A Small Stretch of Sanity, and What I Found There

Well, if I put my head on the pillow tonight without going into the kitchen and eating spoonfuls of sugar or hopping in to the car to make the three minute drive to the 24-hour doughnut shop, I will have a week off sugar. This month is crazy-busy. I have long work days, lots of catching up to do with social circles after being away for two weeks, and several major creative projects this month. I wasn't sure it was the best month to go off sugar. I know the sugar wasn't helping, but I was afraid of exhaustion, crankiness, headaches, and other effects of sugar detox. I shared this fear with a friend. This friend has been off sugar for over fourteen years, so I often call her for support during my journey. She said, "Maybe you won't have any symptoms. Stop thinking you know what it's going to be like." Miraculously, I've had no ill-effects. I've had more energy, more clarity, and the ability to show up to long days and back-to-back commitments without being late to every one. If I was on sugar, I would've had to stop between each appointment to "fuel up" on sweets.

Though I overate today, I also haven't had a non-sugar binge for six days. After a late afternoon binge last Thursday, I texted a friend who has had found a path to moderate eating after years of bingeing. She talked me through a kind of plan and asked me to text her every day to tell her how I was doing. I don't know why the accountability worked with her. I'd tried doing that with many other friends, but for some reason, whatever the combination of our conversation , agreement, and her model, it's been working so far.

So, now I'm faced with a whole new set of food obsessions and fears. The agreement was that I would eat one normal-sized plate of food at each meal and three vegetable or fruit snacks. But when she showed me a normal-sized plate, it looked pretty small to me. But I gave it a go. But I find if I don't stick to that agreement perfectly, I feel horrible about myself, eat more because I've already "ruined" the day, thinking: I'll start fresh again tomorrow. That's totally diet mentality. And we all know diets don't work. But, being struck with that mentality when I was twelve, there's a pretty deep hole I have to dig to uproot it.

Today, I worked from 7:30 AM-6 PM with a one hour break. I brought my three moderate meals and a vegetable snack. I really didn't bring much food. I'm kind of aware of calories. It was only like 1100 calories. I thought, okay, I won't die if I only eat 1100 calories--I'd gotten through the day and I only had one stop to make on the way home. The stop was a neighborhood association mixer and meeting. I wasn't sure if there'd be snacks there, but I told myself I didn't need to eat there, that I could have a green smoothie when I got home if I was hungry.

But I was tired and felt a bit out of place, even though several of my friends and acquaintances were there. I started grazing on the sweet potato chips and cheese platter. I didn't binge, but it was nervous, tired, and hungry eating. I felt bad about it when I got home. I texted my friend I've been reporting my progress to, told on myself. Then I ate another large, but healthy snack. Immediately, I become obsessed with the scale; I want to know if I had just undone the stretch of the last six days. I think, maybe I should put the scale somewhere I can't get to in the morning in my pajamas (because I only weigh myself in the morning, don't you know), like in the trunk of the car or something. . .

As you can see, putting down the sugar has just brought up a whole bundle of issues--social anxiety, ideas of food and weight perfection, a need to tell on myself, to report myself as shameful. It's not like I didn't know these issues were there, but the sugar and bingeing helped distract from them because the present pain and shame from the eating was all that I could think about.

I have a long way to go, but a lot of support. I hope you are all finding your way on your own healing journeys.

A Scarce Beginning

Well, today is April 7^th. I didn’t eat sugar on April 1^st, but I did every day since then. It wouldn’t be an issue if I had a handful of M & M’s or a slice of cake. It’s the quantities that concern me. I wake up every day looking forward to a day of clean eating. I make these beautiful green smoothies—spinach, a pear, lemon juice and fresh water. I roast vegetables, toss salads, melt coconut oil on lean meats. I’m ready to give this body a rest from the quantities and the toxic levels of sugar and processed foods. I want the peace in my head that comes from not obsessing about where the next pastry will come from, whether I have time to stop by the grocery store for candy and cookies on my way to work and if I can consume them all while driving from the store to the parking lot near my office.

I have so many supportive friends—some friends with similar struggles, some with no struggles with food but who are sympathetic. I have friends who offer me berries  instead of cookies when I stop by for a visit. I have friends who text me and invite me to call them on my way to the doughnut shop. I have friends that ask, what else is going on? This seems like more than a physiological addiction to sugar.

I’m so grateful for all the support.

I wish I know what the secret might be. I don’t want to eat and I eat. I’ve been in structured support groups where we commit our food and weigh and measure meals. This has helped for stretches of months, I feel clear-headed and efficient, my weight drops. But I haven’t been able to maintain the tasks of these programs and end up bingeing worse after every break.

I was twelve when I bought my first diet book. It was called the Women Doctor’s Diet for Teenage Girls. My dad thought it was a good idea that I watch my weight. He offered incentives—new wardrobes, trips to Disneyland, etc, if I lost ten or fifteen pounds. I put myself on a crash diet from the book, but I couldn’t sustain it and gained more weight afterwards. So, a young girl who was pretty normal-sized, ended up in a vicious diet cycle and ended up gaining more weight as years went on. Still, most of my life I was pretty good at being able to get on a diet every couple of years and dropping 30-50 pounds. Here’s the thing, everyone says diets don’t work. Every diet book I read says this is not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. The program I had most success in was also a lifestyle change, not a diet. But eliminating many foods and weighing and measuring ones food, every ounce of it, sure looks like a diet. I don’t know how to take the diet mentality out of “food plans.”

