You may have noticed that I haven't written in a while. You also might have noticed that the challenge should have ended a couple weeks ago. While both of those observations are true, what you don't know is that my sister somehow convinced me to carry my Flamin' Hot fast through lent all the way to Easter. At the time I was almost psyched about the idea. I had been doing so well I thought, hey, what's another two and a half weeks, right? Now all I can think is that right now I could be satisfying this persistent rumbling in my stomach with a handful (or twenty) of Cheetos. But next Sunday is Easter and that night I plan to celebrate the Lord's victory over death with a big bag of cheesy goodness and reruns of Psych (a show I largely enjoy because its main characters also understand the importance of satisfying snacks). This doesn't mean, however, that I have gained nothing from this experience. In fact here are a few reflections on this challenge as it comes to an end:


1) I can go without Cheetos...In a week I will have successfully gone one month, three weeks, and four days without eating Flamin Hots, a feat I had previously thought impossible. In the past couple of weeks, I have even stopped thinking about them so frequently, going entire days without craving them. That is something I truly never thought possible. And I like to think that after this is all over, I will be able to indulge in a handful of Cheetos without going overboard. But somehow I think that avoiding them completely will prove easier than portion control.


2) I should not go without Cheetos completely...Although this challenge helped me to achieve the intended goal of detoxing my system, I can't say that it improved my diet. All of the time I spent eating Cheetos was simply replaced with time spent being hungry and wishing I had some Cheetos. And sometimes with Nutella. But mostly hunger. I'd tell myself, hey, instead of Cheetos, why not eat an apple? And then I'd go to the refrigerator, open the door, stare at its contents for a few seconds and then close it and grab the jar of Nutella or bag of chocolate chips from the pantry. My meals continued to consist mostly of chips and salsa (or just salsa), although my mac n cheese intake did drastically decline. So while I definitely have learned the value of portion control, it is not all that beneficial to cut out Cheetos completely. 


3) I can't think of another reflection so here's a story...During the first winter at our new/current house, when I was eight or nine, there was a HUGE snowstorm. The snow in my backyard was up to my thighs and there were super tall drifts along the fence that were well above my waist. I was playing in one of these snow drifts with my Dad nearby. Keep in mind that it was snowing so heavily that I could barely see my Dad even though he was only standing a few feet away. Also, keep in mind that I have never had a really good handle on keeping my imagination from influencing my perception of reality. Anyway, I had been climbing onto the fence and jumping off into the mountain of snow below. I did this again but this time my Dad began yelling at me in an old man voice. Because the snow was impairing my vision, I thought that I had fallen onto the other side of the fence and that it was my grumpy neighbor who was yelling at me. My Dad then began to kick me repeatedly and shout, "Get out of my yard! This is MY YARD! GET OUTTA HERE!" 


In tears, I was shrieking "DADDY! DADDY HELP ME!" and thrashing around in the snow, trying blindly to find the fence so I could throw myself over it back into the safety of my own yard. Eventually, my Dad realized that I was not joking along with him and was in fact not laughing, but crying hysterically. 


He stopped kicking me and asked, "What's wrong?"


"Dad? Is that you?"


"Yeeeah...who else would I be?"


"I...don't know."


"Okay. Let's go inside."


And so ended one of the most terrifying events of my life. 

Food Wars

Well, I'm about halfway to the finish line and going strong! I wish I could say it's gotten easier, that I still don't fantasize every day about ripping open a bag of Flamin' Hots even just to smell their cheesy aroma. But that would be an outright lie. I have, however, had less of a temptation to actually leave the house and walk to Meijer to buy a bag. And when I do happen to go grocery shopping for my Mom with her credit card and instructions to buy whatever I want, I can trust myself to pick up a bag of tortilla chips and then walk right by the Frito Lay section. Not that I don't think about buying a bag and never telling anyone, but my commitment to this challenge is too strong.


