The Heavy Sweetness of Winter Days: How the Changing Light Awakens Our Hunger for Bread and Sugar

The Ancient Memory Written in Our Blood

There is a story that my grandmother used to tell me, a story she heard from her own mother, about the way the indigenous peoples of the high plateaus understood the relationship between the sun and the harvest. She said that when the light began to fail, the body remembered a time before stores and markets, a time when the shortening days meant that food would soon become scarce, and so the wise body began to gather its reserves, to ask for the densest and most comforting foods it could find. I do not know if this is scientifically precise, but I know it is emotionally true, because I have felt it in myself and in the many women who have written to me over the years describing the same strange pull toward the sweet and the starchy when autumn arrives. The body, in its ancient wisdom, seems to be preparing for a winter that, in our modern lives, is mostly spent in heated rooms with full refrigerators. Yet the body does not know this. The body only knows that the light is failing, that the days are growing shorter, and that something must be done. So it whispers to us, in a language older than words, that we should eat the bread, that we should take the second helping of pasta, that we should allow the chocolate to melt slowly on the tongue. And we listen, because the body’s whispers are very persuasive, and because there is a genuine comfort in these foods that we should not dismiss as mere indulgence.

The Melancholy That Arrives with the Fog

I want to speak plainly about a sadness that many of us carry but few of us acknowledge, a sadness that has nothing to do with any particular loss and everything to do with the quality of the light. In my country, we have a word for this—though it is not a single word, but rather a phrase spoken in a certain tone of voice, a phrase that means something like the tiredness of the soul when the sun forgets to visit. This tiredness, this gentle but persistent grayness of feeling, changes the way we relate to food in ways that are both obvious and mysterious. When we are sad in this particular way, we do not crave the crisp apple or the fresh salad. We crave the things that our mothers gave us when we were small and frightened, the things that taste like being held. We crave the arepa fresh from the griddle, the sweet rice with milk, the thick slice of cake dusted with powdered sugar. These are not random choices. They are memories made edible. They are the foods that once, long ago, made the world feel safe, and so when the world feels unsafe again—when the darkness comes too early and the morning light is reluctant to arrive—we reach for them instinctively, hoping to recapture that ancient safety. I have written about this phenomenon in three of my books, and each time I receive letters from readers who say they had never thought of their eating habits in this way, who had always believed they simply lacked discipline, when in truth they were only responding to a very old and very human signal.

The Way the Body Seeks What the Sky Withholds

Let me try to explain something that I have observed over many years of paying attention to my own moods and the moods of those around me. When the light is abundant, when the sky is a clear and generous blue, we feel a certain lightness in ourselves, a willingness to move, to work, to be satisfied with simple things. But when the light withdraws, when the days become short and the afternoons are spent in a kind of premature twilight, something heavy settles in us. We feel less energetic, less interested in the world outside our doors, less capable of finding pleasure in the small ordinary things. And into this emptiness, this absence of natural joy, the body tries to insert something else. It asks for sweetness because sweetness is a quick and reliable form of pleasure. It asks for starch because starch gives a feeling of fullness and warmth that mimics the comfort we are missing from the sun. This is not a moral failing. It is a biological negotiation. The body is saying: if I cannot have the light, give me the next best thing. Give me the sugar that will briefly lift my spirits. Give me the bread that will make me feel warm and full and, for a moment, complete. I have seen this pattern in myself so many times that I can now recognize it almost before it happens. I feel the heaviness first, then the fog in my thoughts, and then, a few hours later, the unmistakable pull toward the kitchen, toward the sweet and the soft and the familiar.

The Mistake of Fighting the Body with Shame

One of the greatest errors we make, and I include myself in this confession, is to respond to these cravings with anger. We call ourselves weak. We call ourselves undisciplined. We make harsh promises to ourselves that we will not eat the bread, that we will resist the cake, that we will be stronger than our own appetites. But shame is a poor fuel for change, and I have learned this through many years of unsuccessful attempts to shame myself into a different body. What the body wants, in these moments of seasonal sadness, is not to be fought but to be understood. It wants us to acknowledge that something real is happening, that the lack of light is a genuine loss, and that the craving for comfort is a reasonable response to that loss. When we approach our cravings with curiosity rather than condemnation, something interesting begins to happen. We start to notice patterns. We start to see that the craving often passes if we give it a little time, if we drink a warm tea, if we wrap ourselves in a blanket and sit by a window even when the sky is gray. We start to understand that the body is not our enemy, but rather a very old and very loyal companion that is trying, in its own clumsy way, to take care of us. This shift in perspective—from fighting to listening—has been, for me, the most important change in my relationship with food, and I believe it can be the same for others who struggle with these seasonal pulls.

