OK, I have a confession to make, to kick start this post: I am absolutely and totally addicted to Diet Coke and McCoy's Salt and Vinegar crisps. My family can back me up on this.
At worst, I could drink up to 14 litres of Diet coke a week (2 litres a day, mostly made up of 4 500ml bottles), and eat 4 50g packets of crisps a day - two with lunch and two after dinner. I won't even try and think of how many packets that is a week. It'll be enough to say that it's been less than helpful to my waistline.
And while my family - my mum, sister, and father in particular - have been urging me to cut this down (scratch that, cut it out entirely), I can't help wanting to follow a certain train of thought.
Whenever we think about addictions, we think of the following: drink, drugs, cigarettes, sex. And those are the ones that usually blow your life apart in a huge way: rehab, debt, overdoses, the whole kit and caboodle.
But then there are... I don't want to say less harmful addictions, but - let's go with more SUBTLE addictions, like food. And I think it's because of our perception of food; the stuff's essential - no food and you're toast.
Yeah, I know - terrible pun, but I didn't have to fish for it. OK, I'll get back to the point.
The way I can't help seeing it is that food's a carer's drug. It can still make you sick in that you overeat in one sitting and throw up then, but it doesn't incapacitate you straight away. You can eat crisps and some chocolate, and then get up and do something that requires good mobility.
If you're drunk or stoned, the ability to walk a straight line juggling oranges and lemons isn't going to work out well.
But when you overdose on junk food and fizzy drinks, the worse that can happen - or at least the worst that HAS happened to me at least - is that you puke all over the place.
As Caitlin Moran wrote once,
"Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers... Fat people aren't indulging in the "luxury" of their addiction making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone."
And we don't entirely realise it. Granted, we realise the dangers of eating too little food - too many girls puking their guts out in primary school, or eating lettuce leaves because Joe Sexy-DooDah says he only likes girls who weigh the same as a bottle of beer.
But practically nobody sees the opposite end of the spectrum - women eating the entire contents of their fridges at midnight because they think that Joe Pecksey would never look at them twice.
But people aren't talking about it unless there's a 2 year old already puking her guts out without enough fat on her.
But then, maybe I'm not having a go at the sins of fat people. I'm fat myself, I can't talk. I'm just having a go at the hypocrisy of society, I guess. There's a quote - I don't know who by - that I found recently, and love:
"I don't have a short temper, I just have a low tolerance for hypocrites and drama."
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