My name is Cinderella
(pause for you to say Hi, Cinderella) I am 35 years old (almost 36) and I am addicted to sugar.
It all started when I was still very young, my friends introduced me to Venda da Dona Tereza, next to my house. That little shop looked like the house of the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel (adorable children, by the way, but who got lost due to addiction). There we could find from those umbrellas made of cheap chocolate to the delicious teats of nega. A real mouth for a glycodependent (I just made it up!).
But until I married Prince Charming I was just a normal consumer of sugar, I consumed it socially and almost never bought it, I didn\’t really miss it, if I had it I ate it, otherwise I didn\’t.
However, during the royal wedding I didn\’t realize that I wasn\’t happy and started using sugar to plug the holes left unfilled by my relationship. But I still wasn\’t a super frequent user or buyer.
When I broke up, the problem started. Not knowing how to deal with my emotions, in fact, nor recognizing some of them, I ended up using sugar as a medicine. And we really didn\’t need any scientific research to know the pleasure of eating chocolate, chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream (my favorite sugar flavor, in this case).
I started to stop to buy candy to take home or even leave the house just to buy candy. To make matters worse, at the motherfucking school I worked at (I say this with all my love and affection lol) there were only wonderful people making and taking delicacies to be shared. Of course, let\’s all use it together, nobody wants to be addicted alone, right!?
After a while, I was astonished to see the differences in my body in the mirror, from when I got married and now. I went into shock! Like a good Cinderella with a Perfection Complex I could tell that some cellulite was, at the very least, in the wrong place.
I declared war on sugar, having lived intense battles of love and hate in the last four years, which I believed had come to an end, when in my first New Year\’s resolution we had an abrupt decision to separate me and him.
No, it wasn\’t just about my body anymore, it was about my mind too. The more sugar, the more I think, the more agitated I get, the less I sleep and the more shit I do. So I thought that although I\’m still learning how to deal with my emotions, now I can already recognize them, which gives me a huge advantage in winning against this enemy of mine.
And so I did. After the passage of the year, I continued without him, disciplined, as I had done on other occasions.
When then, in a night of intense anxiety propitiated by my astral hell, I succumbed to the delights of my enemy. But hey, let\’s go! It wasn\’t like you\’re thinking, it wasn\’t like that wildly. I knew about my anxiety and thought I open the can of condensed milk left over from Christmas to enjoy this little movie and relax or not?. I decided to open. And even though it was a conscious decision and I didn\’t eat half of it (which is quite an achievement!) I felt a little guilty. But I knew that the next day I could start all over again, with all my discipline.
And that\’s when life shows you that you can\’t run away from who you really are.
The next day I had a party and at the end I had to bring about 12 pieces of leftover chocolate cake home. Yes, I did, because if there\’s one thing that grandma taught me very well, it\’s not to waste food, no matter if it\’s made of sugar. The other day I went to watch a movie at a friend\’s house. As soon as I sat down she said friend, there is a can of condensed milk, just to let you know lol. And the day after that another friend calls me and says are you at home? I\’m stopping by to drop off some rice pudding that I made for you, but I made it with little sugar because I know you don\’t like it..
Hey? I dislike? I fucking love it! I can\’t live away from him and neither can he from me. It even makes me sad to see the faces of the brownies brought from work by my roommate staring at me on the table, knowing I want them and me leaving the kitchen without taking a single piece. This is more regrettable than seeing some poorly located fat. It\’s also regrettable to be the boring visitor who doesn\’t eat the cake made with all the affection for the friend. And even more regrettable is to keep comparing my body with other people\’s. That is indeed sad!
I\’m not ignoring the harm it can do, but the effects of the unbridled overeating resulting from abstinence are much worse than the normal consumption I was used to before losing myself in the world of uncontrolled emotions and the stereotype of fitness beauty increasingly demanded by the media. And after all, that gym has to do something, too, besides giving me muscle to support a skeleton that\’s another 30!
After realizing all this, I decided to restart and take on our romance, stopping seeing sugar as my enemy, with high hopes that we can respect our spaces and appreciate each other as before, socially, from time to time, in moments of leisure and trying to avoid date nights so I can get a good night\’s sleep. And when the mirror wants to tell me to let go of it, like a good Aquarius woman against what I am, I\’m going to look it right in the face and say: I\’m in charge of this shit!