitis don't usually present until the teens or early twenties, so this is not a case of infants with the disease simply dying early in the developing world.)
  - Retric 2y ago
    Mild cases of Crohn’s are less likely to be diagnosed in the developing world and far more likely to be deadly when combined with something else like Malaria or TB. So it’s almost impossible to compare statistics between such wildly different countries. Essentially unless the healthcare system is good enough and population healthy enough you only capture severe casss.
    - jessriedel 2y ago
      I don’t think that’s the expert consensus at all, unless you’re using a much more expansive definition of CD and UC (vague “IBS-like symptoms”). People have studied this question very carefully, and the strong consensus is that these diseases, which are very often deadly if left untreated (and sometimes even if treated), occur at vastly lower rates in the developing world. It’s not mere measurement error.
      - Retric 2y ago
        I’ve heard both views from experts. If you look at the methodology used to collect data, and consider how different health system would what was available for review, it’s easy to question the validity of these studies. Ex: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(19)30333-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1... “To model IBD mortality, we used the causes of death database, which includes data from vital registration and verbal autopsy data.” “To estimate the non-fatal burden of IBD, we used two separate databases, one for Crohn's disease and another for ulcerative colitis. Both included data from literature, hospital discharges, and claims data (the latter available only from the USA in 2000, 2010, and 2012; further information on IBD data is provided in the appendix, p 21). ”
        jessriedel 2y ago
        Do you have links to papers that argue for your position, or are you just saying you personally talked to a researcher who held it? The paper you link reports a 60 fold difference in prevalence of a deadly illness, which is not the sort of thing that can be easily obscured by the measurement issues you bring up.
        Retric 2y ago
        Researcher, I don’t know if they published anything on the topic. As to the 60 fold difference, I’m not sure if you realize just how vast the difference in healthcare systems are worldwide. Chad for example has 1/60th the doctors per person as the US, how many colonoscopies do you expect they preform per year?

theonlyjesus 2y ago

I'm a fellow Crohnie. Crohn's disease is a long, exhausting disease. I hope we see a cure in our lifetime.

spondylosaurus 2y ago
Same and same. It broke my heart a little to read that this essayist got diagnosed at age 11... it's bad enough as an adult, but I can't even imagine dealing with it as a little kid :(
notshift 2y ago
[flagged]
- reverius42 2y ago
  Is it banning glyphosate?
- drekipus 2y ago
  I'm ready for mass downvotes, let's hear it
- knodi123 2y ago
  Is there a cure that has been shown to be real in a double-blind trial? Or maybe that has widespread agreement among the medical community? I'm ready to hear it, but I've gone down this road a lot with people saying things like "just stop eating chemicals!" or whatever.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    Chron's wasn't an issue I struggled with myself, but I've successfully resolved many wellness and comfort issues through personal experimentation. Science is slow in general and medical science mostly examines population-wide efficacy rather than individual efficacy, as its these population-wide conclusions that help form guidance for practicioners serving a population. For any given potential treatment or remedy, an individual may be an outlier whose specific attributes weren't represented or analyzed in that kind of research or whose response would have fallen into the noise floor. You can certainly choose to only accept those population-scale conclusions, but many of us only have so many decades to try to sort ourselves out. And further, because of the feedback loop between thought and many autonomic processes in the body, one can even experience real remedy from formally invalid treatments. For an individual, that's all you need.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

I've always thought we should have a digestive system bypass in the esophagus. Give us the joy of tasting, chewing, and swallowing food, but then have it go into an external bag before it hits the stomach.

arghwhat 2y ago
Unfortunately, we also sense the mechanical filling of the stomach, and the movement through the bowels. Unless you stop the hunger altogether I don't think you'll feel satisfied without the whole process.
- mateo1 2y ago
  It's not just that. I'm pretty sure your stomach and gut also provide information regarding caloric intake, on top of other sensors detecting the raise in blood sugars/lipids/aminoacids. And even if it didn't, you'll get hungry when your body/brain detects you've switched to using reserve power. If eating doesn't satiate the hunger by providing energy, the response would likely be to make you hungrier and hungrier.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    Well, "reserve power" is from starvation, intense exercise, or weird diets, not hunger. From brain perspective, "reserve power" would be when it ends up relying on ketone bodies, which start to be produced in higher numbers when you have been in high glucagon, low insulin condition for a longer period of time. Long enough that the liver burned through its glycogen stores and the liver cells redirect oxaloacetate to gluconeogenesis (producing glucose from stuff in the blood) to the point where the cells become unable to finish its own metabolism of free fatty acids. It then turns the intermediate products it can't use itself into ketone bodies. That part can be regulated with nutrition, glucagon and insulin, but having plenty of glucose won't replace sensations from the digestive system itself.
  - mcmoor 2y ago
    Yeah I've heard that the reason artificial sweetener makes people fatter instead is that the body feels robbed when they don't get the supposed caloric intake they should get when eating something sweet. So they crave more. I actually do feel it, I still feel hungry if I eat lots of something that has little caloric value. So eating lots of vegetable and water doesn't fool my body into satisfaction.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