And this is certainly not the first food-related challenge that I've taken on. But this is the first one that involves NOT eating food. I can chug a mixture of fruit punch, Tabasco, garlic, and chow mien without hesitation or force down a cup of week-old coffee remnants, dish soap and mold, but when dared to simply not eat Cheetos, I laughed at the impossibility of the suggestion. I think I can more effectively empathize with my friend who lost one of our food challenges and had to go two weeks without eating meat of any kind. And he loves meat. I mean LOVES it. It's possible he loves meat more than I love Cheetos....Ha ha ha ha ha...oh that's funny. But seriously, he's driven over two hours on several occasions just to go to some steak place where they apparently sell really good steaks. But the steaks are raw so you still have to drive all the way home and prepare it yourself. It's like the Ikea of steak venues. That's my understanding of it anyway. So those two weeks were pure agony for him. And all I had to do was drink a little condiment cup full of cold nacho cheese mixed with pickle juice. We had spent the whole night arguing about animals rights and vegetarianism (I think it's clear who was on which side of the argument) and then he said, "Jackie, if you drink this entire cup of pickled cheese, I will go until Thanksgiving without eating meat." Unfortunately for him, we didn't know each other all that well yet and he really thought I wouldn't do it. Poor fool. I looked at him and then I picked up that cup and gulped it down like it was liquid Cheetos. Of course, I'm really not good at chugging things quickly so cheese was falling down the sides of my mouth and dropping into globs onto the table. It was not a pretty sight and I honestly think watching me drink that curdled cheese must have been worse than actually drinking it.

That was the first in a long line of food challenges between the two of us. This also happens to be the same friend who caught me with Cheeto dust all over my teeth a few months later. Fortunately for me, he always settled for the worse end of the challenge. He would challenge me to eat something, like chicken strips marinated in grape juice (which was surprisingly tasty) or a bowl of red pepper flakes and after I succeeded I would later give him a follow up challenge that was inevitably worse than the one he'd given me. I may have even taken one challenge a tad too far. But he survived and now we can laugh about it. Well, I can laugh about it. He's still bitter. This particular challenge started out fairly easy. He had to put two Alka Seltzer tablets in his mouth and then chug half a bottle of cherry coke. The intention was for the soda to fizz up so much that he wouldn't be able to drink it and he would ultimately fail the challenge. But with impressive speed, he not only swallowed both tablets but drank the entire bottle of soda. So technically, he had already completed the challenge at this point. But I was so disappointed that he had succeeded so easily that I egged him on to swallow the one remaining Alka Seltzer tablet, which he did. What I didn't tell him was that after three tablets the pressure created by its dissolving increases exponentially (thank you Mythbusters). So for about a minute he stood there bragging about how that was the easiest challenge he'd ever done and how mine would be so much worse. And then he stopped moving and got this pained looked on his face and said something along the lines of, "What...did you do to me?"


As a general rule of our food challenges, you must refrain from puking for ten minutes after completing the challenge or you still lose. So for ten minutes he stood silent and motionless with his eyes closed and one hand against a wall while I shouted, "Hey, do some jumping jacks!" and "Want me to bring you a burrito or something from the dining hall to wash down that Cherry Coke?" But I gotta give him credit, he held out for what was probably the longest ten minutes of his life. He later told me that for three hours he laid in bed wondering if he was going to die from the pain in his stomach. Sometimes I feel a little bit bad about that third tablet. But he did make me suffer for several long hours in return while I ate an entire orange. I mean the whole thing. Including the peel.


So, all that to say, I've eaten a lot of things that would make my sister gag just thinking about them, but this is still the toughest challenge I have yet to tackle. Although the orange is a close second. But my resolve it strong and I'm halfway there!

The Popsicle Incident

So day seven is almost over! I guess the good thing about being sick all weekend is that I didn't feel like eating anything, not even Cheetos (though had someone set a bag in front of me I might be telling a different story). Plus I actually had plans this weekend (with actual people) so that was a welcome distraction. Not only was it nice to get out and talk to other human beings (not that I don't enjoy mixing corn starch with water to mimic glacial movement or exploring Catholic cemeteries by myself), but hanging out with my friends made me realize that there are other benefits to avoiding Cheetos besides not becoming physically ill. Allow me to explain with a story...


