FEELING DEPRIVED


Mom has been rather weird lately, getting increasingly health-conscious. She loves to cook broccoli and carrots on Saturdays and Sundays (the only days when she's at home to cook dinner), hailing its health benefits. A few months ago, she introduced brown rice into the family dinner menu. Just the other day, because of the recent humid weather, she bought barley drinks, claiming that it's "cooling" for the body. Sitting in our refrigerator, currently, are also two 1.5L of Oat Milk from Magnolia. Gone too, is my favourite coffee, to make way for instant Milo sachets instead.


Not that I'm complaining, anyway.
I've always been more of a hypochondriac, afterall.
Brown rice. Broccoli. Celery. Wheat. Oat. Wholemeal bread. Milk. Bring it on!



It's no secret - to anyone who knows me well enough - that coffee is my best friend. Literally. Instead of replenishing my body with pure, pristine H2O, my hands would wander ever so naturally to the particular drawer containing - to my extreme delight - the much-beloved coffee sachets. On any typical day, it is not uncommon to consume an average of 3 cups. Of course, in the face of exams, the statistic easily goes up to 6 cups per day. Coffee keeps me company as I study.

It's not healthy, I know, I know. But try as I might, kicking off the addictive lure of caffeine eludes me like a plague. Previously, I had tried - in vain - to replace the daily doses of coffee with a healthier alternative of milk formulas. Chocolate-flavoured, even, to make it more enticing to the taste buds. But my hands always seem to possess a life of its own, and would rather stealthily reach out for the coffee sachets than the tin of calcium-fortified, low-fat Anlene. I only lasted 3 months at most, before reverting helplessly back to the caffeine-vein demoness that I was and always has been.



Now that no one in the family is re-stocking the already-depleted coffee supply, it seems so much easier to kick off the habit. Afterall, there is no temptation in the first place. I could search the whole house and find not even one grain of aromatic coffee powder.

And now I'm happy. Because my body seems to have adapted to taking Milo as a replacement for the usual doses of caffeine. Sure, the occasional urge for coffee is still there. It rears its ugly head once in a while, but at least it's manageable - for the time being, that is.


The bad thing is, having no coffee to drink, I'm now sort of addicted to Milo; and am drinking it with the same fervency and frequency as I did with coffee. And it is still the studying period; my last paper will only end tomorrow. After I'm done with CM3232 (Physical Chemistry of Solid State & Interfaces) tomorrow, I'm a liberated woman lady. And I'll work hard to keep it to 3 cups of Milo per day.



Hope I won't pile on the weight.
Stupid Milo.