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 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 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

 

Grade A Idiot

It’s a wonder I have any teeth at all, considering I snacked my way through primary school. You might be wondering how I was able to do this, considering there were thirty or more children just waiting to snitch on me in class.

The answer is pockets, lots and lots of pockets.

It’s no coincidence that most candy bars and lolly bags are the exact size of a child’s pocket. It would have only taken one marketing executive with the brain the size of an M&M to work out that the most profitable product placement for any confectionary item was inside a child’s school uniform.

I may sound cynical now but trust me, as a child, I was blissfully unaware that by storing half-melted treats in my pocket, I was buying into one of the oldest confectionary scams in the book.

I crunched and crackled my way through every class, thinking I must be extra bright to have tricked my teachers for so long. I assumed they just thought I was the quiet, contemplative type; little did they know that I was unable to speak due to the fact I was harbouring a small platoon of chocolate soldiers inside my mouth.

Perhaps it was because I was only six-years-old at the time, or perhaps the sugar had already eroded large chunks of my brain, whatever the case, I had somehow convinced myself of this completely unfounded fact: if my mouth was closed when I was crunching lollies, no one would be able to hear me eating.

In any case, my little candy-munching scheme was brought to an end one afternoon when the teacher put down her book and said, “Could Miss Jessica Thompson please spit out whatever she is eating so that we might have a chance at hearing the words in this book.”

I’d been caught out and completely humiliated in front of the whole class! My cheeks, stuffed to the flaps with sugary cough drops, burned with shame.

I don’t remember snacking on so much candy during class after that, which is probably the reason I don’t have dentures now.

Anyway, it’s just another reason why being a sugar fiend can ruin your life, or at the very least, your dignity.


Text © Jessica Rosman 2015



Bag Head

Have you ever seen those little mounds that soldier crabs make on the beach at low tide? Well, if you can imagine them making those same gritty globules all over my face, you will have a good idea of how I looked at fourteen.

The most distressing part of having horrendously ugly skin was not the fact that my face resembled something that had just come out of a Dominoes’ pizza oven, or that I was forced to sleep with fifteen blackhead strips plastered to my face every night. It was the fact that, in the eyes of the opposite sex, my head was the equivalent of a badly battered apple; I was destined to be left on the shelf to rot.

Fast forward a few years of wearing a paper bag over my head to every house party, and we get to a moment in class that changed my life. Instead of receiving a lesson on periodic tables, I had a lesson on pimple-free skin.

It happened when a new school friend leaned over my desk and keenly inspected the many lumps and bumps on my face. She concluded that the only way I could ever confidently step out in public was if I took a tissue salt supplement known as Comb D. (She also suggested I reduce my daily intake of jelly frogs.)

Two weeks later, much to the shock of close friends and family, I had a face again. A frog-free diet combined with those miraculous Comb D tablets worked! I still had pimples, but they came and went like a shooting star, as opposed to a heavily clustered galaxy that just spiralled out of control.

The thing about having terrible pimples is that you kind of let the rest of your body go too. I mean, why make an effort if your skin refuses to come to the party? So once my skin flattened out like a freshly paved road, I decided there were some other ways to improve my appearance.

Here’s what I did:

  • I stopped viewing my daily walk to the front door as the perfect form of exercise.
  • I realised that two blueberry Pop-Tarts each morning would not give me my RDI of fruit.
  • I reduced my daily quota of hair spray, so that my locks no longer sat glued to my head like a tightly fitted swim cap.

With those simple changes I felt I was on my way to great things! And the only need I had for a paper bag was as a place to store my multi-grain sandwiches.

 

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

The Jiggling Stick Insect

When I was born, I was a very long baby. My mum, who is of average height and quite slim told me that she could wrap me around her tummy and have my feet and hands meet at each end. It wasn’t just a cool party trick, it was an early indication that the little baby who could be wrapped around any torso would be incredibly tall.

Sure enough, as the years progressed, I reached the ripe old age of five and the first thing my Kindergarten teacher said was, “My, you are very tall Jessica.” Those words, said in a loud-enough-to-humiliate Canadian accent, have rung in my ears ever since.

When I say tall, I’m not talking about Miranda Hart tall, where people actually mistake you for a man. But I am talking about a body that looks like it has been stretched using some kind of torture device.

People think it is a blessing to be tall and skinny. The trouble is, those who don’t go on to become super-models generally end up looking like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in an attempt to fit in. The other problem with being a human pencil is that you think you will never get fat.

I know this because I did what every walking bookmark does: I stuffed myself with whatever I chose, be it cakes, candy, ice cream or biscuits and as a consequence my insides suffered. My outside suffered too. Where once I was able to walk the beach without my thighs touching, they soon began to grate together like bits of sandpaper. After years of happily frolicking in the water in just a bikini, I was forced to start wearing men’s extra-long board shorts to hide the hip extensions and jiggling thighs.

If you can imagine a two-metre long stick insect with zero body tone and a drooping stomach: that was me.

And then one day I discovered that my friend had what was known as a calf muscle. It was as if she had just shown me some fancy new brand of shoe – I wanted in. So I started to do something that I had managed to put off for most of my life: I started to exercise.

The calves didn’t come overnight but eventually I was able to wear my legs out in public. And after a few more years of daily jogs I actually developed what is known as self-respect.

But the best part of all was that I could stop dressing like a pre-pubescent male and just enjoy being a girl.  A very tall girl, but a girl nonetheless.

 

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

Would You Like Gagging With That?

Young people are drawn to fast food restaurants the way moths are attracted to light bulbs. The food is cheap, there are no parents to badger you and it’s usually full of the opposite sex.

Fast food chains spend a great portion of their advertising budgets attempting to draw in teenage boys because years of market research has told them the same thing: to a teenage boy, the fastest way to get to first base is by buying a girl some fries and Coke.

I know this because I was once that stereotypical teenager, who spent her first date in a smelly, grimy fast food restaurant.

A teenage boy took me there because 1) it was probably all he could afford 2) it was more private than his parent’s living room and 3) he wanted to get to first base.

Unfortunately, when you choose to dine on super-sized junk food that is loaded with preservatives and sugar, a normal kind of date is completely out of the question.

After ordering our food we squeezed ourselves into a booth, which had the kind of lighting that made my chin pimples look like a row of ice-capped volcanoes. I then told a joke that was not remotely funny to anyone but myself. Whilst caught in the grip of hysterical sugar-induced laughter, I took a slurp of my soft drink.

Two terrifying seconds later, my throat was constricting, my eyes were bulging and I knew at that moment I was choking, quite badly, and there was a strong chance I might not survive my first date.

There is no attractive way to choke; the gagging noises emitted from my throat that day were reminiscent of the alien sound effects used in Men in Black, which was ironic since we had only just watched that movie an hour before. I was unable to point out this amusing detail due to the fact I had no air supply but from the horrified look on my date’s face, it was clear he had made the connection.  

So in a last and desperate attempt to salvage some dignity, I threw myself sideways and ran for the bathroom. I felt it was much more gracious to slowly suffocate amongst female patrons queued for the toilet, than choke to death in front of a handsome French boy. But as I slumped to the floor of that seedy fast food bathroom I finally started to relax and the next thing I knew, the horrible gurgling and raspy breathing had stopped and … I was still alive!

The morals of the story:

  • If you laugh at your own jokes, stop.
  • And if you go on a first date, suggest a homemade picnic in the park.

 

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015