By Gwen Rich
There is only a ten-calorie difference between Dove’s milk chocolate and dark chocolate.
Not a big enough gap between the added sugars to warrant thinking of dark chocolate as a “healthy” choice. That didn’t stop my mom. She could always justify a dark chocolate treat when a milk chocolate one would not be permissible. In my experience, a full serving of milk chocolate—four pieces—is almost exuberant. Its sweetness so overpowering, I have to wash it down with a drink. Dark chocolate, however, does a dance on your tastebuds. A to-and-fro unique to its dark and tempting taste. A delicious hit of buttery smooth chocolate, then a lingering bitterness in the back of your throat that, instead of making you want to take a drink, makes you want another chocolate. Perfectly bittersweet. Those four pieces are easy to finish. To this day, you can find a couple of dark chocolate Dove tucked away in my mother’s freezer.
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All our best memories together are of chocolate on the couch. The open bag would sit, almost empty, on the console between us. Silver and red marbled foil balls would pile up by her hand. In the memory, she crunches the foil. She rolls it anxiously between two fingers and attempts to make it small, to hide the evidence. It’s still obvious that she’s eaten half the bag in one sitting. The size of the wrapper doesn’t change that. She’s bingeing. She never could let one little treat be just one.
I was right there next to her, bingeing the other half.
But I don’t ball up the foil. I compulsively smooth out the shiny metal. I cherish each bite of chocolate. Playing with the trash gives my hands something to do, to keep me from grabbing another. I meticulously unfold the edges and corners. I push just hard enough to get the wrinkles out, careful not to rip the delicate foil, revealing the messages—hopelessly, sickeningly sweet.
If you are reading this, you are beautiful and worth it!
But my mother didn’t think so. The calories are never worth it. They were an unfortunate consequence of a moment of weakness to be ashamed of and regretted. The sugar craving was to be hidden away, and she lived in fear of the day it would rear its gluttonous head again. Sugar addiction: my mother’s demon. An unwanted inheritance. An heirloom I can’t shake.
She never felt uglier than after a sugar-craving binge. To her, beauty and worth are all twisted up together, inseparably connected. There is no worth without beauty, so anything for beauty is worth it.
Love yourself.
I haven’t been below two hundred pounds since middle school. Luckily for me, my mother was very concerned about this. My stick-skinny sister would pile up her third serving of pasta, but I had to use my specially purchased portion bowl. A gift from my mom. A twin pack she shared with me against my will. She was watching her weight, you see, so it was easy to make my “health journey” an extension of her own.
My mother was always looking for new ways to lose weight. She would pick a workout plan, and it would consume our life for the next few months. We tried everything. Before I was sixteen years old I had done Zumba, spin, and TTap. We tried routines like hip-hop, salsa, and belly dancing. She gave up yoga in less than a week, convinced it wasn’t fast-paced enough to lead to any real weight loss. I’ve walked, I’ve run, I’ve climbed. The StairMaster and the elliptical don’t scare me anymore. Not after what P90X, HIIT, and Insanity did to me. Those routines have sometimes been called too dangerous to try. In 2012, only one year before my mother picked up her very own DVD copy, a twenty-three-year-old athlete was hospitalized after only two sessions of P90X, with severe rhabdomyolysis—a medical condition that occurs when your muscle tissue breaks down so thoroughly that it releases toxins into the bloodstream that cause kidney failure. When Insanity was released, it was commonly called “P90X on drugs.” But it was never enough. We never did lose the weight. Everyone knows “weight loss is only 20% exercise and 80% diet,” after all.
Love is nice, but chocolate is better.
My mom loved me enough to teach me to count calories when I was twelve. I ate a dry tuna sandwich foldover on wheat for lunch every day for a year to stay within my calorie limit. I could only have one teaspoon of mayo, because “that extra teaspoon isn’t worth it.” I know that popcorn and pickles are zero-point foods, meaning you can eat as much as you want guilt-free, and that celery burns more calories to digest than it contains. All these backward negative calorie tricks linger still in my head when I consider what I eat. I know I shouldn’t have more than twenty grams of carbs every two hours if I want to be in the negative, and that I would be keto if I was serious about my health. I’ve done Weight Watchers, Biggest Loser, and Volumetrics. I’ve tried the 16:8 intermittent fasting window, and when that didn’t work, at sixteen I did a fifteen-day water fast. I got all the way down to 205, and if my dad hadn’t made me stop after I collapsed and didn’t regain consciousness for five minutes, I would have made it under two hundred.
Every woman is a super (role) model.
I would watch from the doorway of my mother’s master bath as she weighed and measured herself in the mirror. Its reflective surface was covered in dry-erase mantras and motivational quotes. Everything from the classic, “You’ve got this!” to “Love yourself enough to say no.” She would poke herself in the belly, the sides. She would pinch her thighs and arms and neck. She would look down at the scale and let out a hopeless breath that reverberated off the yellow bathroom walls. She squeegeed away old data and filled in new metrics of success, beauty, and worth. She set goals, wrote new words of encouragement, and went about obsessing over her body. Is it any surprise that I did the same?
