The Anorexic's Cookbook
Recipes for the skeletal self-loather.
by Rachel Shukert
April 29, 2008
Chapter One: BREAKFAST
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It's also the most difficult meal to skip, particularly if you wake up having eaten very little the night before. Here's a quick and easy recipe to start the day off right.
Easy Chocolate-Vanilla Fiber Bowl
Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup high-fiber cereal (60 calories)
• 1 packet diet instant Swiss Miss hot chocolate (20 calories)
• 3 tablespoons fat-free vanilla yogurt or vanilla soy milk (30-40 calories)
Combine cereal and yogurt or soy milk in small bowl. Sprinkle with hot chocolate mix and stir. If desired, garnish with 1 packet Sweet'N Low (add 5 calories), or drizzle lightly with fat-free, sugar-free chocolate sauce (10 calories). If still hungry, supplement with coffee, water, or diet soda until full. Wait for bowel movement before leaving house (approx. ten minutes).
It wasn't long before I was on a first-name basis with most of the third-floor staff at the University Health Center: Desmond, the Jamaican security guard; Santoss the friendly maintenance guy; the ray of sunshine that was Danita, the part-time receptionist, a stickler for rules who felt little compunction about openly displaying her contempt for the over-privileged college kids that thronged her lobby, seeking to correct the mistakes of an ill-considered weekend.
"Where your I.D. at?" she would bellow at an unfortunate student.
"Um . . . I don't have it."
"Well, go get it and come back."
"I can't. I think I lost it."
"You ain't got no I.D.?"
"No."
"Well, I need your I.D. card to enter you in the system. How I'm supposed to enter you in the system if you ain't got no I.D. number?"
"I can tell you my I.D. number, I just don't have the card."
Danita raked the girl up and down with disdainful eyes. "What you here for?"
"I need the morning-after pill."
"The morning . . . after . . . pill." Danita repeated the phrase as though it were a concept so foreign each word required its own separate thought. "The morning-after pill," she said again, this time loudly enough that the rest of us waiting in the lobby could look up from our eight-month-old copies of Time and turn our gaze to the wanton that dared brazenly to stand among us.
But Danita could be caring and sympathetic when the occasion called for it. For example, as I waited in the lobby one day, she said to me: "You too skinny. What's wrong with you? You got cancer or something?"
"No," I said. "I have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa."
"Anorex-a. That be that thing where you can't eat?"
"That's right."
"So why you don't just get some McDonald's? Just go get you a Big Mac or something."
"I can't," I said. "It's a very serious psychological problem."
Danita threw her head back and laughed. "Problem? Girl, you come back when you got five kids and they go and shut the power off, then we talk problems. 'Til then, baby, you ain't got no motherfucking problems."
I loved Danita. But I was glad it was not she who was at the desk that afternoon when I came in, but Gladys, a small, stout woman who lived with her elderly mother in the Bronx and was fond of wearing accessories specific to whatever holiday or season was closest at hand, a predilection that, in my opinion, showed a willingness to make the best of things.
Chapter Two: LUNCH
Frothy, fizzy and fun to eat, this great lunch can't be beat! A real treat as exciting to the taste as it is to your waist. Only one thing to worry about: what are you going to do with all that extra energy?
Pick-Me-Up Power Lunch
Ingredients:
• 2 cans Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi
• 1 Twizzler (30 calories)
Bite ends off Twizzler and reserve. Drink first can of soda using Twizzler as straw. Open second can of soda, empty out one third, refill with vodka. Drink, using Twizzler. Eat half of Twizzler, and use other half to snort one line cocaine. Eat cocaine-encrusted half of Twizzler. Repeat as needed.
Note on scoring cocaine: This should not be a problem if you live in an urban area and have regular access to an ATM card; in rural areas, feel free to substitute with homemade methamphetamine (recipe p. 367).
"Hi Gladys," I said.
"Hi baby," Gladys said, smiling. "Where you going? You going to see Dr. Gupta today?"
"No, Gladys, not today," I said grandly. "Today I shall be visiting the Office of Sexual and Reproductive Health."
