Previous post on food & weight: Supporting the spleen.
Read my full weight & health journey by using desktop view and scrolling down on the right to the section called Fat? Me, too.
I’ve blogged a LOT about food and weight. If you want to read all those posts in order, like a strangely written story, start with this one from 2012: My life is better now that I’m bigger. Yeah, that’s right. At first putting on a bunch of weight and becoming fat felt like a novelty, a new adventure, an experiment. That changed. Each post on food and weight is linked, so you can read right through them.
But this post focuses on my addiction to sugar. I’m newly in a place where I (shockingly) don’t have cravings for sweets and I can see the possibility of having healed myself from that addiction for good. This is how I did it:
I worked with various therapists over years, exploring every harmful memory from my entire life, every self-defeating belief and every source of emotional pain. I dove deep into the recesses of my psyche to root out my self-hatred, low expectations, and fear of everything. I returned again and again to childhood memories and family dynamics. And when I realized I had more work to do, I did it. And when I realized I still had even more work to do, I did that. I did this for years and then I did it for decades.
If everyone who’s addicted to a substance or behavior did this work on themselves, they just might overcome their dependence and we just might have a world free of addiction. But that will never happen because this work is @#$-damn f^&*-ing painful and exhausting and it leaves you in a terrible mood as often as it leaves you in a slightly better frame of mind. It sucks dog penis, especially when years go by without the results you want.
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| Time to make (sugarless) coffee! |
It is so much easier to be addicted! It’s a hundred times easier (and often cheaper) to just shove your pain back down and have another drink or hit or cookie or pill or cigarette. Why spend decades trying to get better when you can just keep on like you’ve been keeping on? At the prospect of an emotional slog that could take you through multiple presidential administrations and still might not work, it’s more realistic to just stay addicted.
So why did I pick the emotional slog? At first I thought if I kicked the sugar habit I’d be healthier and I’d avoid getting fat. I believed staying thin would lead to a wonderful lifelong relationship. Clearly that didn’t work, so overcoming my addiction became about trying to lose the weight I put on when my marriage failed, so I could still go find that wonderful relationship.
But in the last few years I realized that letting go of sweets is also necessary if I want to be emotionally stable, not depressed, healthier in my friendships and truly ready for the lifelong relationship I’ve wanted. I’ve been using sugar to numb myself emotionally and hide from my life. Reaching an awake, engaged state of emotional health became just as big a motivator as returning to the size 10 I was seven and a half years ago. With so much on the line, I dug in and kept working. (Actually, being 53 years old, I guess it’s no longer a “lifelong” relationship that I’m looking for, but I’ll take what I can get.)
Sometimes it seems like attaining the indifference to sweets enjoyed by so many is a sad goal. But for me that indifference means I’ve stopped being addicted to a substance I’ve emotionally depended on since childhood. I think I’m close to putting the sugar addiction behind me, and nothing about getting here was easy. If I can live the rest of my life without using food to manage my pain and bad days, I will count this as the biggest thing I have to be proud of and the accomplishment of my life’s work.
Next post on food & weight: Hurdle.