arghwhat 2y ago

The post says that the TPN solution is fed slowly and that the body barely reacts. What if it was intentionally fed with periodic bursts, simulating strong blood sugar, fat and protein spikes from eating and triggering stronger insulin responses with resulting lows? I wonder if that would substantially change the experience. Maybe tuning the nutrition mixture. I vaguely remember the journey of the Soylent guy experimenting with the composition and hitting various snags along the way before he finally got to a point where it made him feel satisfied and not crave any other foods. Soylent still has the mechanical feeding sensation though... Sometimes medical developments plateau when it reaches a point of working, before it reaches the point of being good.

rincebrain 2y ago
I think the whole framing was that the reason the problem space is hard, is that if you deliver too much at once, your body notices and treats it much like if it found splinters stuck in you - invasion of foreign mass to trigger inflammatory response.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  I am not sure if the burning was related to inflammation. I recall the sensation of marker fluid aburning as it moves towards the heart, but it might just be a sensation rather than a reaction. Wasn't clear from the post at least. Maybe one could burst only some convenient nutrition that is easier to deliver in higher doses like glucose, while still drip-feeding the bulkier macronutrients. Another crazy idea could be to intentionally introduce glucagon and insulin to artificially induce highs and lows. I'm sure it's a very hard problem space, but it might be one looking for a creative patient willing to put effort into further research...
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    The explicit quote from the article was "believing it required so much liquid, and such a high concentration of chemical nutrients, that it would cause inflammation and burning when administered.", and I am assuming that the former was not just redundant with the latter. Directly mucking with glucagon and insulin for anything short of directly demonstrable life and death is going to be a fraught proposal in almost any circumstance, I would speculate, given that the risk is not just wasting away from malnutrition but much more direct tissue damage and death. (Much like I suspect something with a risk profile like Accutane's would not get approved again _now_ with the body of evidence we have for what happens if you introduce something that's "almost, but not quite, vitamin A" into rapidly growing bodies...)

John_da 2y ago

[flagged]

Night_Thastus 2y ago

Very dark, but also very insightful. We take a lot of simple pleasures in our lives for granted. The feeling of stretching, scratching an itch, relaxing our muscles, sleep, the taste of food, the smells around us, feeling warmth or cold on our skin, etc. I've wondered a lot about what a life would be like without these things - even if you were otherwise completely healthy.

rincebrain 2y ago
It can be a strange experience, to try and describe to people, something missing from your shared vocabulary. I had a number of rounds of an IV drug treatment 4 or 5 years ago, and on one and only one of them, shortly after being treated, I found myself feeling a strange sensation, one that I couldn't place, but that I definitely remembered having experienced before. After 5 minutes or so of wondering and racking my brain, I placed it. It was hunger. At some point in my early teenage years, that particular piece of wiring stopped working, and I didn't really pay much attention at the time, so I can't place precisely when, but I had no severe injuries or medical maladies crop up. The two likely causes of that are apparently a brain tumor or hormone problems, but my bloodwork and brain scans turned up nothing exciting then or since, so ...who knows. (I did, many years after this started, start drinking caffeine sometimes, but it doesn't stop happening if I stop drinking caffeine for months, so I don't think it's related. I'm not on anything stimulant-like or adjacent either.) But it's a difficult thing to explain, the absence of that - and the knock-on effects, the absence of motivation to avoid it that results, the absence of satisfaction from eating causing it to vanish. How you can sincerely ask "why am I having a pounding headache - oh I forgot to eat for 2 days", and not have had any sign unless you set deliberate calendar events and phone alarms to serve as a reminder that this basic feedback system is broken. (I usually don't need them, these days, because habit is a powerful thing, but I keep them around so that I don't become sufficiently sick or taxed by life that something breaks down and I forget...again.) I can't exactly offer an A-B comparison of the difference, my memories of my childhood are not clear enough for that at this point, but while I will be sad if I end up not eating something especially tasty or unusual, there's not a visceral absence of satiation in it, it's an intellectual lament.
- 2y ago

PunchTornado 2y ago

One of those reads that changes your perspective on life in a way.

smeej 2y ago

This really puts the two years my UC and I could only eat one meal for every meal in perspective. I eventually got used to being the weirdo who brought my own food, or just declined everything if we made spontaneous plans while we were already out. But at least I could eat.

