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

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

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