All of us have been hungry at some time or another. This usually means simply that we have an appetite. It decreases their resistance to disease. It can be intensely painful.
Prolonged hunger can result in permanent damage to body and mind.
And, ultimately, if hunger goes on long enough, it kills. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire, only a great emptiness is left , like the sky like a well in drought, and it is now that the strength drains from your limbs and you try to rise and find you cannot, or to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost. In the following excerpt from Loretta Schwartz-Nobel s book, Starving in the Shadow of Plenty, a women from Boston described the obsessive quality of a life in which one s total energy must go toward getting enough food simply to say alive. My landlord lets me stay. He felt sorry for me because I had no money.