This didn’t include the ice cream in the freezer, the muffin mixes in the cupboard, the Pepsi in the fridge and the candy bowl on the piano. Our home had a junk drawer brimming with potato chips, pretzels, cookies, and tortilla chips.
My childhood memories are punctuated with sugar: bakery donuts on Sunday mornings a pillowcase full of candy on Halloween Dairy Queen trips in the summer pies at Christmas. You can also explore this page here to learn more about my approach to sugar, and what fostered the transformation I’ve described above.
If you’d like to learn more, you can explore this free video course to learn about where abstinence does and doesn’t fit into healing a sugar addiction. They ask this question over and over: how do I relate to what troubles or scares me? And through that relationship, something is born in me, and in you. It was a grieving, a shedding, and a healing process, and it meant facing and feeling the holes that drove me to seek out sugar, food, or pursue a perfect body in the first place.Īnd what also remains unchanged is this: my experiences with sugar are a relationship, something to relate to, and not something to cut out or eliminate. What remains unchanged – whether I was abstaining from sugar for a period of time or whether I’m eating it moderately – is this: my compulsive, obsessive seeking after sugar, food, and the pursuit of a perfect body had to die. So even though this story may not reflect how I eat or even relate to sugar today, I continue to share it as a marker of my journey, for it is a part of it, and it belongs. That is a much longer story, and another ten year journey the how of how I got to that point is chronicled here at growinghumankindness, too. Today, I eat sugar moderately, and no longer abstain from it. Now years later, my relationship with sugar and my food compulsions has changed. And so I was writing about and exploring my relationship to this limit, what you’ll read below. During this stage of my journey, I had come to a point of acceptance that I could never eat sugar again. At the time, I’d been a sugar addict for nearly 20 years and had also struggled with equal years of eating disorders. I wrote this blog post in 2006, when I was beginning to write about my journey with sugar.