Now, this may be in bad taste, but as a veteran of many an overlong meal I have intimate knowledge of what it feels like to eat too much, and to save you from the perils of doing that for exploratory purposes, I here share a Scale of Overeating of my own devising.
More specific scales — say a scale for eating ice cream, or pea soup — may follow after my next payday. Now, however: sit down, pick up a fork, and see how far you have come with me.
A Scale of Overeating
- fed : This is the stage you end up in after a snack. No fullness, not even a burp: in fact, you could eat some more.
- full : This follows easily from the previous one. You’re no more hungry; you are full of energy and quite content. Yet, why not a forkful more?
- overfull : You have eaten a bit too much; just a bit, you see. You’re fed and more; maybe you should go and lie down for a while. Maybe take a nap, or watch a bit of TV. Or maybe seconds… er, fourthends?
- göh : You’ve eaten too much. This stage means feeling sick: your gut is grossly distended, your throat feels a bit raw, and you really, really need to go and lie down. But there’s still food left…
- uk-gluu : Your stomach is full: so is your throat. Your tonsils are touching food from the below. You can just barely waddle to a bed and plump down, groaning and feeling miserable. But —
- hyyyf : This stage cannot be voluntarily reached unless you’re at the uk-gluu stage, and then notice that there’s just one plateful of food left, and you don’t like throwing food away or eating left-overs — so you squint, whimper, and force that last plateful down. It’s a chore, a work, an act of will against reason. When it’s down, you feel feverish, have trouble breathing, and your higher brain functions are quickly shutting down. Your field of vision is narrowed and you can barely bend at waist. The only possible action now is falling down to a sofa in half-swoon until the black spots go away.
- post-hyyyf : This stage cannot be reached voluntarily, and I have no personal experience of it. Still, if someone was waving a gun around, eating oneself beyond hyyyf might be possible. It would be torture. I don’t know if it would end in fainting and maybe choking, or in something tearing inside — or maybe a funny, cartoony explosion of ribs and guts. Maybe it could cause permanent brain damage, or bleeding in the throat, or lower jaw cramps, or tongue paralysis — something anyway that would get you into the local news. Still, if you survived this and went on eating — what then? Nirvana? Or death, and giving this scale to worms to worry over?
PS : In case you wonder, the stages ‘göh’ and ‘hyyyf’ are named after the typical sounds I make when on that level. ‘Uk-gluu’ is (I think) from an old Generation 1 Transformers comic, being the sound made by one in severe intestinal pain. Usually because of someone else’s digits punching through his solar plexus, or because of being fused into a monstrous single entity with a hateful robot enemy from Cybertron because a matter transporter exploded. Ah, those were the days!