Thank God Danita wasn't there. Thank God. I could almost hear her: Repro-what? What you got going on down there? Something nasty? Gladys just nodded, handed me a clipboard and told me to wait, she'd see who was available.
I was, quite frankly, expecting the worst. About a week ago, I'd begun to experience severe vaginal itching. I experimented with a variety of creams and suppositories, but this only seemed to exacerbate the discomfort, which was quickly joined by the near-constant discharge of an oddly colored fluid the consistency of dishwashing detergent and the stench of, in a word, death. It smelled so fucking bad. It smelled like the inside of a garbage truck. It smelled like a meat locker after a long power outage in August. It smelled like that smell that hits you sometimes in the subway, so fetid, rotten and overwhelming that you know you are in a place where the body of an enormous rodent is currently decomposing, or a homeless person has very recently been naked. There was a demon in my vagina.
"Well, I have your charts here," said the nurse, a man in periwinkle scrubs who I'd never seen before. The Office of Sexual and Reproductive Health was not one I visited often. "It says you're being treated for anorexia? By Dr. Gupta? How's that going?"
"Fine," I said.
"It seems to be," he said. "Dr. Gupta's noted here that you've gained a little weight, which she must be pleased about."
I had gained eleven pounds, to be exact, and when I had last seen Dr. Gupta four weeks ago she was overjoyed.
"You're out of the danger zone!" she said, clapping her hands in delight.
"Yes," I said.
"How do you feel about that?" she asked me hastily.
"I am delighted that I am no longer in danger of sudden cardiac arrest." I said.
"It's terrific," she replied. "Really. You should be very proud of yourself. And you know what?" She lowered her voice excitedly, as though she was about to reveal what Santa was bringing me for Christmas. "A few more pounds, and you might even start to menstruate again!"
I didn't tell her that while I had indeed allowed myself to teeter on the brink of health, at least seventy-five percent of my increased caloric intake was alcohol. She was so happy, and it seemed cruel to spoil the moment.
After endless stories from credentialed healthcare professionals about the likelihood of starvation-induced complications and watching Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story while enjoying a hit of acid with my friend B.J. one night, my dread of death had finally overcome my dread of food, but just barely. I still didn't think I was really that thin, but booze seemed like a good compromise. It was highly caloric, but in the best way — its calories didn't just feed your body, they fed your soul. I also found that when I did attempt normal food, the alcohol's inhibition-lowering properties helped. A couple shots of vodka with breakfast, and I could choke down a container of yogurt and a slice or two of dry toast. Another quick shot mid-morning and I tackled a banana. A nice glass of Scotch at lunchtime, and I might even manage the yolk from an egg.
"So," said the man-nurse. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"I believe I have a urinary-tract infection," I lied.
"What are your symptoms?"
I listed them. After thirty or so seconds of extremely unprofessional silence, he regained his composure. Faggot, I thought.
"That doesn't sound like a urinary-tract infection."
"Oh," I said innocently. "Does it not?"
He paused to draw a small circle in the corner of my chart before asking, "Have you been sexually active in the last few months?"
While the alcohol I had been consuming pushed me further each day from the reach of congestive heart failure, it was also causing me to black out, sometimes for hours at a time. For months, I had been waking up in my bed at home with no memory of how I made it back, but lately, things had become a bit more complicated. I might be enjoying an afternoon cocktail at a sunny cafˇ in the Village only to find myself hours later having a late supper in Chinatown with a raucous groups of total strangers, or holding hands with a Senegalese watch vendor in a Duane Reade, waiting in line to buy hair dye. There were vague flashes of memories of men at parties — a hand there, a mouth here, a laundry room. I couldn't be sure how far things had gotten, but given my demographic — a perpetually drunk twenty-year-old student of experimental theater living in New York City with self-esteem issues and no particular religious or moral convictions — a gambler would have no trouble calling the odds.
"I think so," I said.
Given my fuzzy recollection of which pilgrims had of late been admitted through the sacred portal of our Mother Goddess, the he-nurse asked if I would be willing to submit my reproductive organs to a few simple tests. I agreed. He informed me it was possible I had fallen prey to an opportunistic infection, transmitted by unprotected sexual contact. I confessed that this had crossed my mind. Having signed the necessary consent forms, I followed him down the hallway to a small examining room where he presented me with a paper gown and gallantly took his leave.
