Of Losing, Food Porn, and the Bottomless Pit

I stood on the scale at the gym today (Day 3 of the Hunger Challenge) and discovered that I've lost two pounds. Since Sunday. Yikes. I'm all for a little bodily rightsizing when appropriate, but a pound a day is not exactly the healthiest way to go about it. Oh, and also? Losing weight in this manner makes you an airheaded, loopy doofus. At least it does if you're me.

It's not an exaggeration to say that being more or less constantly hungry has made me markedly dumber, yesterday in particular. I reached a point last night at which my brain was so conking out on me and my stomach was growling so loudly (for real; it would have been comical were it not so depressing) that all I could do was sit in bed and read. Check that: try to read. I didn't get far before giving up and just going to sleep.

Here's what baffles me a bit: I know I'm eating less than I normally do, and probably have not had nearly enough fat over the past few days, but still, it's not like I'm eating nothing, or eating vapidly. Whole grains, fruit, veggies, protein: check, check, check, check. And yet every time I consume something, it seems to fall deep into the bottomless pit that has suddenly become my stomach. I had a hefty-ish bowl of oatmeal this morning, for example, which normally would be enough to fill me up for at least a few hours. But within 30 minutes I was ravenous again, as if my body had completely forgotten that I had just dosed it with food. Lunch was whole wheat pasta with onion, spinach, and white beans. Time spent feeling full after eating: just about 20 minutes, at which point I would have been delighted to have a second bowl. What gives? Shouldn't my metabolism be slowing down (at least as much as my brain has)?

This constant, nagging hunger and waning intelligence have conspired to convince me that the way to get through this week is to spend time browsing what can only be considered food porn: Mark Bittman's column in the New York Times (his soba salad this week looks so good I could weep); my friend Heather's blog, called Pestle Mortar (her specialties are desserts, which I miss achingly); the site for a new fancy-pants frozen yogurt place in the Fillmore. I read them, salivate, sigh. Meanwhile, my stomach begs with my eyes to just stop already.

I think it's safe to say by now that no, it's not especially possible to eat a filling, local, organic, produce-rich diet--especially not one that includes the blazing extravagance of a cup of Fair Trade coffee in the morning--on $4 a day. Were I thinking straight, I might throw in the towel here, call the experience done and the conclusion reached, and go to town on a block of cheese.

But my addled brain pushes me forward. If I can't prove that one can be truly Pollan-esque on this sort of budget, at least I can get a true visceral sense of what happens when you can't get enough to eat--of how physically uncomfortable it is to be hungry, of how much harder it is to function on a less-than-adequate supply of calories, of what it's like to go through your day in a vague mental fog.

Of course, come Sunday morning, I can go to Fraiche and gorge myself on a bowl of high-end frozen yogurt with organic fruit and some sort of stupendous baked good, then can follow that up with three full meals of whatever strikes my fancy.

This is for the 34 million people in the U.S. who can't.