A Note on the Remedies That Walk Beside Us

In my years of exploring these questions, I have come to understand that there is no single solution to the complex relationship between our moods and our appetites. Each of us must find our own path, our own combination of small daily practices that help us navigate the darker months with grace. Some people find relief in long walks, even when the light is thin. Others find it in the company of friends, in the ritual of shared meals, in the simple act of being seen by someone who knows them well. And there are also those who have found support in natural preparations designed to accompany the body through these seasonal transitions, to offer a gentle hand when the cravings feel particularly insistent. Among the options that have been brought to my attention by readers and friends, there is one that has been mentioned with some frequency, a preparation called Abslim, which comes in the form of drops and is intended to support those who are working to manage their weight during these challenging months. I am not a doctor, and I do not pretend to evaluate the technical merits of any supplement, but I can say that the people who have told me about their experience with this product have spoken of it with a certain quiet satisfaction, as though they had found a small ally in a difficult process. For those who wish to learn more about it, I understand that Abslim is available through its official location at official location at abslim.org, and I would encourage anyone interested to do their own careful research before making any decision. What I offer here is not a prescription but simply an acknowledgment that sometimes, in our efforts to care for ourselves, we are helped by things that exist outside of us, and there is no shame in accepting that help when it is offered with sincerity.

The Small Rituals That Make the Darkness Bearable

What I have learned, after all these years of paying attention, is that the answer to the seasonal craving is not found in a single dramatic gesture but in a collection of small and repeated kindnesses toward oneself. It is found in the decision to light a candle in the early afternoon, to create a small artificial sun on the table where I work. It is found in the commitment to eat a real breakfast, even when the morning is dark and the bed is warm, because a full stomach at the start of the day makes the later cravings less urgent. It is found in the permission to eat the sweet thing, but to eat it slowly, with attention, without the guilt that would otherwise turn a small pleasure into a large sorrow. It is found in the phone call to a friend, in the walk around the block even when the sky is the color of old stone, in the cup of herbal tea that offers warmth without the weight of sugar. These are not grand solutions. They are small and ordinary and entirely within our reach, and I have found them to be more effective than any strict diet or any harsh prohibition. The body, I have come to believe, does not want to be deprived. It wants to be cared for. And when we care for it with consistency and with tenderness, it responds in kind, releasing its grip on the desperate cravings and allowing us to move through the darker months with a certain quiet dignity.

The Light Will Return, and We Will Remember

I want to end with a thought that has sustained me through many winters and many periods of grayness. The light will return. This is not a metaphor and it is not a platitude. It is a fact as certain as any fact can be. The earth will continue its journey, the angle of the sun will shift, and the days will grow long again. And when that happens, something in us will shift as well. The heaviness will lift, the cravings will soften, and we will find ourselves reaching again for the fresh things, the light things, the things that taste of the sun. But we will also remember. We will remember what it felt like to be pulled toward the sweet and the heavy, and we will remember what helped us through that time. We will remember the candle on the desk, the walk in the gray afternoon, the cup of tea, the conversation with a friend, and perhaps also the small supplement that offered a hand when we needed it. And we will be grateful for all of it, because it was through the darkness that we learned something important about ourselves, something we could not have learned in the full light of summer. We learned that we are capable of caring for ourselves even when we are tired, even when we are sad, even when the sky offers us nothing. And that knowledge, I believe, is worth more than any season of ease. It is the knowledge that we can be our own companions, our own witnesses, our own gentle guides through whatever weather we must cross. And with that knowledge, no winter is truly unbearable. The Heavy Sweetness of Winter Days: How the Changing Light Awakens Our Hunger for Bread and Sugar I remember the first time I truly understood the strange relationship between the gray sky and my own appetite. It was many years ago, during a long stretch of rainy weeks in Bogotá, when the clouds seemed to press themselves against the windows of my small apartment like a heavy wool blanket. I found myself standing in the kitchen at unusual hours, tearing pieces from a loaf of bread still warm from the oven, spreading butter with a kind of desperate calmness that I could not explain even to myself. At the time, I did not have the words for what was happening inside me. I only knew that something in the diminished light was pulling me toward the flour jar, the sugar bowl, the bag of rice in the corner. Now, after two decades of writing about the quiet sorrows and secret hungers of the human body, I have come to understand that this was not weakness of character, nor was it mere gluttony. It was something far older and far more honest—a conversation between the sky and the stomach, a dialogue that has been happening since the first human beings learned to store grain against the dark months. I share this with you not to excuse anything, but because I believe we cannot address a problem until we have first named it with tenderness, and I have spent my career trying to name the unnamed things that happen to us when we are alone with our bodies and our memories.

