Quash

quash
verb, transitive. To reject or to void, especially by legal procedure; to put an end to or to suppress

Ruth turned from ‘net-surfing to a writing exercise, propelled by the momentum she had experienced earlier that morning while writing a journal entry, then a practice piece. She loved the way her mind would awaken and generate ideas that she had had no idea were waiting in the wings when her hands were idle. Sometimes, her fingers would begin to ache with the strain of typing so quickly. These were the times when she knew beyond any doubt that she was a writer--no question. When the act itself gave her more happiness than almost anything else she did.

Then an unexpected sensation interrupted her focus: she felt hungry.

“Wha...? It seems as if I just ate breakfast!” she muttered. The previous day, she had decided to eliminate wheat from her diet, as an experiment, after reading thirty or forty pages in a book her sister had sent for her birthday: William Davis’ Wheat Belly. She had seen copies of it in bookstores and in health-food stores for several years, but had never picked it up to sample the contents. She had figured that she was already following enough diet restrictions, with little to show for it. Her abdomen continued to grow. Every time she weighed, she was disgusted by the higher number on the scale.

Then yesterday, she found herself reading on and on in the Davis book. His premise was alarming. Agronomists have been changing the DNA of wheat for decades, and now, after 50 years or so, our bodies probably cannot recognize it as food. This is similar to the body’s response to the High Fructose Corn Syrup we ingest. Yes, it’s made of corn, but it is so intensively processed that our bodies can’t recognize it as food. The puzzled body stores it in the liver as fat. Ruth suspected that the body was converting wheat to abdominal fat and storing it as well, for a similar reason.

Her hunger pangs distracted her again. She slowed her typing. “Maybe I should put on my Sauconys and go out and get some exercise,” she thought. “Exercise always seems to quash these hunger pangs.” She stopped typing and pushed away from the desk.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.