Why do we spend thousands of dollars trying to polish up a body that spent its whole life being entirely misunderstood? I have asked myself that question every single morning for the past six months, usually right around 6:15 when I am standing barefoot on the cold linoleum of my kitchen, watching the kettle heat up without wanting a single drop of it. For years, I wore my lack of morning appetite like a badge of honor. I told myself it meant my metabolism was clean, that my intermittent fasting was working wonders, and that the quiet emptiness in my stomach until noon was just discipline at work.
My sister Clara used to tease me about it over the telephone, calling me her little bird, and I would laugh and tell her I was just lighter on my feet than most women our age. But the truth was much uglier than a skipped breakfast. My body was not fasting; it was locking the doors and turning off the lights to save itself from the daily shock I kept putting it through.
The clinic on Adams Street in Jefferson City always smelled faintly of floor wax and old paperbacks from the waiting room. I had gone in to see Dr. Aris because my joints had started aching with that deep, dull grind that feels like salt in a wound, and because the fatigue had reached a point where I was setting three separate alarms just to make sure I got out of bed to feed the dog. Dr. Aris is a man who looks like he has spent thirty years looking at people who do not listen to him.
He has silver hair that sticks up in back and glasses he pushes down his nose whenever you try to explain away your symptoms with something you read in a wellness newsletter. I sat in that faux-leather chair with my purse clutched in my lap, ready for him to hand me a prescription for Vitamin D and tell me to walk twenty minutes a day. Instead, he reached for a wooden tongue depressor, looked me square in the eye, and told me to open wide.
“Stick it out,” he said, his voice flat and tired. “And don’t pull it back.”
I did what he asked, feeling slightly foolish like a child at the dentist. He leaned in close, adjusted the gooseneck lamp on his desk so the yellow light hit my face directly, and let out a long, slow breath through his nose. He did not say anything for a solid ten seconds, and honestly, that silence felt worse than whatever scolding was coming.
I watched the tiny blue veins in his temple pulse once before he dropped the wooden stick into the silver trash can with a dry clatter. He sat back down in his rolling stool, crossed his arms over his white coat, and gave me a look that made my stomach turn over twice.
“You have got a canyon right down the middle of your tongue, Martha,” he said, and he did not sound like he was joking. “How long has that been splitting open on you?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, my hand coming up instinctively to cover my mouth. “It’s just… I figured it was dry mouth. From the coffee.”
“It’s not from the coffee,” he said, leaning forward again. “Well, not the coffee itself. It’s from your stomach screaming at you every single morning. Your tongue is a map of your digestion, and yours is cracked straight down the center because your gut lining has been under siege for the better part of a decade.
When was the last time you ate a hot breakfast before noon?”
I tried to think back, but my mind just sort of stalled out on the question. I could tell him about the green smoothies I choked down every single day at 7:00 AM, packed with frozen kale and raw spinach and ice cubes straight from the freezer because I read somewhere that cold drinks boosted your calorie burn through thermogenesis. I could tell him about the raw salads I ate for lunch at my desk every afternoon, cold greens drenched in apple cider vinegar, making me feel virtuous even while my lower belly bloated out until I had to unbutton the top of my slacks by three o’clock. I told him all of that, speaking fast because I wanted him to see how hard I was trying to be healthy. Dr. Aris just listened, nodding slowly, his fingers tapping a steady rhythm against the edge of his mahogany desk.
“You are treating your insides like an icebox,” he said when I finally ran out of breath. “You think you’re doing wellness, but you’re running your liver into the ground. Pooping right after coffee is not healthy digestion, Martha. That’s a stress response. Your colon is panicking because you dumped freezing liquid and acid into an empty tank first thing in the morning, and it’s trying to empty out the bilge before you can do any more damage.”
The word bilge hung in the small office air between us, heavy and smelling faintly of antiseptic. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him about the wellness influencers with the glowing skin and the lemon water routines who promised that cold plunges and raw greens were the secret to eternal youth and hormone balance. But then I thought about the way my hands shook whenever I tried to skip lunch, and the way my lower back always felt like a wet towel that had been wrung out too many times. I thought about the ice water I drank while sitting in my car after grocery shopping, even in November, because I was convinced my internal thermostat was just broken. Dr. Aris reached out and slid a small, folded pamphlet across the blotter toward me, the paper corner catching on a stray paperclip.
“Stop the raw salads,” he said quietly. “Stop the iced drinks. Stop shocking a system that is already fighting for its life every time you have a hard week at home. If you want your hormones to settle down, you have to feed the furnace before you ask it to burn anything.”
I walked out of that clinic into the hazy Missouri afternoon with my ears ringing softly. The parking lot gravel crunched under my boots in that familiar, rhythmic way that usually calmed me down, but today it just felt like noise. I got into my Ford, turned the key, and sat there for five minutes with the air conditioning blowing a gale right into my face before I reached out and switched the dash vents to warm. My hands were trembling just a little bit against the steering wheel, not from fear, but from the strange, hollow realization that I had spent ten years starving the very parts of me that were begging for warmth. I drove straight home past the feed store and the Methodist church, watching the gray clouds hang low over the hills, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t turn on the radio. When I walked through my back door, the house was quiet and smelled of old cedar and dust. I walked straight to the kitchen sink, filled a small saucepan with tap water, and set it on the front burner to boil before I even took off my coat.