"Good luck," he said.
"Thank you," I said. "You've borne up admirably."
He blushed at that. "Oh, well, just part of the job."
I undressed and sat on the examining table, the smooth paper cool against my bare bottom. The Smell filled the room, and I clamped my legs shut, hoping to contain it, when the door swung open.
She didn't remember me, but I knew her at once. Being a university health center, each staff member needed to be something of a jack-of-all-trades, ready to set a broken bone, perform a urethral swab, or administer an I.V. at the drop of a hat, and it was this very woman who had treated me when I came to the clinic in the first semester of my freshman year, ill from severe dehydration brought on by a particularly virulent (and untreated) strep infection.
"Would you mind lying down for me so I can take a look?"
I scooted to the edge of the table and positioned my feet in the stirrups, lowered myself onto my back and spread my knees, watching her face all the while for the first flinch of repulsion when the stench hit it.
There was nothing. Just the cold, familiar unpleasantness of the speculum.
"Well, here's your problem." My doctor (later I would find out she was really a P.A.) was suddenly sounding like an auto mechanic. Leaving the speculum in place, she stood up to change her surgical gloves. "When was your last period?"
"I don't get my period," I said, as haughtily as I could manage naked from the waist down with a metal clamp affixed to my parts most delicate. "I am an anorexic."
"Be that as it may," said the doctor. "You've got a tampon stuck up in there. Been there for two, maybe three weeks, from the look of it."
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"I . . . didn't know that could happen," I whispered.
"Neither did I," she said. "But there's some blood, so it looks like you definitely had your period. Did you just forget you had it in?"
"I've been drinking a lot lately," I said.
"I'll have to take it out in pieces," she said. "Frankly, I'm surprised you're not dead."
"Maybe all the alcohol kept me from going septic," I laughed weakly. "Like you know how they use it to sterilize things, like in the movies?"
Surgical scissors in hand, she regarded me for a long moment.
"That's doubtful."
Was it possible? Had I been drinking that much? So much that I failed to remember getting my first period in more than eight months? As I watched the long instruments flashing back and forth between my legs, bearing on each return trip a tuft of soiled white cotton, I tried in vain to capture an inkling of what had happened — a stained pair of panties, a knee hoisted on the edge of the sink for easy insertion. Could I have dismissed PMS symptoms — a headache, cramps — as a bad hangover? Had it been tampons, and not hair dye, I was trying to purchase with the Senegalese watch vendor? Eventually, in the interest of science, I was forced to conclude yes. I had been drinking that much.
The doctor had finished. "Okay! You can get dressed. Go home, take a shower and you'll be fine. I'm going to tell Dr. Gupta that you're menstruating again. She'll be so pleased!"
"Thank you," I said. "Are you sure I don't need any medicine or . . . anything?"
She looked at me for a moment, her face suddenly warmer, and I imagined I saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
"You might really want not to drink so much," she said softly. She smiled a little. "You're just a baby."
A few weeks later, the baby woke up at 7:34 a.m. hooked to an I.V. on a stretcher in a downtown New York City hospital, having been delivered by ambulance a few hours earlier, with facial lacerations, three stitches in her knee, and a severe headache. The attending physician was unsure of the circumstances of the baby's accident; he did, however, mention that the vigilant E.R. attendants had performed a rape kit on the semi-conscious baby, and finding no evidence of assault, proceeded to pump her stomach, treat her wounds and administer intravenous hydration. The general consensus among the attendants was that the baby, in a state of extreme inebriation, had collapsed in the street and injured herself, and that a well-meaning but anonymous third party had come upon her and concerned for her safety, phoned the ambulance. At 9:12 a.m., the baby was disconnected from her I.V. and discharged on her own recognizance, along with a prescription for a mild antibiotic, a topical soothing cream and a hospital bill for emergency services rendered. The bill for the ambulance, she was informed, would arrive in the mail.
n° ©2008 Rachel Shukert and hooksexup.com