Previous post on food/fatness: Fatness – let’s review
Read my full weight & health journey by using desktop view and scrolling down on the right to the section called Fat? Me, too.
My physical and emotional dependence on processed sugar has caused me decades of pain. My physical need for all-day-long sweets started when I was a child. My childhood was so frightening that I developed unhealthy ways to cope and one of them was with cookies, ice cream, cake and candy.
Eventually my physical and emotional needs for sugar became so tightly entwined that in adulthood, even when I managed to wean my body from sweets my emotional need for them messed me up again. Over and over I got processed sugar out of my diet just to get back on it when I had a bad day or just because I thought a life without cake was a life without color.
So it’s taken from 1994 to 2019 for me to work with many therapists, healers and doctors, and finally reach a breakthrough on my emotional addiction to sugar. After 25 years and thousands of dollars I have finally untangled my physical from my emotional dependence on sweets, and now those sweets just don’t taste the same.
It used to be that my mood would lift as I savored cake, cake, CAKE! Expertly baked yellow layers with superb buttercream frosting used to make the world stop and my insides sing. I was unable to concentrate on anything else while I had such a treat in front of me. Even in my deepest depressions, cake made the pain stop at least for the time it took to eat it. It felt like what I imagined love was.
For a long time, I thought this response to sweets was normal. I thought only a minority of people didn’t need everyone to stop talking because they were enjoying a cream-filled donut. I believed those who didn’t look forward to celebrations because of the cake were bizarre, half-dead people. Of course dessert was the best part of everything. Everyone knew that.
But it turns out that what I thought was a natural sweet tooth was a combination of physical disorder and emotional need. Deep inside I still carried the little girl who needed cookies to make her feel safe and cared for. She was the one who was easily dazzled by sugary decorations and cinnamon smells.
(Please imagine here a long description of all the things I did over 25 years to slowly scrape away my fear and psychosis.)
I’ve now reached a new level of health. Finally — on a deep, subconscious level — food is no longer connected to relief from my emotional pain.
Finally — on a deep, subconscious level — food is no longer connected to relief from my emotional pain.
And now that food and emotional pain are two unrelated things, you know what that means? It means that food doesn’t have the effect it used to have. Now a piece of cake just tastes sugary and feels airy and empty. Same for cookies. It’s as if I used to be in a trance or a dream and now I’m awake. The incredible, heaven-sent sweets I used to enjoy have been revealed as earth-produced. When I chew cookies I feel dry flour and grittiness. Cake frosting feels greasy and too sweet. The cake layers feel unsubstantial and leave me wanting a snack with heft and weight, one that will feed my physical hunger because cake no longer feeds my emotional hunger.
It’s sad. My go-to, my drug, my guaranteed relief from the pain of life is gone. It’s gone. I’ve finally healed myself from the processed sugar I hated to love, but there’s no joy yet. I’ve even tried to get that feeling back, pushing cookies or cake into my mouth, waiting for the euphoria to kick in, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t and then I stop because what the hell sense does it make to force myself to eat what I don’t want?
I’ve watched videos and read accounts of people stripping all added sugars from their diets for 30 days or 90 or whatever and then celebrating their new sugar-free life. These people have always been alien to me. They clearly don’t have my physical-entwined-with-emotional dependence on sugar. Maybe I’m in a tiny minority, but my disease went so deep it took 25 years of endless effort to arrive where I am now. Those people are also foreign because their loss of sweets is happy. They’re just glad afterwards. They don’t feel like they’ve lost a major source of emotional support. They don’t grieve.
I’m grieving. This grieving started months ago when I started to feel the sugar addiction weaken, and I thought I was done. But I guess it’s similar to grieving anything else: the pain comes and goes. Some days I’m okay without the sweets and other days I want it back badly.
I’ve been trying desserts that used to make the day better, but they don’t work anymore. Each time I confirm this I feel bewildered and sad. I must accept the new state of things. I must accept that sweets are no longer my crutch, grieve them and let them go. With the physical dependence and emotional dependence gone, all that’s left is the habit of gazing at bakeries and desserts. I feel lost.
Next post on food & weight: Fatness check-in
Next post on food & weight: Fatness check-in
Excellent analysis of a complicated conditionn. All the "Anonymous" groups recognize that vaccuum, grief feeling. I wish you a replacement, a GOOD HEALTHY replacement "thing" that inspires that happiness, this time with peace added to it.