NYU Law Student Spent $10,000 For A Two-Week Rehab To Overcome Her Crippling Cheese Addiction

Shutterstock Images.

NY Post - A Manhattan law school student was so hooked on cheese she had to go to rehab to end her insatiable appetite for dairy, she told The Post. 

Adela Cojab said her Camembert cravings began during her junior year at New York University, in spring 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,” said Cojab, 27, often while sitting on the floor of her Midtown apartment alone in the dark. 

“It was the only thing that would make me feel somewhat whole.” 

The feta fiend said she devoured an estimated 5.5 blocks of cheese per week, along with savory parmesan crisps she stocked in her pantry.

Meet Adela Cojab. She's a law student at the prestigious NYU. She's a beautiful woman, a powerful woman, and most notably a woman who overcame a crippling cheese addiction with the help of a $10,000, 2-week stay at cheese rehab in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Ok I guess she technically didn't go to "cheese rehab". It was a wellness retreat that catered to people with various different addictions and ailments. But for Adela it was cheese rehab. Adela had a cheese problem. But thankfully she was able to identify the problem. She bravely admitted that she was powerless over cheese. That her life had become unmanageable. That only a power greater than herself could restore her to sanity. And through hard work and serious self-reflection was able to get herself straightened out to a point where she is now mentally strong enough to just say no to cheese. 

As a person who's had his own fair share of addiction issues, I've always made it a point to not judge other people for their personal addictions. No matter how ridiculous they may seem. I didn't even judge that one guy I sat next to at an Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Bowling Green, Ohio who compared his energy drink addiction to a man who just got done telling the story of how his recent heroin overdose resulted in the loss of custody of his kids. Who am I to judge? Who's to say Red Bull can't be just as damaging to one's life as shooting fentanyl laced heroin directly into the bloodstream?

Same goes for a nice sharp cheddar. One day you're ordering extra cheese on your Friday night pizza. Next thing you know you're a literal rat rummaging through garbage picking melted cheese off of discarded cheeseburger wrappers. Crawling the floors of pizza parlors in search of scraps. Stealing parmesan shakers off of table tops. Sucking dick for $5 worth of gouda. Cheese can be a nasty addiction. Just ask Dr. Neal Barnard. They don't call it dairy crack for nothing.

Dr. Neal Barnard, author of the “Cheese Trap” and adjunct professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine, explained people like Cojab become addicted to cheese due to the high concentration of fat and salt in the food, along with a protein known as casein that can “get people mildly hooked.”   

“Cheese contains opiate chemicals that attach to the very same brain receptors that fentanyl or any other narcotic attaches to,” he said, adding that due to the high concentration of casein in cheese, “some people refer to cheese as ‘dairy crack.’”

Luckily, Adela was able to pull her shit together. She was able to escape the stranglehold big cheese had over her, and replaced her destructive habits with healthier food alternatives. It's great to see that Adela has managed to get her life back on track. She's dropped nearly 50 pounds of cheese weight, and her menstrual cycle has finally returned to normal. 

She also stopped menstruating for five months during the throes of her cheese feasts and became at risk for Type 2 diabetes. 

But I'm still a bit worried about her. She seems to be doing fine as of now, but the end of this article in the NY Post is a bit troubling to me.

These days, she said she reaches first for a “lighter” mozzarella over a Vermont cheddar or parmesan.

And during a visit to the Ideal Cheese Shop in Midtown East, she smiled while nibbling on samples of Gruyere and Prairie Breeze cheddar with crackers.

“I dabble, but not in the way that I used to before,” she said, adding the recent waves of anti-Israel encampments at Columbia and other universities prompted brief relapses.

“When I’m really stressed, I’ll have a block of cheese, but it doesn’t happen that often.” 

How many ex-heroin addicts do you know who've cleaned themselves up, gotten their lives back on track, but every once in a while when they're "really stressed", will have just a gram of smack to take the edge off. 

"But I don't do it too often any more. I totally won't go back down that road again." - famous last words of literally every addict who has ever relapsed in the history of time.

That's not how addiction works Adela. With that type "just-a-little-bit-of-cheese-is-no-big-deal" attitude, she'll be back on the floor of her apartment drinking cream cheese through a straw in no time. Where is her sponsor at during all of this? Where is her wise old black man with 26 years of sobriety who constantly berates her with tales of his own personal struggle, and speaks mainly in catch phrases? He would never let that behavior fly. If he caught Adela browsing the cheese fridge at an Italian market he'd drag her out by the hair so damn fast, throw her ass in the backseat of his Buick, and drive her straight to a 12-step meeting for the group shaming of a lifetime. 

Advertisement

That's the thing about addiction. Almost nobody succeeds at getting clean the first time. For many it's a lifelong battle. Most people fall off the wagon 5 or 6 times before they're finally able to see the light and start treating their cheese addiction like the life-threatening disease it is. Hopefully Adela proves me wrong and is able to continue living a life a moderation. Maybe she's an outlier who will be able to evenly split cheese-based appetizers for the rest of her life. But if you're reading this, and you happen to be friends with Adela, make sure you keep a close eye on her. If you come back from the restroom at brunch one day and she gives you some wild story about how a seagull swooped down and devoured only the cheese portion of your charcuterie board, it might be time for another intervention.