The Ancient Memory Written in Our Blood

There is a story that my grandmother used to tell me, a story she heard from her own mother, about the way the indigenous peoples of the high plateaus understood the relationship between the sun and the harvest. She said that when the light began to fail, the body remembered a time before stores and markets, a time when the shortening days meant that food would soon become scarce, and so the wise body began to gather its reserves, to ask for the densest and most comforting foods it could find. I do not know if this is scientifically precise, but I know it is emotionally true, because I have felt it in myself and in the many women who have written to me over the years describing the same strange pull toward the sweet and the starchy when autumn arrives. The body, in its ancient wisdom, seems to be preparing for a winter that, in our modern lives, is mostly spent in heated rooms with full refrigerators. Yet the body does not know this. The body only knows that the light is failing, that the days are growing shorter, and that something must be done. So it whispers to us, in a language older than words, that we should eat the bread, that we should take the second helping of pasta, that we should allow the chocolate to melt slowly on the tongue. And we listen, because the body’s whispers are very persuasive, and because there is a genuine comfort in these foods that we should not dismiss as mere indulgence.

The Melancholy That Arrives with the Fog

I want to speak plainly about a sadness that many of us carry but few of us acknowledge, a sadness that has nothing to do with any particular loss and everything to do with the quality of the light. In my country, we have a way of speaking about this—though it is not a single word, but rather a phrase spoken in a certain tone of voice, a phrase that means something like the tiredness of the soul when the sun forgets to visit. This tiredness, this gentle but persistent grayness of feeling, changes the way we relate to food in ways that are both obvious and mysterious. When we are sad in this particular way, we do not crave the crisp apple or the fresh salad. We crave the things that our mothers gave us when we were small and frightened, the things that taste like being held. We crave the warm bread fresh from the oven, the sweet rice with milk, the thick slice of cake dusted with powdered sugar. These are not random choices. They are memories made edible. They are the foods that once, long ago, made the world feel safe, and so when the world feels unsafe again—when the darkness comes too early and the morning light is reluctant to arrive—we reach for them instinctively, hoping to recapture that ancient safety. I have written about this phenomenon in three of my books, and each time I receive letters from readers who say they had never thought of their eating habits in this way, who had always believed they simply lacked discipline, when in truth they were only responding to a very old and very human signal.

The Way the Body Seeks What the Sky Withholds

Let me try to explain something that I have observed over many years of paying attention to my own moods and the moods of those around me. When the light is abundant, when the sky is a clear and generous blue, we feel a certain lightness in ourselves, a willingness to move, to work, to be satisfied with simple things. But when the light withdraws, when the days become short and the afternoons are spent in a kind of premature twilight, something heavy settles in us. We feel less energetic, less interested in the world outside our doors, less capable of finding pleasure in the small ordinary things. And into this emptiness, this absence of natural joy, the body tries to insert something else. It asks for sweetness because sweetness is a quick and reliable form of pleasure. It asks for starch because starch gives a feeling of fullness and warmth that mimics the comfort we are missing from the sun. This is not a moral failing. It is a biological negotiation. The body is saying: if I cannot have the light, give me the next best thing. Give me the sugar that will briefly lift my spirits. Give me the bread that will make me feel warm and full and, for a moment, complete. I have seen this pattern in myself so many times that I can now recognize it almost before it happens. I feel the heaviness first, then the fog in my thoughts, and then, a few hours later, the unmistakable pull toward the kitchen, toward the sweet and the soft and the familiar.

