Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

The Anorexic's Cookbook: Part 1

Note: The following is excerpted from The Anorexic’s Cookbook: A Cornucopia of Deprivation, the landmark, yet unpublished, tome from lifestyle guru Rachel Shukert. 

Introduction:  All About YOU!

Take off your clothes and go to the mirror. Run your eyes over every part of your body—your arms, your waist, your thighs.   Look at your stomach—really look at it.  Poke your finger in the fat.  Gather it up in your hands and feel it.  Now let it drop, back into place, and listen to the noise it makes.  Is there dull squish, like the sound of your lip knocking hard against your teeth?  Or is it a thud, like a big burlap bag of lard sliding around in the back of a truck?

            Look at your wrists.  Can you circle them with your thumb and forefinger and still have room to spare?  What about your hands—are they slim and delicate, or thick and meaty, like they might have just garroted someone named Vito in the back room of  strip club?  Look at your chest, your shoulders, your neck, and then, very slowly, raise your head and look yourself in the face.

            It’s hard, isn’t it?

            Were you happy with what you saw?  Did you look at the unsightly ripples, the wobbling folds of a sweaty flesh, the revolting, pock-flecked lumps of tumescent blubber and think, well, I’m just lucky to have my health?  Are you someone who thinks gee, it’s an honor just to be nominated?

            Or are you the kind of person who looks at that pasty, quivering blob in the mirror and thinks: I can do better!

            If so, this is the book for you.

            Because you can do better.  The question is, do you have the guts?  I mean, I know you have a gut, but do you have the guts?  The guts to stand up to all the jealous nay-sayers who will try to keep you in your place to make themselves feel better about their own pathetic, fat, miserable little lives.  The guts to keep on going, even when it gets painful, even when the doctors try to stuff your head full of “symptoms” and “statistics” the way they fill their own disgusting mouths with bacon cheeseburgers. 

They’ll say it’s a prison.  Well, I’ve got news for them.  Prison isn’t voluntary, unless it’s one of those non-violent offender prisons in Finland.  And as long we’re playing word games, let’s look at another word for prison: corrections facility.  Corrections—as in “making right.”  If something’s wrong, a responsible member of society fixes it. 

Maybe most of the world is content to be the way they are, mediocre peasants eating cheese balls in the dirt—but remember, the middle of anorexic is “rex.” Not just a dog or the sophisticated British star of stage and screen, but Latin for “king.”  Anorexic:  you are royalty.

Jump in the air and feel that gut move with you.  You can still see it move even when you land, can’t you?  That’s disgusting.  Look at all that fat wobbling and rippling on your body, shaking as you move up and down.  Listen to yourself as you hit the floor—it’s like an elephant is trying to dance.  How does that make you feel?

Some people deserve to be in prison.

Chapter One: BREAKFAST

 You know what most cookbook authors have to say about breakfast.  They’ll write about mornings at their grandmother’s sprawling old farmhouse, waking up to the smell of bacon frying and coffee perking, of buttermilk biscuits, fresh from the oven and thick slices of country ham and sausages that you make out in the smokehouse; cheese grits and hash browns and hand-cut oatmeal with sweet cream and strawberries and grandma herself in the middle of it all, a faded apron tied about her ample middle, flipping flapjacks at the old woodstove and how every time they make the Best Blueberry Pancakes or Pastor Steven’s Sausage Loaf they think about the lost world of their dead grandmother and her hand-embroidered linen napkins that would be worth a fortune if they only knew what happened to them.