Patrick Holford — Blog — JESSICA ROSMAN

Let me tell you about my teenage years.

Wait, I’m not sure that I can. I think I slept through them. Yep, thinking about it now, that’s definitely what happened.

You might think that’s because I needed the sleep to grow and develop and yes, like all sprouting teens a little extra sleep was needed. But this was different. The kind of tiredness I am referring to would fall upon me when I was mid-way through a sentence.

Looking back, I can see now that what I suffered from was common among many teenagers. Patrick Holford calls it ‘The Blood Sugar Blues’, which is a result of too much sugar in the diet, exhausting your internal organs. In Patrick’s book, The Optimum Nutrition Bible, he states, “As a consequence your energy level drops, you lose concentration, get confused, suffer from bouts of brain fog, fall asleep after meals, get irritable, freak out, cannot sleep, cannot wake up, sweat too much, get headaches…”

I ticked every box.

Sad really, especially since I needed to be awake to study. Beavered away in my study den, I didn’t see the harm in catching some z’s every now and then. I thought the tired spells would pass and to help my body along, I continually refuelled on sugary snacks, which only perpetuated the problem.

These nanna naps didn’t just happen in the privacy of my own room. They also happened at school. The culprit for my completely unhinged blood sugar being the school canteen. I distinctly remember snacking on donuts and cakes in recess and then curling up at the back of the class for some much needed slumber. The day this little routine backfired was when I made the mistake of falling asleep at the front of the classroom. I awoke to find the teacher flogging my back with a ruler.

I fell asleep so much during my final years of high school that my step-mum conducted random face examinations to see if I’d been napping. There were lots of ways she could tell if I’d been sleeping, for example, if she suddenly called my name and I ran down the steps to meet her with a post-stick note stuck to my head, or if she suddenly barged in to my room to find drool all over my notes and a semi coherent teenager rearranging her hair. Either way, the game was up.

If only I had known about the crash and burn effect of a highly refined diet back when I was a teen, I might actually remember what happened.

If I could do it all again:

· I would not keep a 2-litre container of tomato sauce under the dining room table to drown my nightly meals in.

· I would not eat a whole container of ice cream each weekend in an attempt to supress the uncertainty about boys, friends and life in general.

· I would have eaten more meat to help control sweet cravings, instead of letting the movie Babe influence my food choices.

But there is no point dwelling on the past. It is what it is. So it’s best to stay awake, learn from it and move on.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

Quote from The Optimum Nutrition Bible by Patrick Holford, p 256

You want the ugly truth? I wasn’t always the model of health that I am today. I didn’t fly out of my mother’s womb wearing a giant fruit hat and a pink and green apron. I never pranced around my living room as an over-active four-year-old shouting that every child should eat more fruit and vegetables. I’m sure that even as a teenager I couldn’t name many types of apples.

The simple fact is that when I was about eight, my parents divorced and my two brothers and I took to drowning our sorrows in junk food. It was the early nineties and the ‘all you can eat’ buffet was a booming business for most family restaurants. Every weekend and some weeknights, my dad would scoop us up like we were a couple of wet rags left on the carpet, and take us to a colourful restaurant that had loud music and an endless supply of soft serve ice cream. This was how I got through the huge anxiety associated with a family break-up. The sugar was there for me and I was there for it.

Little did I know that I was creating a nasty addiction that would only lead to suffering and ill-health. But it gave me comfort at an extremely vulnerable period in my life. The creepiest part is that I began to associate junk food with healing.

The problem with emotional food binging is that it gives you a very short-lived high. You feel really good for a very short time and then you feel really crappy. Whenever I felt the urge to tear my hair out in life, I immediately binged on the bad food.

Here are some of those tearing-hair-out moments:

Parents sit me down and tell me that we will no longer all be living in the same house.
Dad announces he is moving to the other side of the country and I can choose to live with either him or mum (the distance being around 4,000 kilometres).
Both parents re-marry.

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I had experienced a lot more tearing-hair-out moments and it’s safe to say I didn’t cope well with them. As a result, I had done a lot of binging and I was an emotional wreck. I was also a little overweight and constantly tired because my poor little adrenals were burnt out.

Instead of continuing the cycle, I starting doing something that I love to do: I started to read. I read day and night about health, squeezing as much information into my head as possible. One of the books that changed my life was The Optimum Nutrition Bible by Patrick Holford. Reading this book made me realise that a healthy diet coupled with a good amount of exercise, equips you with the tools you need for all those tearing-hair-out moments. You may even end up with more hair.

So I gave my pantry an overhaul, banishing biscuits, lollies and sugared snacks from my home as if they were troublemakers looking to start a fight.

Within a matter of weeks I was waking up with so much clarity and focus that people wondered if I had undergone a brain transplant.

My only regret is that I didn’t binge on healthy eating books sooner.