My second diet book was called .The Only Diet There Is. This book takes a spiritual approach to food and body image. It uses affirmations (I deserve to be my ideal weight of 125 pounds), forgiveness, removal of concepts of “bad” and “good” foods, prayer, and presence. Many of these approaches are found in other diet and eating disorder recovery books. I pray. I meditate. I journal. I’ve kept food-mood journals. I keep coming back to the food.

I don’t want to eat like this but I don’t know how to be without eating like this. I want to walk into the food void fearlessly. Once, when I was eating clean for eleven months, I started to have panic episodes, bouts of self-hate and self-abuse, trembling, screaming, crying spells. I want to be unafraid of the feelings that might come up, and without expectation of what might or might not happen. I want to invite the gift of recovery from the binge cycles. I am afraid to want this healing. But I want to want it. And I know that is a beginning.

Natural Sugar Alternatives

So, my lesson today was one I've learned before. I guess sometimes I need to learn a lesson more than once before I get it. Stevia sweetened and other sugar alternatives are not a healthy option for me. I still eat the dessert item compulsively, and it often is a "gateway drug" to the hard stuff (sugar). I can check that one off my list. If it looks like a dessert or acts like a dessert, it's a no-go for me.

Tomorrow is another day.

For those of you who might not have the issue I have with sugar alternatives, my friends at Luv Ice Cream in Stillwater, Minnesota have some great products--amazing stevia-sweetened chocolates, ice cream mixes, chocolate chips, and straight stevia for making your own baked goods. They do mail order and are super amazing people! The stevia doesn't have that weird licorice aftertaste and is all natural, no non-natural fillers.

Falling Headlong into Doughnuts

Yesterday, I might have set myself up for a fall. I tried to go on a cleanse yesterday. I thought I’d just drink green smoothies for a week. I’ve done cleanses before. They always feel good, especially after overloading for several weeks on junk food. But that kind of restriction can be a set up for a binge for me.

Today, I was extra tired from a long train trip on Monday and Tuesday. I slept in until nine. That might have seemed early to me even ten years ago, but now I’m of the mind if it’s light out when I get up, I’ve wasted the day. I was still groggy when I climbed out of bed. I felt good in my body, because I’d had a pretty light day with the food the day before. I didn’t manage to stay on the cleanse even for the whole day, but what I ate last night was pretty simple—strawberries, yogurt, oatmeal and nuts.

My mind is a bit crazy when it comes to food, though. If I make a plan, such as a cleanse, and don’t stick with it, I beat myself up. I have this problem with wanting to be perfect. I know I am human and can never be perfect, but that desire still rattles around in my brain and my body.

I got on the scale. I’d dropped four pounds in a day. Scales are useful tools, but I find that whatever the number is, I can use it as an excuse to eat or to beat myself up. I think, like food, they should be used in moderation, but I also find it a difficult habit to moderate. When I was in my twenties, I lived in Berkeley for a few years and took classes at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. In one of the classes, in an attempt to let go of the power the material world had over us, we were to destroy a physical object. Some people brought in photographs of exes. I brought in my scale. It was very liberating to break it. Sometimes, I ask my boyfriend to hide my scale. After a few days, I start to get anxious because I don’t know where it is. I knew, today, if I ate any more than I ate the day before, which I probably would (since I’d eaten so lightly), that I’d gain weight again. However, I didn’t feel great, pretty sluggish, so I started the day with a hot mug of lemon water and later had a smoothie and handful of nuts.

Do you see how small my world becomes when I’m struggling with food? How I’m sitting here writing a blow by blow of what I ate, how I tried not to eat? Small and boring world! So, I’ll skip the rest of the food details—I had a productive morning, finishing a script for an upcoming performance and taking care of some work emails and such. But by afternoon, I was headfirst into the sugar. In the middle of my fourth pastry I was planning what I was going to pick up on the way home.

The thing that concerns me is that I know how vicious this cycle is for me, what the consequences are, yet a part of me doesn’t want to stop. But I WANT to want to stop. And that’s a starting place. A mentor tells me that the part of me that is attached to the misery for my sugar binges is the monkey mind and I need to learn to ignore her.

But there’s this other part of me that is so attached to my role as a baker. I saw lovely French macarons that a Facebook friend posted yesterday. I don’t know her personally, but many people in town have told me I should connect with her because we are both cooks and bakers. I asked her if she would teach me to make macarons and she agreed to make a time to do so sometime in the future. She was also spending the day experimenting with cauliflower pizza crust and other healthier baking alternatives, so I got to thinking about my Sweetie’s Yumhouse Kitchen flyers that offer specialty baked items: vegan, gluten-free, sugar alternative. I started daydreaming about starting a local bakery with this woman, offering guilt-free products as well as our guilty pleasure specialties. It’s been such a long-held dream to start a bakery café.

