Halloween gets all the credit for being the holiday of candy, but Christmas is in it for the long haul. With Halloween, you have candy a couple days before, and a couple days after. With Christmas, you start eating candy on Black Friday, and don't stop until you go into insulin shock on New Year's Day.
Which got me thinking: how far could I stretch my candy intake? (Side note: Dentists, stop reading now to avoid potential stress aneurysms.)
While a month of eating nothing but candy seemed like an exciting feat, I assumed it would end in something less exciting: my death. So I thought a week of eating exclusively Christmas candy would be a great excuse to test my sugar endurance, and eat pounds and pounds of candy, which I love. Plus: probably no death. Bonus!
My meal plan for the next week.
The day before the experiment, I made a shopping trip that is every ten-year-old child's dream. While at Wal-Mart, my basket overflowing with sugar, I felt I had to buy some random non-candy items just to dilute my cart: like when you get flagged for buying a lot of bombmaking materials at Home Depot, I was worried about being placed on a sexual predator watch list.
My lunch and dinner on Wednesday were my last chances to get some real nutrition before my fast from vitamins and minerals, so I really had to make those meals count. So, of course, I had Taco Bell and pizza.
My last meal.
Day 1: Thursday
Most of the time, my breakfast consists of Fruit Roll-Ups and soda, so making the switch to candy wasn't a terrible shock to the system. Still, I figured I should start with a serving of fruit.
Exactly as pictured!
Cordial cherries are the elegant cousin of the Cadbury Creme Egg. Both candies feature chocolate shells filled with disgusting slime, but only one has a red thing resembling a cherry in it. Fancy!
As you can see, the cherries inside aren't exactly a bountiful harvest. But after eating the whole box, they probably add up to maybe 1/10 of a serving of fruit.
At least they will stay fresh for the next 300 years.
This probably wasn't the best candy to start with. The (I'm searching for a more polite word) slime inside uses some sort of weaponized version of sugar, taking it to a sweetness level that could almost give you superpowers. My teeth are still throbbing.
In a surprising turn of events, the cordial cherries weren't very filling. So for my mid-morning snack, I decided to go with something more substantial.
Some might say that Peanut M&Ms aren't a Christmas candy. To that I say: Look at their colors, you fool! Red and green! It was either the Supreme Court, or possibly Kid's Court on Nickelodeon, that upheld the ruling that anything colored red and green was automatically Christmasy.
Since Peanut M&Ms have actual peanuts, which contain protein, they're nutritious. I don't know if it was the peanuts, or the fact that I ate half the jumbo-sized bag, but I did get pretty full.
Later on, I started to get sick of chocolate, so I went for something more reasonable. What seemed logical at the time was a foot-long candy cane.
Maybe this means I can skip brushing my teeth tonight.
The novelty of the foot-long cane wore off fast. The rest of my day was made up of various fun size candies, which I figured were less conspicuous and would delay my wife asking why I was eating so much candy. Well, more than usual.
Day 1 Results:
Hunger Level: 2
Mental Stability: 10
How much do I still like candy? 10
Day 2: Friday
The sugar from the first day was sending my mind into overdrive. My brain was frantically fretting over one of the age-old questions: why does everything you eat after brushing your teeth taste like crap?
I quickly worked out a solution: simply make sure your breakfast tastes like toothpaste. The transition between brushing and breakfast is seamless!
So I had a bag of York Peppermint Patties for breakfast.
"When I bite into a whole bag of York Peppermint Patties..."
Anyone who says this is an unhealthy diet has never opened thirty individually-wrapped candies. Surely, that has to burn some calories.
At lunchtime, I thought it might be fun to get a little football going. No, I don't mean going outside and exercising. I mean eating a chocolate football.
No, laces OUT!
Thank God this was hollow, because a solid football of this size would have accelerated the schedule of my diabetic death by at least three months.
Nope, no nutrition in there.
The back of the box had ten NFL trivia questions, of which I knew the answer to one. So between eating chocolate all day and being ignorant when it comes to sports, I'm slowly turning into the comic strip character Cathy.
Later on, feeling extra hungry and needing some protein, I thought some arctic meat might do the trick. I decided on a chocolate walrus, since walrus is a traditional Christmas meal in northern Europe. (Fun fact: that previous statement was a complete lie.)
Goo goo ga joob.
Unfortunately, it tasted more like a chocolate-scented candle than it did actual chocolate. Full disclosure: I'm only assuming what a chocolate scented candle tastes like.
The most boring connect-the-dots ever.
Rounding out the day's meals was a box of Christmas Dots. If you are one of those lesser-evolved people with peanut allergies, these are apparently a great snack since they have a giant logo of a crossed out peanut on the side. I wouldn't expect Dots to have peanuts in them anyway, but I guess you can never be too careful.
Day 2 Results:
Hunger Level: 2
Mental Stability: 10
How much do I still like candy? 9.5
Day 3: Saturday
Speaking of peanuts, I tried to get Saturday off to a filling start by going with some protein-packed peanut candy. Unfortunately, twelve fun-sized bags of Reese's Pieces didn't have that trail-mix-fill-you-up quality I was hoping for.
Since I am apparently going to eat peanut butter candy every day, I went with Reese's Peanut Butter Bells. Then after snacking on Nestle Crunch Bells, Gobstopper Snowballs, Christmas SweeTarts, and gummy reindeer, by night time it was becoming somewhat clear: candy isn't very filling.
The tree of diabetic life.
It's filling enough to ruin your appetite for a meal, but it doesn't work that well as a meal replacement. I'm thinking the key is just to eat more of it. So I ate a giant plastic candy cane filled with Reese's Pieces. It was only about two hours later that I realized I had already eaten Reese's Pieces for breakfast. Maybe the candy was starting to affect my brain.
Day 3 Results:
Hunger Level: 3
Mental Stability: 9
How much do I still like candy? 9
I never thought I'd say this, but I was actually starting to get sick of sugar. Unfortunately, I still had four days to go, and there was not a salad in sight.
Please continue to Part 2: Headaches, Hangovers, and Hallucinations!
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