Cara’s struggle against America’s secret killer

 

In high school, Cara C was at the top of her classes. A year younger than most of her classmates, she graduated at the age of 17, and could go to any college of her choice. Besides taking time to study, she would also find the time to swim for the Upper Arlington swim team.

 

This superhuman worked around the clock. In the morning, she would drive to the high school before the sun rose to swim, eat a quick breakfast in the cafeteria, take all of her classes, spend lunchtime doing homework, swim again after school, drive home, eat dinner while doing homework, and then sleep. For five hours. Then she would restart the entire cycle again.

 

But Cara wasn’t thinking about school in the small office. She sat in a chair, a lamp hanging over her head, while nurses fit a gas mask over her mouth. Conversations flew through her head, while a hazy figure encompassed her vision. Two hours later, she woke up, forgetting when she fell to sleep.

 

Once more, the nurses by her side are incomprehensible, except this time she can’t seem to keep her eyes open. The following hours are a blur. She only remembers people telling her to stay awake, propping her up against walls and chairs to stop her from falling over.

 

When her mother drives her home from the doctor, she gratefully falls asleep. The next morning, she wakes up feeling thirstier than usual. Half asleep, she walks to her bathroom across the hall to get a glass of water.

 

Pouring the water down her throat, she notices her mouth feels numb. Poking the inside of her mouth with her tongue, the taste of wet cotton and iron passes over her tongue. The realization of her missing wisdom teeth falls on her like a sack of bricks.

 

This is how her sugar addiction started.

 

Cara’s problem was small, at first. She had her wisdom teeth removed during her summer vacation, to not interfere with her school work or swim practice. During her brief vacation from school, she could sleep in, and eat whenever she felt like it. But she couldn’t eat normal food.

 

The tissue inside of her mouth were sensitive and held together with string. The only foods she ate that didn’t hurt her were fruits, apple sauce, and ice cream. They would be soft, easy to chew, and wouldn’t make her mouth feel like it was filled with razor blades.

 

When her mouth was healed, and school started, Cara’s routine recommenced. She woke up before the sun rose, ate breakfast and lunch at the high school, and would return home after swim practice. Typically for lunch, she would eat a breaded chicken sandwich on white bread with some chips, fruit or fries, a cookie, and a soda. For breakfast, she ate Kellogg’s brand cereal, such as Frosted Flakes, with cafeteria milk. But something was different.

 

She felt more stressed. At night, she had trouble sleeping, and she was more anxious in the morning. She shook off the feeling of what she thought was the school blues, but it didn’t go away. Instead, problems she could handle suddenly became stressful and difficult. Her mother allowed her to put a television in her room, to help lull her to sleep, and the problem digressed.

 

All of these actions are symptoms of sugar addiction, restlessness, anxiety, and the over consumption of sugary food. Where would Cara get these foods? Well, at school of course.

 

In schools, foods high in sugar are not difficult to find. For example, in the school cafeteria. There, one may find vending machines and snack bars near the lunch lines, where foods of all different assortments can be found. Cookies, gummy bears, gum, soda, and much more can be found in a school cafeteria.

 

Except for her real problem. All of this time, her consumption of foods with sugar grew. At school, eating chips or a cookie became more important than having fruit for lunch. At home, what used to be a pint of ice cream every two weeks escalated to one pint every three days. This was only the beginning.

 

Suddenly, everything became stressful. School felt like a punishment; her teachers were the punishers. If she missed a homework assignment, it meant the end of the world.If she got a B on a test, it meant she had failed. Swim practice and her own home “tortured” her too.

 

It felt like her coach was asking for too much. His voice berated against her ears, screaming at her to swim faster, ordering her to do something she felt was impossible. Before, she enjoyed the freedom swimming gave her, as she pushed through the water, feeling the water glide past her hands and face. After a long day at school, the water would always find a way to cool her off. Now, it felt like an icy cold grip was holding her prisoner, making her listen to the orders of a man she could not respect. Feeling trapped, home should have been her safety net, with a loving family awaiting her arrival, to ask her how her day was, and what they could do to make it better.

 

Reality was not so kind. Though it was no safe haven before. Her brother and herself were not on the best of terms, while everything her mother did got under her skin. She felt regretful about her relationship with her brother, because neither of them truly understood why he didn’t like her. Her mother though, she didn’t regret hating her.

No one knew why, but she and her brother never got along well. Whenever she tried to hug him, he pushed her away. If she tried to be nice to him, he would spit in her face. No matter what she did, it somehow widened the gap between them. It broke her heart, because she didn’t know what to do.

 

The food softened the blows though. While his screams hurt her, the food would always make it better. They would always fill the holes in her heart her brother would make. When it didn’t, she could always scream at her mother.

 

She believed she had every right to scream at her mother. Their relationship deteriorated after they moved from Pittsburgh to Ohio. Cara had just joined the swim team, and wanted to make friends. One way, was through the parents. Except her mother did not want to make friends, or at least in Cara’s eyes anyway. After her initial impression, she had trouble making friends in the swim club, and blamed it on her mother for not making friends with the other parents. She felt because of her mother’s inaction, she was purposefully excluded from events like car pools, where she could make friends with others.

 

Now, with the piling stress, Cara felt like she needed to scream. So who else, but her own mother to take the brunt of it. Every night, until nearing her graduation, Cara and her mother would argue, their screams heard throughout the house.

 

The problem only got better after she did something about it. Despite what she thought, her family was trying their best to make Cara feel better. Even her own little brother didn’t want to see his sister screaming until her lungs gave out. Together, they tried to help.  Her brother made the first move. He mentioned his concern, noticing her increasing consumption of ice cream. Then her mother noticed the recent purchases of clothes that were a size larger than normal, coupled with frequent trips to the grocery store for more ice cream.

 

Cara did not take action immediately. Her mother was mentioning small changes for her diet, hoping they wouldn’t set her off, and not wanting her to become stressed even further. Cara denied her weight problem. But after she took a good look at herself in her mirror, she didn’t like what she saw. She wanted to look better; she wanted to change herself.

 

She made many lifestyle changes. She got rid of the ice cream in her freezer, bought a scale to measure her progress, and hired a dietitian to help her decide what foods she should eat, and those she shouldn’t. Her problem did not disappear overnight though.

 

It was only in her sophomore year in college that she reached a normal weight. Along the way, she had to choose for herself, what she wanted eat, when she would exercise, and how she would live. Self-control was a big part. At college, she had no one to tell her if what she was eating too much. Four years later, Cara has gone from a swimmer to a runner, spending her days and weekends preparing for half-marathons.

 

Cara’s problem was not a singularity though. Sugar addiction itself is not what is harmful to our health as individuals and a nation.  The problem is the way sugar affects our body and lives.  Sugar surrounds us in our daily lives, at school, in the advertisements that invade us. It appears in foods that people would never think contained any sugar,  and the problem of sugar has only become exacerbated by the growth of the High Fructose Corn Syrup industry.  Sugar is marketed as being natural, being necessary for our diets, and as being important for energy. This is all true but like many other things in life this is only true in moderation.  As America has grown more and more affluent, we have consumed more and more sugar to a point where some consider it an epidemic.

 

 

Works CIted:

 

Kulkarni, Mayuri. "Sugar Addiction Treatment." Buzzle. Buzzle.com, n.d. Web. 16 May 2014.

 

"sugar." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 16 May. 2014.