Unfortunately, the same red coating of "Cheeto dust" that makes Flamin' Hots irresistibly delicious also leaves behind embarrassing Cheeto evidence. My tongue and teeth are left bright red for several hours after finishing off a bag. But because I don't spend a lot of time looking at the inside of my mouth in the mirror, I was unaware that this happened every single time. That is until the Popsicle Incident. My sister and one of our friends (whom my roommate accurately nicknamed "the little one") came to visit me at college during my first year at U of I. We spent most of the weekend playing a game we invented called "Hi Dad". Basically, the little one sits somewhere reading a newspaper or looking busy in some way and when a guy walks by she looks up and says casually, "Hi Dad" and goes back to reading her paper. The reactions of the unsuspecting guys are hilarious. Most of them try and act like they didn't hear her but it is clear that they did because all of them instinctively jerk their heads to look at her when she calls them Dad. We also play with guys that pass us on the sidewalk and my favorite was when the little one said "Oh, hey Dad" to a middle-aged man who passed us with his family. He looked at the little one and his wife looked at him, both with the same puzzled expression. But that is not the story I meant to tell. So getting back to the real story of the Popsicle Incident, my sister and the little one spent the night on the floor of my dorm room and in the morning I fed them Flamin' Hots for breakfast because we didn't wake up early enough to make breakfast in the dining hall. We headed out of the dorm so I could give them an inside tour of campus and promptly ran into one of my friends. He told us he was coming back from the gym and I introduced him to my sister and the little one. Keep in mind that this was someone I was friends with but still didn't know very well since we had only been friends for part of a semester. We were still in that phase of trying to convey ourselves the way we wished to be interpreted as an individual through our every action and word. Well, I was at least, but then I often over think things. Anyway, after asking what our plans were for the day he looked at me and said,


"So...did you have a Popsicle for breakfast?"


Totally oblivious, I replied, "No..."


"Fruit Punch?"


"No...why are you-"


"Oh, you've been at the Cheetos again, haven't you?"


"How did you know?" I asked, still completely clueless.


"Your teeth are all red."


At that moment I wished I was anywhere but standing there looking like an idiot wiping my teeth with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. 


"Yeah...well, see ya later." I said and abruptly crossed the street. 


When my sister and her friend caught up I turned around and whispered furiously at them. "Why didn't you tell me my teeth were all red!?"


"I swear I didn't notice," my sister said.


"I did," the little one said casually. 


"Why didn't you tell me?"


"I dunno."


I was slightly upset and hurt by the fact that the little one wouldn't warn me that I was about to walk outside looking like I had just chowed down on a live squirrel. But I had to forgive her when I came back from class later to find streamers adorning my bed and a colorful sign that said "True friends tell each other when they have Flamin' Hots in their teeth" and another that said "I'm sorry". 


But worse than the specks of red dust lining my gums is the consistent red discoloring of my fingertips. It doesn't matter how often or how vigorously I scrub my fingers. They are always a varying shade of red. Normally when meeting new people, I just pray that they don't go in for the handshake.  Card games with new people are also a nightmare, my unsightly fingers exposed and the object of attention whenever it's my turn to discard. So when I joined my friend and two of his friends at the auto show this weekend, I instinctively curled my hands into the ends of my jacket sleeves and ran my tongue over my teeth in a last second attempt to rid them of any evidence of Cheetos before introducing myself. And then I realized that I had nothing to be anxious about. For once, I didn't have to wonder if they were wondering if I had just eaten a cherry Popsicle or  fifty watermelon Jolly Ranchers. It was a relief. 


So, even though my stomach is rumbling and I want nothing more right now than to scarf down ten times the suggested serving size of Flamin' Hots, the knowledge that I don't have to live in shame--you know to be honest it really feels worth the red fingertips to be able to eat a bowl of mac n' cheese topped with Cheetos right now. But it is a small--very, very small--comfort to know that I don't have to live in fear of anymore Cheeto-based embarrassments in the near future.

The Return of Jamie

Day Three is winding down and I am proud to say that I still have consumed no Cheetos. I am not proud to admit, however, that I may have underestimated the difficulty of this challenge. This morning I got up, brushed my teeth, turned on my music and started kicking around the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor to find something to wear. My thoughts were on what music I'd listen to in the car and more importantly not on Cheetos. That is until I spotted the empty bag poking out of my trash can. I wish I could say that this was the first time I had ever considered eating food from a trash can. I also which I could say that I have only ever considered eating food from a trash can. But as my friends who once watched me eat a loaf of Jimmy Johns bread off the ground can attest, I have eaten my share of dumpster food. I will have you know, though, that I do have standards when it comes to eating what I call "street food". That day-old Jimmy Johns was completely un-munched and wrapped in paper. Plus I ate it from the inside out just to be extra safe. 


Anyway, I had forgotten about the one bag of Cheetos I had eaten last week (okay it was five bags) and the bag was sitting there and I just knew there were crumbs in there. Delicious, fiery crumbs. And crumbs don't really count as food, right? 


