After decades of numbing herself with Diet Coke and Little Debbie cakes, a 70-year-old woman discovers that what she thought was her personality—anxious, foggy, quick to anger—was actually just her diet, and the real her had been waiting underneath all along.
The afternoon I cleared out my pantry eight years ago, I found seventeen boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes hidden behind the canned goods. Seventeen. I'd been buying them on autopilot for so long that I'd created a processed food fortress without even realizing it. Standing there in my kitchen at sixty-two, holding a box of Swiss Rolls that had probably been there since my husband's funeral, I understood that I'd been medicating myself with sugar and chemicals for longer than I cared to admit.
The realization came slowly, the way arthritis creeps into your joints. One morning I counted the empty Diet Coke cans in my recycling bin and stopped at twenty-three. A week's worth. That's when the math hit me: I'd been drinking roughly a thousand Diet Cokes a year for three decades. Thirty thousand cans. The number felt impossible, but there it was, measured out in aluminum and aspartame.
What started as curiosity became an experiment. I'd read somewhere that Uma Naidoo, MD, stated that "Ultra-processed foods contain substances extracted from food (such as sugar and starch), added from food constituents (hydrogenated fats), or made in a laboratory (flavor enhancers, food colorings)." The clinical precision of that description haunted me. Laboratory-made substances. That's what I'd been living on.
The first week without soda felt like swimming through cement. My body threw tantrums—headaches that started behind my eyes and spread like spilled ink, exhaustion that made my bones feel hollow, irritability that turned me into someone I didn't recognize. Or maybe someone I recognized too well. My daughter called on day four, and I snapped at her for asking how I was doing. Later, sitting with chamomile tea instead of my usual evening Sprite, I wondered if this was withdrawal or just who I'd always been underneath the chemicals.
By week three, something shifted. The morning brain fog that I'd attributed to age started lifting earlier each day. By noon, I wasn't reaching for caffeine or sugar to prop myself up. My hands, which had trembled slightly for years (I blamed it on too much coffee, though I rarely drank coffee), grew steady. Small changes, barely noticeable unless you were living inside them.
The processed snacks went next, almost by accident. Once you start reading labels, you develop a kind of horror at what you've been consuming. Modified corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, red dye 40, ingredients I couldn't pronounce without stumbling. I stood in the grocery store holding a package of my favorite cookies, squinting at the label like it was written in a foreign language. Which, in a way, it was.
Replacing those foods wasn't about finding healthier versions of junk. It was about remembering what actual food tasted like. Apples instead of apple-flavored anything. Almonds instead of those cheese crackers that left orange dust on everything. Water—just water—instead of the endless parade of flavored drinks I'd convinced myself were hydration.
Three months in, I noticed I hadn't yelled at anyone in weeks. This might not sound like much, but I'd been a yeller. Traffic, telemarketers, the news, my own reflection—everything had been worth raising my voice over. My daughter mentioned it first, tentatively, like she was afraid of breaking a spell. "You seem... calmer," she said during Sunday dinner. I was slicing actual carrots for actual soup, and I realized she was right.
The changes accumulated like snow, silent and gradual until suddenly the landscape was transformed. My sleep, which had been fitful and brief for twenty years, stretched into seven uninterrupted hours. The joint pain that had been my morning alarm clock softened to a whisper. Even my skin, which I'd given up on decades ago, seemed to remember what it was supposed to do.
But it's the mental clarity that still astonishes me. Imagine living your entire adult life slightly drunk, not enough to notice but enough to blur the edges of everything, and then suddenly sobering up. Colors seem more saturated. Conversations flow instead of stutter. Books that I'd struggled to finish suddenly made sense. I reread Virginia Woolf last winter and understood passages that had eluded me when I taught them.
Research from the NIH found that adherence to the MIND diet, which emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins, was associated with a lower risk of cognitive decline and impairment in older adults. Reading this felt like vindication, but also like loss. All those years of fog. All those years of operating at seventy percent and calling it normal.
The question that haunts me isn't whether the change was worth it—of course it was. The question is why it took me six decades to realize I was poisoning myself in small, socially acceptable ways. Every birthday party, every teacher's lounge, every gas station stop had reinforced the normalcy of living on processed food. It was so ordinary it became invisible.
Now, at seventy, I watch people my age struggle with the same fog I lived in, and I want to shake them. But I remember being shaken myself, metaphorically, by well-meaning friends who'd gone organic or given up sugar, and how I'd smiled and nodded and stopped at McDonald's on the way home. Change doesn't come from other people's revelations.
Sometimes I dream about Diet Coke. Not drinking it, just the sound of opening the can, that specific hiss and click. I wake from these dreams neither sad nor nostalgic, just aware of how deeply those habits carved themselves into my brain. Thirty years of conditioning doesn't disappear in eight.
What I've gained isn't perfection or youth or immunity from grief and aging. What I've gained is presence. The ability to feel what I'm actually feeling instead of what the chemicals tell me to feel. The steadiness that comes from blood sugar that doesn't spike and crash every few hours. The quiet that comes when you stop feeding the static.
Final thoughts
The other day, my granddaughter asked if I missed my "old treats." I thought about it while making us both cups of real tea, with real honey, in real ceramic cups. I miss the convenience sometimes, the mindlessness of it, the way processed food asked nothing of me. But I don't miss the woman who needed those things. She was exhausted and anxious and angry, and she thought that was just her personality. Turns out, it was just her diet. The real me—steady, clear, present—was waiting underneath all along, patient as only the truth can be.