But I have other dreams to. And I’ve had other dreams that I had to let go of.  Even though starting a bakery is unrealistic for a thousand reasons besides my relationship to sugar, it’s a dream I have trouble shaking. It’s so core to who I think of myself as. There’s all these dreams I’m chasing. And all that longing. I suppose I identify as a person who exists in painful longing. What if I stopped living in longing and started living in the joyful reality of all that is actual and present in my life? My life is abundant with friends, purpose, and creative projects. If I stop focusing on what I don’t have now, and focus on what I do have, perhaps I can translate that to my relationship with sugar. I can’t have sugar, but I can have the strawberries from the local strawberry stand, that just re-opened a week ago. Nothing’s sweeter.  

A Start at Unsugaring

Today, I went off sugar. Or I should say, I went off sugar again. I’ve said goodbye to sugar several times in my life, most earnestly during four stretches between the summer of 2009 to now. Most recently, I quit sugar and all sweeteners last June for eight months. Then, about six weeks ago, I had a breakdown and, in the course of one day, pretty much ate every type of sweet I’d been daydreaming about. It started with a giant banana split at the local diner, followed immediately by three doughnuts from the nearby doughnut shop. I can’t remember what happened after that, but I know the day ended with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and some Girl Scout cookies.

I have nothing against sugar. I don’t think of it as evil. I know there’s a lot of new science out there that reveals that sugar is more addictive than crack. I’ve never had crack, so I can’t make a comparison. All I know is that, for me, it seems like as hard as I try to eat sugar in moderation, so I can keep up a friendly relationship with it, once a dessert hits my body, I’m off to the races, planning and plotting my next sugar item before I’ve finished the one I’m currently devouring. My world gets very small because I’m driven by the quest for the next item. I tend to like to alternate a sweet item with a salty meal. By meal I mean a bag of chips or giant bowl of popcorn. The salt seems to cleanse my palate for the pie I’m  planning to eat later.

But I have several friends who can eat sugar in moderation. They can have a dessert at every meal, sometimes opting for fruit in lieu of a piece of cake. When I worked as a baker at a restaurant in San Francisco, I often saw parties of three order one dessert and share it—and not even finish it. I’ve tried every which way to be this kind of sugar-consumer, but I have found that, for the most part, I am a volume sugar-eater. 

But who will I be without sugar? I’ve worked on and off as a professional baker since 1992, even garnering a listing in the Huffington Post as making one of the six best apple pies in the country. My alter-ego, Sweetie, is a baker who teaches science to children through cooking—primarily, baking—demonstrations.  Do I have to give up baking and Sweetie if I give up sugar? I have baked for others when off sugar and enjoyed it, but not as much when I’m eating sugar.

During this last sugarless run, many things changed in my mind and body. Within two months, I was feeling really drugged, so I tried going off my psych meds and immediately felt better. (I was on an anti-depressant, a mood stabilizer, and used another medication on occasion for panic episodes. I stayed even-keeled the whole time I was off sugar.)

My efficiency skyrocketed. I work as a college writing instructor and was able to grade my papers more quickly, getting them back to students within a week. I wrote a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, plus packed my house and moved the last week of that month. I wrote and received a grant for Sweetie presentations. In December, I graded final essays, submitted grades, and hosted my whole family in my house for an early Christmas, cooking several meals and desserts.

But I missed my old friend, sugar. I guess I wanted one more go-around. But the situation quickly devolved. I was sick to my stomach most days, had trouble fighting off a cold and sore throat, found myself too full to fall asleep on time most nights. My work and performance in general suffered. Plus, I got depressed and my self-esteem plummeted as my weight bounced back up. I’d gotten back into a whole lot of other bad eating habits about a month before the return to sugar, but sugar was the item that most triggered a battering of my self-esteem.

So, there’s lots of good reasons to go off sugar for me, but why write about it?

Recently, several other people have told me they are newly off sugar. Many others have shared their struggles with sugar. I think we need to talk about this openly, and ask each other for support. Before I decided today was the day, I made agreements with two of my friends to bookend today with them. I wrote them texts in the morning, they wrote me encouraging notes, and then I will tell them of my success (or lack of success) at night. Their encouragement, and admittedly, my pride, has helped me get through this day so far. Why not create a whole team, through going public, to help shepherd me forward into the unknown? I hope to help others and be helped in the process.

Another reason I wanted to put this in writing is that I’ve struggled with food issues since I was about four years old, but even though I’ve written about all kinds of personal struggles, I’ve never written about my food problems. It’s as if I’ll tell you any kind of embarrassing thing, so you don’t have to see what I consider the most embarrassing thing—the way I consume sugar. If I don’t say it out loud, I can keep doing it, in my own private world of misery. If I bring it to the light, and show you this secret place—then maybe, just maybe, it will have less power over me.

If we start a community dialogue about our struggles with sugar and food, then maybe we can stop the cycle: I eat, I feel ashamed about it, so I eat some more. That doesn’t have to happen if we all look at these issues together in the light.