And that's when I realized that inside my head there rages an intense war. My conscious mind knows that if I buy a single bag of Cheetos (a difficult feat in itself since they're always on sale) that I WILL eat the entire bag in one sitting and I WILL feel sick afterwards. But my subconscious tells me that I deserve a cheesy pick-me-up after a long day of napping and baking and napping. It tells me that I will only eat a few handfuls (half the bag at most) and save the rest for later. My subconscious is a liar. And a clever one at that. Jamie (yes I named my subconscious in the sixth grade) has no small store of trickery and deceit which she expertly uses to get what she wants. Which is Cheetos. And sometimes a trip to a miniatures museum two hours away (thank you Grimwade if you happen to read this). But mostly Cheetos. And the thing about Jamie is, once I get an idea in my head she will not let it go. Once when I lived in my apartment, I decided that I wanted to make brownies. It was two or three in the morning but once I imagined biting into a warm, gooey brownie and following it up with a cold glass of milk, I had to make it happen. Well, I actually wanted to sleep. But Jamie wanted that brownie and she completely took over. As I was opening the boxed mix, my roommate, who I like to call Pishpun (it's a long story in which I could not properly pronounce "pushpin"), walked into the kitchen. 


"What are you doing?" she said. 
"Nothing."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm hungry."
"What are you doing?"
"Making brownies," I said, trying to sound like I thought it was a completely normal thing to be doing at 3 A.M.
"No you're not." She walked over, snatched the box, and was halfway to her room before I knew what she was doing. 


I ran after her but she had already locked her door. And when she opened it she informed me that the brownie mix was hidden and that I should go to bed. I knew that she was doing me a favor but Jamie wasn't  about to take no for an answer. I whined while she got ready for bed about how I absolutely NEEDED to make brownies RIGHT NOW. And when she turned off her light and got into bed I crawled in after her and proceeded to flop around on the bed like a fish on dry ground saying "Please, please, please let me make brownies!". When that didn't work I stood up and jumped around her singing a song about how I would die without chocolate. Eventually I jumped and sang myself into a state of total exhaustion and fell asleep. But the point is that I will fight myself and anyone else for what I want until I get it, even when it's not what I want. (Try making sense out of that).

With my two cerebral halves at war with each other, it's hard to maintain very much willpower. While living in the apartment I made several attempts to quit the spicy snack. Familiar with Jamie's tricks, I enlisted Pishpun to help keep me accountable. But as committed as she was to the cause, little Pishpun was no match for my commitment to my dirty habit. I began sneaking Cheetos into the apartment inside my sweatshirt. I hid them under the bed. I ate them in the bathroom with the shower running to hide their telltale crunch. And when Pishpun hid my Cheetos in her sock drawer, I ate the Cheetos and left the bag carefully refolded the way I had found it. 


This morning I did muster the willpower to leave that bag in the trash. But it is now abundantly clear that this is going to be a rough battle. Plus I am getting pretty hungry right about now and that bags of crumbs is still sitting in my room smelling delicious. But I am going to close my computer and go downstairs and eat an apple. I'm just kidding about the apple, but I will go downstairs and count day three as a success. And hopefully this will get easier. But with Jamie around, I highly doubt it. 

Girl Meets Cheesy Snack Food

Before college I used to pride myself on my incredible willpower. Growing up, I never lost an argument. Not because I was always right but because I refused to lose. And if I made a promise I always followed through. My little sister and I had this understanding that we could deceive and prank each other, all in good fun of course, but if we promised something, (and here we specifically had to use the words "I promise") it meant we weren't messing around. I once told my friend that I could make a single gummy worm last an entire month and when she doubted me I promised I would do just that. I sucked on that colorful candy worm every day after school, placing it in a sandwich bag at night. My friend was so grossed out by the saliva-covered thing sitting in that plastic baggy that she begged me to just swallow it already. I refused. And after a month I forced down that lump of sugary goo with a smug smile on my face.