DoreenMichele 2y ago

Everything was vigorously wiped with alcohol because any bacteria would be injected straight into my heart. Anyone with a serious medical condition that requires home care on par with hospital care deals with this -- often, while at their very worst. It's probably one of the scarier aspects of living with a serious chronic condition.

gwern 2y ago

I wonder how much appetite suppressants like GLP-1s could help here? They seem to hit appetite at a high level and curiously reduce other cravings or addictions, so they might be able to deal with the hunger here.

TheCapeGreek 2y ago

The bit about the 1944 study and how they rebounded eating way more food after their starvation really struck an emotional chord with me. I had a few years of financial struggle as a high schooler and student, to the point where I was constantly hungry and very skinny. It was a bit of a traumatic time for me for other reasons, and this article gave me more insight into another dimension of it. Since I hit a career stride and haven't been walking nearly as much, I've been at my largest ever. A kind of eternal overcompensation. My father also sometimes excused wasteful grocery expenditure saying "I've gone without before; I refuse to do it again".

mlinhares 2y ago
Been there as well. Took me a while to recognize I did not have to finish every plate of food, that i could either save it for later when i was hungry again or just throw it away.
- rikthevik 2y ago
  I don't want to waste food, but I need to regularly remind myself that overeating is also wasting food.
  - mikestew 2y ago
    It’s just as wasteful to put the food on my ass as it is to put it in the trash, as I tell my spouse on occasion.
  - LorenDB 2y ago
    If it's not going to waste, it's going to waist.
  - sourcecodeplz 2y ago
    I try to waste as little as possible. Would have been nice to live in a house with a yard and some chickens. Would give them leftovers. Otherwise just turn it into compost.
  - 2y ago

davidkuennen 2y ago

I'm amazed Stanley Dudrick didn't win the Nobel Prize for inventing TPN.

Ductapemaster 2y ago

There’s an excellent Radiolab episode that ends with a similar story of someone on TPN. If you found this interesting, it’s worth a listen. https://radiolab.org/podcast/197112-guts https://radiolab.org/podcast/197112-guts

gcanyon 2y ago

The best meal I've ever had was clear chicken broth and it's not even close. Let me explain: in my 20s I was in a motorcycle accident. I was in a forced coma for over a week, and in the ICU for four weeks. No food, only an NG (nasogastric) tube. When they took the tube out, the first thing they gave me was a toothbrush. I brushed for something like five minutes, it was indescribably pleasant. Then they gave me a cup of clear chicken broth: basically salty water with something to color it yellow. It. Was. Heavenly. I have literally never in my life enjoyed eating anything as much as I enjoyed sipping that broth.

DoreenMichele 2y ago
That falls under the saying "No spice like hunger." It's just kind of an extreme situation for it. I can relate, actually. I had a terrible first pregnancy and threw up constantly for most of it. Once the baby was born, my husband rushed off to Burger King to get me a burger and fries and I wolfed it down. It was half gone before I realized what was "weird": I had been picking at my food for months. I don't even usually eat burgers, but was also all "Wow, soooo good!"
- gcanyon 2y ago
  What I always say: "When you're really hungry -- I mean really hungry -- nothing satisfies like food."

omoikane 2y ago

The idea that taking away food also takes away what's human reminds me of Dazai Osamu's "Ningen Shikkaku"[1], where the narrator wrote in the first chapter that he had no idea what being hungry means, that he never understood what it means to feel hungry. People must eat to survive and thus must work in order to eat, but because the narrator never felt hungry, he does not understand how humans operated at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Longer_Human "No Longer Human" seem to be the official English title, although a more literal translation would be "disqualified as human".

mise_en_place 2y ago

> As the experiment progressed, Ancel Keys, the nutritionist running the study, noticed odd psychological effects. As we know now, Keys was a truly unscrupulous fellow. He took bribes from the AHA to lie about the effects of saturated fats and animal fats on heart disease.

Varriount 2y ago
Can you provide a source for this assertion?

bruce343434 2y ago

I wonder if a hunger inhibitor like ozempic would help

tonnydourado 2y ago

Well, that was some nightmare fuel early in the morning. I've been diagnosed with Crohn's almost 20 years ago, had two surgeries, and am currently on meds. No fistulas, thankfully, but the whole thing is a Damocles sword, nevertheless. Reading this made it a little extra sharp.

RCitronsBroker 2y ago

This is what pulled me out of an eating disorder as a teen. Got diagnosed with Crohn’s, also was put onto a mush-diet for almost half a year, and got so pissed over that timespan, that the primal joy of eating just straight up overpowered any sort of disordered obsessiveness i was fighting with before. Life is so damn strange.

Koshkin 2y ago

When I was younger, I thought that we eat in order to live. Growing older, I realized that the opposite is true.