Confessions of a Sugar Addict

If you’ve found your way to this page, you’re probably enrolled in my Sugar Challenge. (If not but somehow here you are, that would be The Universe telling you that you should be!)

You already know about my home-made sugar cereal and my closet pudding days of childhood. Why should I give up even more dirt on myself? Aside from the fact that everyone secretly loves to get the dirt, I think that it can help you to be less hard on yourself. There is a tendency for our brains to make it out like we are the worst. Or that other people have it easier, better, etc. When trying (and failing – repeatedly!) a tough task, it’s easy to give up and just feel lame about it.

And with addictions – and the sugar habit is absolutely an addiction – it’s even worse. By its nature, there are almost always periods of relapse and having to get back on the wagon again! It’s the nature of the beast.

 My first conscious sugar memory was actually a church  memory! I was just a toddler, probably around 2 years old. I remember sitting in church, eating sugar cookies with colored sprinkles on them and looking up at the stained-glass windows. The sprinkles on the cookies were the type that were large dyed sugar crystals. They were red and green, so they were probably Christmas cookies. I remember looking intently at the sugar crystals and looking at the stained-glass windows and thinking about how they looked like they might be made of the same material. Oh boy, if those windows were made of sugar?? I wanted to eat them so bad. Stained-glass windows still evoke a faint craving for sugar cookies in me!

As a really little kid, I had to make do with dreaming of sugar and candy. I would often peek down the dress of my Raggedy Ann doll, to look at the outline of the heart printed on her chest. According to the story, she had a candy heart! I would often press her chest, trying to feel around for it. Thinking about what I would do if and when I found it. Wondering if I would get in trouble for cutting out and eating Raggedy Ann’s heart! I know, I know, it sounds a little… extreme..?? But it was true! My parents thought it was cute that I seemed really into Raggedy Ann. In fact, I mostly just wanted that candy heart!!!

When I got a bit taller and sneakier, that’s when the sugar-sneaking started. You know how that went.

I got my first cavity in 4th grade, which my mom blamed on my dad’s “crappy teeth genetics.” At that point in time, my Korean mom – in her early 30s – had still never been to the dentist once in her entire life! And she had great teeth – well-aligned and not a single cavity. My dad, on the other hand, had experienced a lifetime of American dental and orthodontic care! My younger brothers never developed the same extreme sweet tooth, and they managed to make it to adulthood before ever getting a cavity. I’m sure that genetics played a role in that early cavity, but I’m also sure that my hidden sugar habit played a bigger role!

Sugar later morphed from simple bad habit to emotional coping mechanism. I would sometimes hoard candy and then eat a bunch of it if I was feeling stressed. As a teenager, I even took some pride in this! A lot of my friends were smoking cigarettes or getting drunk to cope with their stress. But not me! I was doing the much “healthier” and “less bad” thing. I was “just” eating candy. Unfortunately, I was also teaching my nervous system to adopt a pretty counterproductive coping mechanism.

All through the childhood years, I never gave a second thought to the sugar issue. It sucked to get cavities despite my daily adherence to brushing my teeth, but I really believed that cavities were the only real danger. I was a skinny kid, and I felt that as long as I didn’t get fat, everything was fine!

My big sugar wake-up call came during chiropractic school, when I desperately sought the care of one of my teachers for my worsening brain fog and fatigue. I could barely keep my eyes open in class, and I was afraid that I might even fail out of school! School had always been really easy for me, and I didn’t feel that I needed full brain power all the time. But grad school was a whole nother game, and I needed every brain cell I could muster! The teacher I went to was well-known for nutrition and functional medicine. He made me take a bunch of lab tests, including a glucose tolerance test, and the results were pretty clear. I had a big problem with sugar, and I needed to get off of it.

I didn’t like what I heard, but I had just paid this guy around $500, which was a ton of $$$ for a grad student in Georgia in the 1990s, and I wasn’t going to ignore his advice! I got on the supplements he recommended and immediately started on the prescribed diet. The diet involved zero sugar.