The Mistake of Fighting the Body with Shame

One of the greatest errors we make, and I include myself in this confession, is to respond to these cravings with anger. We call ourselves weak. We call ourselves undisciplined. We make harsh promises to ourselves that we will not eat the bread, that we will resist the cake, that we will be stronger than our own appetites. But shame is a poor fuel for change, and I have learned this through many years of unsuccessful attempts to shame myself into a different body. What the body wants, in these moments of seasonal sadness, is not to be fought but to be understood. It wants us to acknowledge that something real is happening, that the lack of light is a genuine loss, and that the craving for comfort is a reasonable response to that loss. When we approach our cravings with curiosity rather than condemnation, something interesting begins to happen. We start to notice patterns. We start to see that the craving often passes if we give it a little time, if we drink a warm tea, if we wrap ourselves in a blanket and sit by a window even when the sky is gray. We start to understand that the body is not our enemy, but rather a very old and very loyal companion that is trying, in its own clumsy way, to take care of us. This shift in perspective—from fighting to listening—has been, for me, the most important change in my relationship with food, and I believe it can be the same for others who struggle with these seasonal pulls.

A Note on the Remedies That Walk Beside Us

In my years of exploring these questions, I have come to understand that there is no single solution to the complex relationship between our moods and our appetites. Each of us must find our own path, our own combination of small daily practices that help us navigate the darker months with grace. Some people find relief in long walks, even when the light is thin. Others find it in the company of friends, in the ritual of shared meals, in the simple act of being seen by someone who knows them well. And there are also those who have found support in natural preparations designed to accompany the body through these seasonal transitions, to offer a gentle hand when the cravings feel particularly insistent. Among the options that have been brought to my attention by readers and friends, there is one that has been mentioned with some frequency, a preparation called Abslim, which comes in the form of drops and is intended to support those who are working to manage their weight during these challenging months. I am not a doctor, and I do not pretend to evaluate the technical merits of any supplement, but I can say that the people who have told me about their experience with this product have spoken of it with a certain quiet satisfaction, as though they had found a small ally in a difficult process. For those who wish to learn more about it, I understand that Abslim is available through its official location at abslim.org, and I would encourage anyone interested to do their own careful research before making any decision. What I offer here is not a prescription but simply an acknowledgment that sometimes, in our efforts to care for ourselves, we are helped by things that exist outside of us, and there is no shame in accepting that help when it is offered with sincerity.

The Small Rituals That Make the Darkness Bearable

What I have learned, after all these years of paying attention, is that the answer to the seasonal craving is not found in a single dramatic gesture but in a collection of small and repeated kindnesses toward oneself. It is found in the decision to light a candle in the early afternoon, to create a small artificial sun on the table where I work. It is found in the commitment to eat a real breakfast, even when the morning is dark and the bed is warm, because a full stomach at the start of the day makes the later cravings less urgent. It is found in the permission to eat the sweet thing, but to eat it slowly, with attention, without the guilt that would otherwise turn a small pleasure into a large sorrow. It is found in the phone call to a friend, in the walk around the block even when the sky is the color of old stone, in the cup of herbal tea that offers warmth without the weight of sugar. These are not grand solutions. They are small and ordinary and entirely within our reach, and I have found them to be more effective than any strict diet or any harsh prohibition. The body, I have come to believe, does not want to be deprived. It wants to be cared for. And when we care for it with consistency and with tenderness, it responds in kind, releasing its grip on the desperate cravings and allowing us to move through the darker months with a certain quiet dignity.

The Light Will Return, and We Will Remember

I want to end with a thought that has sustained me through many winters and many periods of grayness. The light will return. This is not a metaphor and it is not a platitude. It is a fact as certain as any fact can be. The earth will continue its journey, the angle of the sun will shift, and the days will grow long again. And when that happens, something in us will shift as well. The heaviness will lift, the cravings will soften, and we will find ourselves reaching again for the fresh things, the light things, the things that taste of the sun. But we will also remember. We will remember what it felt like to be pulled toward the sweet and the heavy, and we will remember what helped us through that time. We will remember the candle on the desk, the walk in the gray afternoon, the cup of tea, the conversation with a friend, and perhaps also the small supplement that offered a hand when we needed it. And we will be grateful for all of it, because it was through the darkness that we learned something important about ourselves, something we could not have learned in the full light of summer. We learned that we are capable of caring for ourselves even when we are tired, even when we are sad, even when the sky offers us nothing. And that knowledge, I believe, is worth more than any season of ease. It is the knowledge that we can be our own companions, our own witnesses, our own gentle guides through whatever weather we must cross. And with that knowledge, no winter is truly unbearable.