my body is wicked smaht

for the past two weeks, i have been suffering from shockingly intense chocolate cravings. i yearn for it all the time, and i'll take it any way i can get it--ice cream (well, the non-dairy equivalent thereof), cookies, beverages, flavored lip gloss; i am the quintessential junkie. this is unlike me on a couple of levels. one, i've never cared all that much for chocolate; i mean, i don't hate it or anything, but when it comes to cravings i've always been a salty-snack kind of girl. two, i'm a mild-mannered individual with no prior evidence of an addictive personality. true, i smoked menthol cigarettes for seven years, but i never smoked more than six a day, and when i decided it was time to quit, i quit. just like that. i chewed nicorette gum for a few days and found it decidedly unpleasant, as much because of its disgusting peppered-creamsicle flavor as the havoc it wreaked on my misaligned right temporomandibular joint, and i donated the remaining 80 pieces or so to a friend who was also trying to quit. i never relapsed; nicotine, one of the most addictive substances on the planet, i shrugged off like so much nothing. but lately when i don't eat any chocolate during the day, i wake up at two o'clock in the morning with the shakes and start digging at the kitchen counter with my thumbnail in the hopes of scraping up some tiny amount of residue from the cocoa powder i finished off three days ago. what the hell?

what i suddenly realized is that the onset of the cravings falls in line nicely with the time it first began getting dark before i made it home after work. i may not have a history of addiction, but i do have a history of seasonal affective disorder (SAD--what a punnily apropos acronym), my symptoms ranging from mild anxiety to profound depression; in my third year of college i stayed in bed for an entire month--from october to november. there were additional precipitating factors that year, and things wouldn't have gone as badly without them, but the transition from summer to fall is always a difficult one for me to make.

i knew, because i researched it pretty thoroughly while in school, that the main neurotransmitter involved in SAD is serotonin. it's involved in a number of mood-related interactions in the brain, and its levels tend to drop when an individual isn't routinely exposed to full-spectrum light, like sunlight. well, guess what i found out?

The combination of sugar (carbohydrate) and saturated fat in chocolate also produces a neurotransmitter called serotonin that acts as an opiate or sedative in the brain--kind of like antidepressants. Small amounts of chocolate will produce serotonin, however, binging on chocolate can cause the serotonin to rise to almost a sedative effect and then crash. This type of effect might cause an addictive response for more chocolate in pursuit of elevating the serotonin.

awwww, what a good body i have! she's been trying extra-hard to stabilize me and keep me safe and happy, and my despicable lack of willpower sent her into a flaming tailspin of insatiable choco-desire. but no more; now that i understand her motivation she and i should be able to glide through our days almost as though we shared one brain. and i do mean "almost"; i'll never understand why she keeps kicking the inside of my left ankle like that when she walks. but i think this is a pretty solid start.