There was no challenge I could not conquer with my impressive discipline of mind. That is until I went away to college. As a public school kid, the dangers of peer pressure had been drilled into my head from a young age by my parents, teachers and D.A.R.E. But nothing can really prepare you for the mixture of new-found freedom and isolation from the real world that comes with college. You live, eat, party and study with your peers. You're safe from the responsibilities of adult life with the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. In this environment peer pressure runs rampant. Don't get me wrong, I didn't fall into any of the classic college pitfalls. I don't drink, have never touched drugs and my friends' idea of a wild party is blowing glow-in-the-dark bubbles in a crowded bathroom with the lights off. But there is one temptation that I was not prepared for. It's name is Flamin' Hot Cheetos. They are my passion and my downfall. I am a tragic hero brought down by my own pure love for this particular cheesy snack food. The first time I was introduced to Flamin' Hots, I was on a college visit at a small private school. I spent the night in one of the on-campus apartments with my student guide, a very nice senior in theology. We were sitting around the tiny common room of her apartment with her roommates watching CSI on DVD, when one of them opened up a big bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Immediately, a starchy, spicy odor filled the small space. It was intoxicating. The bag was passed around and I grabbed a small handful, studying the bright red Cheetos with interest. I popped one in my mouth and my tongue tingled with every crunchy bite. They burned so good going down and I reached for handful after handful. That night as I shivered in my sleeping bag, lying on the floor crammed between a bed and a dresser, I thought about the way they coated my tongue in a flavor that compared to nothing I had ever tasted before. And I knew one thing to be true: I would never go back to regular Cheetos again. I was hooked.


In retrospect, I probably should have seen it coming. There is a video of one of my early birthday parties, I must have been seven or eight, where my friends and I are gathered around our old kitchen table. The remnants of pigs in blankets and french fries are strewn across the festive tablecloth and several simultaneous conversations are being shouted across the table. All of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, I sit up very straight and rigid in my chair, get this glazed-over look in my eyes, and shout "CHEETOS!" I begin to chant it, pumping my fist in the air, until all my friends join in. "CHEE-TOS! CHEE-TOS! CHEE-TOS!" And then suddenly it's Christmas and I'm passionately hugging a box of crayons that I had just pulled out of my stocking, saying in complete seriousness, "Just what I've always wanted! Thanks Santa!"


My Mom didn't keep chips in the house and so at first my Cheetos intake was limited to the times I convinced her to buy me one of the little bags of Flamin' Hots stacked by the register at Meijer. But soon I was living an hour away from home in my own dorm room where there were no food restrictions. And more importantly, my parents had let me take one of the family cars with me to college. My cousin and I had decided on the small Christian school together and she lived across the hall from me. Although our parents paid for our meal plans, we took weekly trips to the nearby Dominick's to supplement our diet of dorm food. Our grocery list consisted of: Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts, Milk, and Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Whenever we weren't in class we were in one of our rooms eating Cheetos. It didn't help that we seemed to lack the ability to make friends there (one time I saw two girls from one of my classes so I jogged up to them and said "Are you heading to chemistry too?" and one of them nodded and then they both sped up to get away from me-no joke) so that we had almost nothing to do except do our homework, watch "Rob and Big" and eat Cheetos. We quickly settled into a comfortable rate of finishing off one family sized bag every two days between the two of us. We bought them four bags at a time. We often skipped meals because we had no one to sit with anyways and just ate Cheetos for dinner. It only got worse from there.


After a year at that school I transferred to the University of Illinois where I actually managed to make some friends. Fortunately (or unfortunately as the case may actually be), our dorm building had a little mini store in the basement that we called "Late-Nite" because it was open mostly during the late hours of the night and because words are of course cooler when you leave some of the letters out. At Late-Nite, residents could use meal plan credits to purchase snacks, including bags of...yes...Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Because they only sold the individual snack bags my intake was at first limited but soon I was eating two bags at a time. But it wasn't until I moved out of the dorms and into an apartment that it really became apparent that I had a problem. Without the dining hall at my disposal I had to cook for myself. I quickly discovered that mac n' cheese mixed with Flamin' Hots was a delicious and easy meal. Without Late-Nite access I went back to buying big bags of Cheetos, and soon I was back to our old rate of four bags a week, only this time I didn't have my cousin to eat half the share. After a while it got so bad that I couldn't make it between our weekly Walmart trips and would go out of my way to stop by the gas station on the way home from class to pick up a bag. And I didn't even have a car . Knowing that nothing I could cook would taste as good as Cheetos I wouldn't even bother and would finish off an entire bag in one sitting. Often this would make me sick to my stomach and those things burn a lot more coming up than they do going down.


Needless to say I can no longer deny that I am wholly and seemingly helplessly addicted. So when my friend (and former roomie), Liz, challenged me to go a whole month without Flamin' Hots, I laughed and laughed and laughed. But she, being the true and wise friend that she is, kindly told me that she was worried that if I didn't detox my system I might very well die and insisted that I accept the challenge. So it's day two of thirty and I am fully committed to living Cheeto-free. And I hope that by documenting this journey of self-liberation for the world (or at least for Liz) to see that I will be able to hold myself accountable along the way. So bring on day three!