Welcome to the Hanger Scale, a highly scientific tool that enables you to accurately gauge our hanger in order to determine the speed with which you must ingest food.

The lowest rating, 1, means your hanger is so manageable that you could watch the entire Academy Awards ceremony before feeling the pangs of hunger.

The highest rating, 10, tells you that healthy choices and waiting mean nothing – it’s all about proximity and speed.  So if the closest prepared food is yak tartare, you’d eat it.  Even if you’re a hard core vegetarian.

You’ll see the Hanger Scale on the X-axis.  Find your number, and then trace it up to the orange hanger line to see how much time (on the Y-axis) you have until your hanger will worsen.  For example, if your hanger is a “5,” you have 60 minutes to prepare and ingest food before you advance to the next level of hanger.  Continue to ignore the hanger, and you’ll continue to advance to the end of the scale.  What happens when you get to a 10 and you don’t eat food inside one minute?  The Hanger Meltdown begins.  I could describe the horror of a Hanger Meltdown to you, but I’d prefer to show you a picture of someone in the midst of one:

A DUI?  Sure.  That’s what the press would like you to believe.  The truth: Nick Nolte was an 11 on the Hanger Scale.  Yeah.  An 11.

And thanks to Chris Farley’s dramatization, awareness about the dangers of a Hanger Meltdown came into sharp focus when “Cindy” accosted “her” sorority sister after ignoring her hanger for too long.

Don’t let this happen to you.  Aside from making exceptionally poor fashion choices, a Hanger Meltdown could find you posing for a pretty mug shot due to the Meltdown’s ugly, indescribable side effects.