"Feeling of nothing in your stomach really is different than feeling hungry. Definitely headaches. People call it a hunger headache. Probably two days out of the week, I get a migraine. My brain starts to pulsate. You get them, you can feel them throbbing. It goes from the eyebrow to the back over here. A ball of pain in the front of my head. Like something is holding on to your brain, almost."
"I will feel so tired, as if I cannot move a limb in my body. It's like going into a power-save mode. I feel like my stomach's going to eat me. So it actually feels like it turns to a ball and it just keeps turning. I can't be relaxed. I can't be calm."
"You really have to choose: Am I going to pay this bill or am I going to eat? I didn't eat anything at all today. I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat lunch. Skipping breakfast and lunch, and dinner, I'm a little worried about. I still only get the set amount of the SNAP benefits, and it just seems to be going quicker and quicker. I eat a lot of peanut butter because it's protein and it's cheap and you can carry it around."
One in seven people in America lives with hunger and experiences significant physical and emotional effects. Hunger produces severe headaches and migraines described as throbbing pain from the eyebrow to the back of the head. Chronic hunger causes extreme fatigue, impaired movement, and intense stomach sensations likened to a turning ball. Many people must choose between paying bills and buying food, leading to skipped meals as SNAP and income fall short. Common coping strategies include inexpensive, portable foods like peanut butter, drinking water to suppress hunger, chewing gum, and parents forgoing meals for their children.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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