The first day was mildly unpleasant, but not a big deal. Days 2-3 were pretty bad, though! I had the worst headache and mood, and had an even harder time focusing on anything! I felt awful. But by day 4, I woke up and my brain felt surprisingly sharp! My mood was better, and I was able to focus better in class. The longer I stayed off of the sugar, the better and more clear-headed I felt. It was shocking. Like a miracle! The diet prescribed to me wasn’t just a no-sugar diet, it was also a no-wheat and no-dairy diet. This was super difficult, but I felt so good. It reminds me of a saying that one of my patients told me: “Nothing tastes as good as healthy feels.”

 After this world-changing revelation, you would think that I would have stayed off of the sugar forever! Why would I ever go back to it?! I felt amazing!

Well… I think you can guess what happened.

Life happened!

Sometimes it’s a slide that you barely notice happening. Holidays roll around and it starts with a little candy here, a little candy there, and boom. You’re back.

Sometimes it’s well-meaning friends or family simply trying to show their love with gifts of food. When I was struggling to keep off of the wheat and dairy (and to avoid giving it to my son), I told my parents, “It’s OK if you want to send gifts, but please, please, no wheat or dairy, OK?” They nodded. Rolled their eyes, but nodded. And then, what did we receive in the mail? A big gift-wrapped box of… BAGELS AND CREAM CHEESE!!! Did I throw them away? No, I didn’t want to “waste food.” We ate them! And once you slip up once, well, it’s oh so easy to rationalize another slide and another, and to say you’ll get back on the wagon tomorrow… or next week… or at the beginning of the year…

Cue sad trombone.

I remember when Standard Process first came out with the 21- Day Purification Program way back when (about 20 years ago?). It was so exciting to have this easy kit to get off the sugar and feel great again! I still recommend it to people who enjoy the structure of a prescribed diet of shakes, supplements and specific foods. Actually, that’s not a ton of people, but, if you need to get your numbers looking good fast, it’s a nice way to do it! On the one hand, it’s fantastic. It’s a neat trick to watch your medical doctors look impressed when you can show them the difference in your cholesterol and fasting blood sugar numbers after just a couple of months between tests!

But, as with all good things, even a system like that can be cheated. And addicts are really good at getting around tests!

Like a kid cramming for a test at the last minute, I used to basically “cheat” and do a cycle of Purification Program when I knew that I had to have my labs done for a physical! I suspected that my blood sugar numbers weren’t so hot, so I essentially crammed for the test. This habit seemed to “work OK” for some years, but eventually, my number squeaked closer and closer to the edge of bad until I just couldn’t hide it any longer. It’s not even that I couldn’t hide it any longer from my medical doctor or my life insurance nurse. I couldn’t hide it from myself! I started to feel worse and worse in my own body and develop scary symptoms. My back started hurting all the time, I was waking up exhausted no matter how many hours I had slept, my brain was getting foggier, I was becoming more sensitive to certain foods and beverages, and I noticed that my joints were even starting to get swollen! As the inflammation spread to my hands, I eventually came clean, got some honest blood work done and admitted defeat. I had crossed over into full on diabetes, and I had to start taking medication!

On the bright side, the medication helped a LOT with the symptoms. Duh. But I knew that this was just buying me time. If I didn’t change my behaviors FOR REALS, then I was on my way to a slow march of ever-increasing meds, maybe insulin, and worst of all, maybe Alzheimer’s!

On the other bright side, going through this journey all the way into the crappy zone of diabetes has helped me to be a more compassionate practitioner. From this point of view, I have seen and experienced a whole lot more than I did way back when I was a 24 year-old with mostly just theoretical knowledge and experience.

Even when you “know better” and the danger signs are starting to flash, the brain has a funny way of always working to fool you! The brain is a bit of a liar. It lies to us alllllll the time. Why?! Mostly because it think it’s doing us a favor. There’s not much point in fighting this factoid. It’s just the way it is!  So instead of struggling against it, the new goal is to learn more and more about how it works, and work with it.