I weighed and measured. I poked and pinched. I tried. I sighed. I cried. And then I’d try again. I wrote mantras on my own dingy mirror, much more hateful than my mother’s. I kept my own diet log in a journal she gifted me. Then I started rolling my eyes each time my mother told me I was beautiful. I think back and wonder how she ever could have thought I would believe her. How could I be beautiful if she wasn’t? How could she love me when she didn’t love herself?
Treating yourself is never wrong.
If we ever reached a goal, shed a pound or two, finished a tough routine, or broke a record, we would celebrate with a little treat. We had earned it. A coke. A cupcake. A chocolate. The treat was always something we had denied ourselves in our efforts for health. We would sit on the couch, curled up next to one another, not exercising any more muscles than were necessary to reach for another chocolate. We would laugh at the comedy, or cry during the romance. With the distraction of our minds, our bodies gained autonomy. No longer being beaten into submission, it could finally have what it really wanted: the sweet taste of chocolate. And one taste was never enough.
The sugar would call to us.
Go ahead, have another 🙂
And we would heed the call. The sugar rushed into our veins and reminded us of lost happiness. We stood on a slippery slope. We couldn’t seem to help ourselves.
Happiness is one bite away.
Everything we worked for, anything we gained, would be lost in a blackout binge in front of the TV. We would come to, from our stupor, to discover ourselves surrounded by wrappers and mired in shame. The happy moment was gone. We would be right back where we started.
Again and again, I ran on this treadmill track to nowhere. Following behind my mom, her eyes fixed on her prize, my eyes fixed on her.
Try to see the humanity in everyone.
The Christmas I was pregnant with my daughter, I sat around the table with my mother and aunts swapping stories. We laughed and shared a bag of Dove. It is a beautiful memory. It’s warm and smells like chocolate. The wrinkles at the corners of my aunt’s eyes as she laughs and the sparkle of genuine joy in my mom’s face are etched into my mind. I reached and took a few more chocolates from the bag and my mom censured me. She was on autopilot, reminding me to watch how much chocolate I was eating. In a mindless slip, she ripped the joy away. The cold foil burned red-hot and guilty in my hand.
I barked out a bitter laugh. I reminded her I was six months pregnant. She made a snide comment I don’t remember, but I do remember the way my aunts shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Their eyes searched for anywhere else to look.
“You have always done this to me,” I told her, shaking my head in disbelief.
She scoffed. “Done what?”
I remember the pinched and defensive look on her face as she frantically scanned her sisters’ faces, looking for support.
“You nitpick what I eat. You make me feel fat.” A moment of silence. “You make me feel ugly.” I bore my gaze into hers. I was an adult by then, no longer blindly running behind her. No longer afraid to speak my mind.
“I do not. I have always told you that you are beautiful no matter how much you weigh.”
She honestly believed what she said. I could see it in her stubborn eyes.
I couldn’t let her be right about this. Too many years of weight-obsessive hell washed over me. The bitter chocolate aftertaste was no longer a pleasant one. Memories of dinners when my stomach was too full of acid, shame, and fear to eat and afternoons spent in my living room in front of a high-cardio exercise until I passed out on the floor filled my head. For the first time,
I told my mother what she did to me.
“I thought you wanted to lose weight with me,” the quiet words came out. I shook my head, a silent answer, easily the heaviest thing in the room.
Her face grew splotchy red, and her shoulders began to shake. She sobbed into hands that smelled like chocolate. She looked small, and not because this was the first time I had seen her since her bypass. She was imperfect and full of regret. I love her for that.
“I never meant to,” she said. “I never meant to.”
Inhale the future, exhale the past.
My husband gifted me a bag of Dove chocolate for Mother’s Day. I sit on the couch with my daughter as we watch TV. She crinkles around inside the bag and pulls a hand out. She extends her arm to me and unfolds chubby fingers around a chocolate. I pluck it from her palm and open it for her. She happily pops it into her mouth, and I smooth out the foil. I set it in on the stack next to me, message face up. I open one for myself and add it to the stack. As the stack gets higher, I feel the itch to tell my daughter no more. I find myself thinking my mom’s thoughts, and almost saying my mom’s words. I bite my tongue, ashamed. I let her have another. She climbs into my lap and leans back against my belly. I snake my arms around her and breathe the moment in. We share more chocolate, and I hope, memories. She starts to play with the stack of wrappers. I read her the one in her hand, but she is too little to understand. Instead, she begins ripping up the little sheets. The foil platitudes fall to pieces.
Moments like these need to be savored.
Gwen Rich is a current BYU Creative Writing English student. She expects to graduate in April 2025, the same semester she will work on Inscape. By the Fall 2025 issue, she hopes to be in the BYU English MFA studying creative nonfiction while caring for her two children. She is a southern girl who hungers for learning and good food. Find Gwen Rich on Instagram here.
Header Image by Quentin Lee Webb, Inscape 1992
