Life after Death by Chocolate

There are times in your life when you can’t help but be a glut. When you think, 'I can't possibly eat another mouthful or my stomach will explode, splattering everyone in the vicinity with semi-digested food particles'. But you still have that extra mouthful.

One of those times, for me, was at a restaurant called Death by Chocolate.

I know. The name should have warned me. It was basically saying that should I choose to dine with them, I could expect the main meal to come with a complementary eulogy, and the dessert to be accompanied by their finest selection of coffins.

But I still went. In fact knowing me, I would have had my nostrils pressed up against the restaurant window, eager to show the chef that there was a giant pig at the door who would really enjoy rolling around in their muddiest mud cake, if they would just let her in.

My little heart must have been beating its fists against my rib cage yelling, 'Get me the heck out of here! I'm not ready for stints! Do you hear me? If our life together has meant anything, DO NOT go into that restaurant!'

But I didn't hear it. Or if I did, I chose to ignore it. In the same way I ignored my liver, pancreas and other vital organs.

Little did I know, I was about to suffer from what a dietician might term a ‘chocolate mousse lobotomy’, where you eat so much of the gluttonous dessert, that your brain seizes up and all decision making tasks are relegated to your stomach.

Had I known about this strange affliction, I might have tried to prevent my tummy from taking over and running up a huge bill on my cholesterol account.  Because by the time my brain finally came to, my body had gone into a catastrophic meltdown. The only positive being that every other patron looked just as sickly and remorseful as me.

Looking back, I'd say that restaurant actually did me a favour, because instead of eyeballing dessert menus with a blatant disregard for the nation’s shortage of hospital beds, I started to approach them with a little more sense.

So in a way, I don't regret my decision to dine at a dessert only restaurant. At least it taught me that normal restaurants have savory meals for a reason and a little moderation never killed anyone. In fact, it's probably the reason I'm still alive today.

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 Chemist Con

Believe it or not, there used to be a time when young children were allowed to walk to school by themselves. Thank goodness all the parents of the world came to their senses and stopped this highly dangerous activity.

When I say ‘highly dangerous’, I’m not talking about the risk that a child might be snatched while dawdling through the local park. I’m not even talking about the fact the poor kid might be flattened by a semi-trailer. No, there is something far more sinister that lurks in the local community: it’s called the ice cream shop.

It’s not just any ice cream shop either. Just like a kidnapper pretends to be your friend before they club you over the head, this ice cream shop tricks you into thinking that it is good for you, that it is healthier than all the other ice cream sellers. It pretends to be a chemist.

When I was little, a chemist was the place I went to get well. It was the place where things were made better. Whether it was scratches, punches or a brother’s bite to the neck, the chemist was the wonderful giant medicine cabinet that made all those ouchies go away. So it was only natural that when feeling sad, I would stop there on my way to school and scoff a triple choc sundae.

The problem is that whilst vitamins, medicines and Band-Aids do help you feel better, daily ice creams make your teeth rot. But when you are seven-years-old and losing a tooth is a daily occurrence, the last thing you're worried about are cavities.

My poor mum probably thought she was doing me a favour by encouraging me to walk to school. “Go out into the sunshine, get some fresh air,” she’d say. Little did she know that once outside, I’d make a beeline straight for the cavernous chemist, which had poor ventilation and smelt of old hand cream.

I’m sure that if the health experts tracked the obesity epidemic on a chart, they would find a sharp increase in numbers around the time doctors were encouraging families to walk more for their hearts.

Luckily, society has gone into overprotective mode since then, so that children don’t stand a chance at making themselves ill, the way I did. But still, it’s important to know that just because a chemist sells ice cream, doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

Sweet Dreams

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 

Divorcing Junk Food

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.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

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