A 12 yr old girl lived in a neighborhood in one of the boroughs of New York City. It was the kind of area that had a small town quality to it. Most everyone knew everyone else. The girl played on porches and the front stoops of apartment buildings. She shopped on the long strip of stores that started at the top of a hill and went all the way down to a park where, in the snow, she would bring her red Flexible Flyer sled to whoosh down one of the sweetest little slopes she had ever experienced.
Everyday she would walk out of school with her friend, past the church down the street to the apartment building with the white columns that faced the rectory of the church. She would use her latch key, go inside, drop her books in the empty apartment and promptly turn around to go to the corner candy store called Optimo, named for the sign brandishing the make of cigar sold in the shop. There she would buy 2 packages of Twinkies, 3 Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, a Whatchamacallit bar and a pint of chocolate milk each and every weekday afternoon. She would proceed back to her house where she would eat her newly purchased stash along with a mayonaise sandwich while watching General Hospital and The Edge of Night. The outside world was not being particularly kind to her so she took her comfort in enormous quantities of junk food.
Through no fault of her family, this went on for years. Her parents were working hard. There was no one to tell her to stop or talk to her about it and so it went on, chocolate milk and and Twinkies...
In Providence, Rhode Island, the girl began to understand the benefits of a good walk in between Chipwich ice cream sandwiches. In Chiyoda, Japan, she understood the benefits of a good mountain climb. In London England she understood the benefits of a good run whilst looking the "wrong" way to cross the street. She still had a weakness for hazlenut chocolate and chocolate milk.
She came very close to climbing the weight loss mountain but fell off just as she was coming to the peak. It took 10 years for her to dig herself out of that hole.
Now here's the upshot. As this girl continues to peak (and she has not peaked yet), Hostess, the company which houses Twinkies, is on a rather dramatic financial spiral. They were in trouble the moment they lost their biggest and most consistent customer.
"Dan White's lawyers argued that his diet of junk food led to a chemical imbalance which led to the killings [of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone]. The press coined it "The Twinkie Defense."
from the motion picture "Milk"
