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Originally and chiefly British English, the phrase skin and grief is used:
– as an adjective meaning: emaciated; weak and starving;
– as a noun designating an emaciated or starving person.

This phrase occurs, for example, in the following poem from The Miracle Diet (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1998), by the British poet Carol Rumens (born 1944) [page 20]:

Genetics
Mum used to say sugar was good for you.
She was glad if she gained a pound or two
On her one-week jaunt to Whitley Bay:
It proved she’d had a real holiday.
‘Fat and Happy’ was her belief
(She called her lean sister ‘Skin and Grief’).
Mum was twelve stone and lived till eighty—
But so did seven-stone Auntie Katie.

These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase skin and grief that I have found:

1-: From The Old Maid, a poem by the English author Manasseh Dawes (died 1829), published in The Town and Country Magazine; Or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment (London, England) of July 1771 [page 383, column 2]—the obsolete adjective impent means: pent in, shut in a pen or fold; hence also: enclosed, confined:

Women must be women still,
If women’s soul they bear:
Yet what they can’t obtain by will,
They cry, “they do not fear;”

And when averse to friendly rules,
And cold to native joy,
Their mind and years the lover cools,
And hap’ly leaves the courteous boy,

Unnotic’d by the soothing train,
With skin and grief impent,
They all against themselves exclaim,
And finally repent.

2-: From a letter, dated Paris, France, Wednesday 3^rd February 1779, from the Reverend John Warner (1736-1800) to George Selwyn (1719-1791)—as published in George Selwyn and his Contemporaries; With Memoirs and Notes (London: Bickers & Son, 1882), by John Heneage Jesse [volume 4, page 30]—here, the noun raree-show designates a “wonderful parade” in which the King of France took part:

We had a monstrous fine raree-show on Monday […]. I am sure the King jokes most cursedly with his people. One of the prettiest things, and what struck me most of the whole ceremony, was the beautiful contrast exhibited by such a number of high-fed, broad-bottomed, pompous, pampered, prancing steeds, and such a number of pinch-bellied, woebegone, skin-and-grief, lanthorn-jawed, soup-maigre subjects, who do not—above once a year, and then it is like a horse-bean. How they must have made him laugh!

3-: From No Change for the Worse, a Mistaken Notion; Or a brief and familiar Address to those among the Poorer Classes in this Country, who suppose it unimportant to their interests, whether the plans of the French miscarry or succeed, published in The Anti-Gallican; Or, Standard of British Loyalty, Religion and Liberty (London: Printed for Vernor and Hood, and J. Asperne, 1804) [Vol. 1, No. 11, page 406, column 2]—the word rotgut refers to an adulterated or inferior alcoholic drink:

English ale and porter, and English bread and cheese would be out of fashion, nor would all your exertions procure a slice of English roast beef, if the enemy should be allowed to order what is good for us. You would be forced to live upon things which, instead of heartening and strengthening you, would reduce you to skin and grief: would soup-maigre or frogs think you, suit an English constitution: Would your stomachs feel satisfied with the thin, sour, rot-gut liquor which contents a Frenchman’s?

4-: From Mr. Grizzle, and Miss Wrinkle. An Entire New Song, by ‘E. B.’, published in La Belle Assemblée, or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine (London, England) of June 1807 [page 323, column 1]:

A wither’d lily Molly lay,
The rose-bud, Time had cut away,
And ebon locks had turn’d to grey,
Alas! what could prevail?
Stiff as a ram-rod Molly grew,
And every art she tried anew,
To win that little—worse than Jew,
Mr. Grizzle in the Vale.

A monument of skin and grief,
Miss Molly moan’d without relief,
While Mr. Grizzle eat his beef,
And sipp’d his can of ale.