Donut Queen

When I was thirteen I wanted nothing more than to fit in and be accepted by my fellow peers. This proved kind of challenging, since I was a head taller than most of the girls in my grade. Luckily, there were other ways to fit in, like cramming my gob with junk food.

So given I had just changed homes, schools and friendship groups, I did what every teenager does when they need to buy a few friends: I took a job at Donut King.

It felt good to be the centre of attention. After school I would change into a bright pink hat and pink and white uniform and stand under hypnotic spotlights in the middle of the shopping mall, serving up processed snacks and deep-fried lard.

I made friends overnight.

Even my big brother paid more attention to me. Instead of looking at me like I was some kind of deformed kitten, he started to embrace my presence of an afternoon, especially when my schoolbag was loaded up with the day’s unsold donuts.

For once in my life I was popular and I didn’t care in the slightest that I had just sold my soul to the junk food devil.

Fortunately for my soul, I was completely inept at the job and it wasn’t long before the manager discovered I had no cashier skills whatsoever. The Donut Queen had no choice but to hand in her crown.

Funnily enough I didn’t care about the money or the job, I cared about losing friends because I was no longer ‘that girl with the free donuts’. I was just ‘that girl who used to have free donuts’.

When you are a teenager, there’s a lot of pressure to eat crap. Cooking up some mung beans and vegetables is not the way to improve your social status. Little do you know that by eating processed garbage in an attempt to make new friends, means you are inadvertently making enemies with your gut and by the time you reach ‘adulthood’ you will be forced to go on a decade long fast if you want any hope of making it up to your tired, swollen body.

The best thing you can do is take a leaf out of my book and quit while you are ahead.  There are worse problems in life than trying to find new friends - try and find a new pancreas for example.

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