Meet Adela Cojab. She’s a law student at the prestigious New York University who recently overcame a crippling cheese addiction with the help of a $10,000, two-week stay at a cheese rehab centre in Hilton Head, south Carolina.
Well, OK, technically it wasn’t ‘cheese rehab’, but rather just a rehab centre/wellness retreat for people with all kinds of addictions. For Adela, that addiction was cheese. Thankfully she was able to admit to herself that she had a problem, and that her life had become unmanageable due to her insatiable appetite for dairy, and after all that time and money spent on rehab, she is now finally able to say NO to cheese.
Adela explained how her Camembert cravings began during her fresher year at NYU in 2018, when she binged almost daily on the “cheapest” bricks of white cheddar and Parmesan she could find:
“I stopped by either Morton Williams or by Whole Foods and I would just buy cheese, and I would literally just eat a block of cheese with my hands. It was the only thing that would make me feel somewhat whole.”
Sounds intense. In fact, Adela says she devoured around 5.5 blocks of cheese per week, along with savory parmesan crisps she stocked in her pantry. Cheese on cheese on cheese!
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I’ve seen a few posts online poking fun at Adela and her cheese addiction and the fact she spent so much money to overcome it, but at the end of the day, who are we to judge other people for their personal addictions? Clearly cheese can be just as damaging to one’s life as shooting heroin or smoking crack or drinking 24/7, and Adela is living proof of this.
She would be sitting on the floor in the dark in her apartment just munching away on cheese every night. She was grating extra cheese on her pizzas! She was trawling McDonald’s in the early hours of the morning trying to pick melted cheese from the inside of people’s burger wrappers! Well, maybe she wasn’t doing all that, but she did literally stop menstruating for 5 months and became at risk for Type 2 Diabetes, so it’s pretty clear she had a cheese problem.
If you’re still unconvinced by Adela and her cheese addiction, then maybe consider this quote from Dr. Neal Barnard, author of the “Cheese Trap” and professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine:
“Cheese contains opiate chemicals that attach to the very same brain receptors that fentanyl or any other narcotic attaches to. Some people refer to cheese as ‘dairy crack.’”
Well, that explains it. Fortunately, Adela was able to beat her addiction and get her life back on track. She’s returned to a healthy weight, and her menstrual cycle is back to normal.
Let’s just hope she doesn’t fall back into her old ways when she comes across this clip of the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling Race. Congratulations on your cheese sobriety, Adela!
