The Young and The Reckless

I never had any really terrible vices as a teenager. I never wagged school so that I could sit behind some wee-stained toilet block and drown my lungs in tobacco and illegal strains of herbs. I never stood outside the local bottle-o and begged some smelly stranger to buy me a six-pack of Stolis so that I could stumble to the park and wake up in a disused building site. I never went to a nightclub and bought an expensive little tablet from some weedy kid in a baseball cap.

It wasn’t because I was a saint or because I was suffering from some kind of early-onset levelheadedness. It was simply because I already had access to a legal, cheap and highly additive substance: sugar.

My thinking was something like this: why put myself in a sleazy, dark and potentially life-threatening environment, when I could just stage my own private protest against the world by consuming an extra-long packet of Tim Tams, from the comfort of my bean bag?

This brings me to the chocolate cigarette. Could there be a better confectionary product that symbolises teenage rebellion? It’s got everything. It’s cheap, it’s legal to 'smoke' and it doesn't make you want to cough up your liver. The problem is, that whilst real cigarettes are dangerous to your health, it can be equally unwise to eat a packet a day of the fake ones.

So what is the answer?

  • Do we need ‘candy crime squads’ who conduct random searches of teenager’s bedrooms?
  • Do we need to hold ‘snack food interventions’ for kids who abuse the family biscuit tin?
  • Do we need to create slow-releasing fructose patches a teenager can wear as they wean themselves off the cola?

Personally, I would say that all a teenager with a reckless sugar habit needs is lots of compassion and a few healthy role models.  And if that doesn’t work, you can at least write to the person who invented the chocolate cigarette and tell them that their product should come with highly graphic and disturbing health warnings.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

The Unofficial Sugar Guide

Sometimes it’s hard to know if you are a full-blown sugar addict because there are very few guidelines on how many candy bars a person is permitted to cram in before their body is tipped over the edge.

Alcohol consumption, for instance, is far more straightforward, with charts, tables and all kinds of guilt-inducing paraphernalia that at least gives your brain and body set limits to work with.

Unless you happen to be an expert in the molecular structure of food particles, knowing how many Oreo cookies one can (if at all) safely consume, is still a bit wishy-washy.

So, in an effort to keep all those little potholed sweet teeth on the straight and narrow, I’ve come up with 6 telltale signs of a sugar fiend:

  1. If you wake up and there are chocolate-coloured smears all over your mouth, neck and pillow, and your cat is not yet old and decrepit enough to mistake your face for the kitty litter tray.

  2. If you only ever buy lip balms that have been enriched with cocoa, infused with butterscotch or contain traces of bubble-gum essence.

  3. If the idea of ‘food waste’ was not brought to your attention by a documentary on sustainable living but by witnessing a friend throw away a half-eaten Mars bar.

  4. If you do not have one childhood memory that isn’t somehow related to eating copious amounts of birthday cake.

  5. When you find there is chocolate under your fingernails, and thoughts of sickness and disease only enter your mind after you have licked out the bits and eaten them.

  6. When it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon and you stop addressing people by their first names, and instead, start calling everyone ‘sweetie’, 'honey' or 'cupcake'.  

It can be a depressing moment when you discover that an emotional meltdown can be tracked back to an extra large slice of cheesecake or that a night terror was fuelled by too much hot choccy before bed, but better you follow my guide and work these things out, before this sneaky little substance has managed to destroy your relationships, gut flora and mental state.

Text © Jessica Rosman

The Laughing Maniac

Hi, I’m Jess and I am a recovering sugarholic.

That’s what I would say if there ever was a Sugarholics Anonymous. Perhaps in the future there will be. Perhaps in the future there will be pale, sickly individuals who congregate in the basement of their local health-food shop to talk about their highly unwise dietary choices, the way I am going to do now.

I guess I knew that I first had a problem when the Creative Director of an advertising agency I worked at, told me that in the two years he’d known me, he had never understood a word I’d said. Instead of talking clearly like a normal human being, I had laughed and giggled my way through presentations, spluttering out the odd word here and there.

On reflection I’d say that was partly due to nerves. “So you (ha ha) want some (ha ha ha) award-winning ideas (ha)?”

It goes without saying that I was retrenched shortly after. But like all big changes in life, this one came with a wonderful silver lining: I finally had time to sort out my health.

The first thing I did was give up refined sugar. Why sugar specifically? With all the free time on my hands, it was just me, myself and I and it became clear to all of us, that I was a moody cow.

So I started reading books and discovered that too much refined sugar in the diet can put huge stress on the body (cross to intelligent chart on the right), leading to many of the emotional and physical symptoms that I suffered from.

There were tears. There was denial. There were times when I needed a straitjacket to stop me from picking up sugar-laden favourites in the supermarket. But I pulled through and overtime the cravings stopped. The incessant laughing stopped too.

Other happy extras (which you won't find on a chart):

  • I stopped needing nanna naps.
  • I discovered my boyfriend was not a nasty evil man after all.
  • I lost my muffin-top.
  • I stopped housing the kind of bacteria that throw loud and boisterous parties inside my gut.

Oh and there was another wonderful thing that happened as a result of cleaning up my diet. I wrote some books that encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables. And after years of only ever wanting to be a published author, I became one.

A nice ending to a horrible diet.

text (c) jessica rosman 2015