🍬 Is Giving Up Your Favorite Vice Good for Business? Part Two
Yes, but you already knew that 🫵🙂↕️
Catch up on part one here first:
Where we left off . . .
If I want to get out of the hole I’m in, I need to do something differently, I said to myself in February. I hadn’t yet joined The Office.
My eyes scanned the negative space of the bottom shelf at the grocery store. Something yummy was getting snapped up, so I crouched down to look. My mouth salivated. I never knew Whole Foods sold something so naughty!
⭕️ SOUR RINGS, hallelujah!
I heard angels and devils singing as I examined the bag. “Lemonade & Pomegranate Flavored” the front read, connoting juice while providing nothing of the sort.
I’ll just buy this one bag, I told myself 😂😂😂, to cope with the first month after losing my longtime licensing client. I become thangry in the summer—tired, hot, and angry. That’s how I ended up at Whole Foods in the first place that sweltering afternoon.1 I just needed to be somewhere with better A/C. I wish I went to the library instead 😭
I tore into the bag before I even made it up the escalator for self-checkout.2 The sour sugar dissolving into my mouth was a taste of heaven.
According to functional nutritionist Jen Briar-Bonpane, “Eating sugar temporarily increases beta-endorphin levels and leaves us feeling like we can manage the stress of the day a bit better.” Beta endorphins are produced in the brain, especially in the pituitary gland, blocking the sensation of pain.3
Sounds about right. I felt something in me satisfy, temporarily, as I popped more rings into my mouth. They were making me giddy, my own little food rebellion, exchanged for temporary relief. Forget the diet mantra I learned growing up, “thin feels better than food tastes.” This taste made me forget the day, the year even.
I’ll just have one or two for dessert, I said, 😂😂😂 hiding them in a cabinet back home.
I don’t have to tell you that I did not buy just that one bag, nor did I dispense them to myself in any sort of restrained manner—at least not after the first day or two.
Like most addictions, the intervals between hits got progressively shorter. Once I knew a) that these sour rings existed at Whole Foods and b) where they were hidden, I started checking during every shop. Just one bag turned into a weekly bag, then daily rings stolen with coffee in the morning, and rings tossed into my mouth at random intervals while refilling my water glass between meetings.
This was my little source of (misplaced) joy for about seven months . . . as more and more pairs of pants stopped fitting . . . until hitting a breaking point in early February.4 I have known for a long time that moderation doesn’t work for me; streaks and cold turkey do (and not the sandwich kind).
So, on February 11, I resolved that I would stop eating processed sugar. Again.
I succeeded for three days in a row, until a pinch-me-am-I-really-here Valentine’s Day nonfiction publishing lunch at my friend’s Upper West Side brownstone. “It’s like you’re in a Nora Ephron movie!” my grandma said as I called her on the way home.
I was having so much fun that I couldn’t resist making a dessert plate. It was a transgression trifecta: a fluffy cotton-candy-colored marshmallow Peep, a heavily sprinkled hot-pink sugar cookie (from a box I brought 😭), and a tiny Baked by Melissa cookie-dough cupcake. I enjoyed every bite. But I knew it wasn’t just about these small bites.
FINE. That was the last time!
How could I expect to turn my business around with sugar clouding my brain and inflaming my body?
