emotions and saying bye bye miss american pie

It seems like I have been ignoring the topic of emotions in my first blogs so far. Not because I am one of those stoics who ignore their emotions and stomp on them like scurrying ants. No. I was raised to ignore my emotions, and when I first got some help to be a healthier person - 27 years ago - the first thing I had to learn was how to feel. And I did. Boy did I. Frozen emotions come through with the force of a swollen river after the snow melts. So for many many years, I treated my forceful emotions as a sign of my health and healing, and let them have full rein.

Now, after twenty some odd years of this, I can say that it was imperative and healthy that I learn to feel my feelings, and I do believe this is a sign of health. But, I have also come to believe that the intensity of some of my feelings - the ravaging downs, the depth of pain when not so deeply provoked, the "meltdowns" that have just exhausted me in my life - these are connected to my sugar addiction, and for many many years I just thought they were connected to emotional issues. But the truth is, my emotions are forcefully affected by what I eat!! When I have been eating well and not indulging in sugar, I am a much happier person. My moods are much more even. Though I still feel my feelings, they do not overtake me and send me roaring to places that I am tired of visiting emotionally. I am prone to depressive thinking and a looming sense of anxiety when I am eating sugar.

It is hard to describe, but my nervous system is directly and immediately wired to my sugar intake or lack thereof. When I am eating sugar, my handwriting changes noticeably - it becomes large unintelligible scrawls, very impulsive and loud and sloppy. When I am low on the sugar end of eating, my handwriting is neat, legible, clean, and I am calmer, more even in my reactions to everything. I see things in a gently positive way, I have a pervalent sense of well-being.

So, I will talk about my feelings as I go through this effort to free myself of sugar. But I will not indulge my feelings. I will not make them Queen of The Universe and give them total power over every other aspect of my life. I will feel them, speak them, honor and acknowledge them, and then let them go. When lived in balance, feelings have a time and a place and my hope is, as I get off this white addictive substance known as sugar, an intensity that is appropriate to what is being felt at the moment.

One of the things that is amazing to me in the book "A Sugar Addicts Total Recovery Program" is that she describes characteristics of sugar addicts that are spot-on when it comes to me. We reach for sugar because afterwards we feel creative, competent, confident and hopeful. There is a bio-chemical reason for this, why sugar stimulates these exact feelings in sugar sensitive people!!! This is amazing.

So, to be truthful, I have had moments of panic and fear at the thought of giving up sugar. A sense of doom or "Oh no, how am I going to enjoy life now?" Also real fear at the withdrawal process - I have strong-armed my way through a total sugar withdrawal before, and it was extremely hard, and it only lasted six lovely weeks before I caved. But I finally finally believe I have found the program that is going to allow me to withdraw more gently, and it is in this book.
So, while I acknowledge my fear and sometimes panic, sometimes slight depression at the thought of saying bye bye baby sugar, I don't need to thrash around in those emotions. I can let them swell in me, see them, and watch them leave on a gentle downswell. If they are not so gentle, I will be honest about that here.

For now, I am still saying, bye bye miss american pie. Bye sugar blues! I am going for it.: My life. The way I want to live it, not as a hard-wired sugar mama to the sugar and health industries - how much money have I spent on this sugar addiction?!?!?!? But as a woman with balanced brain chemistry and a humming sense of well-being. Yeah.

I am a sugar senstive person!!

I took myself out yesterday to buy "Sugar Blues" the first book that blew the lid off the sugar lie in 1975, by William Dufty. I love this book, and I couldn't find my copy, so off I went. I was curious to see how many other anti-sugar books there were, and, surprisingly, given the staggering number of books on health, nutrition, and weight loss, there are very very few. Hmmm.

But all you need is one gem, and there, next to the classic "Sugar Blues" I picked up "The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program" and have been reading it straight since yesterday. I am so excited about this book. I will be talking about it for quite a few posts I am sure. But first, a beginning quote from "Sugar Blues": "The brain is the most sensitive organ in the body. The difference between feeling up or down, sane or insane, calm or freaked out, inspired or depressed, depends in large measure on what we put in our mouth."

What has me so excited about "The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program", by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D, is that she got her Ph.D. in the field of nutritional addiction. She was the FIRST to do this, and while she has treated alcoholics and heroin addicts successfully through nutrition, she fully recognizes sugar addicts as addicts. This is a chemical reaction that some people are sensitive to. I am one of them!!!

I have taken countless puffs of cigarettes from friends over my lifetime, and I have never become a smoker. I remain physically and emotionally indifferent to tobacco. It has no power over me, yet many I know became addicted at the first cigarette. Same with alcohol. I have drunk or not my entire life as I wished, and walked away every time, and I am not an alcoholic, depite a history of it in my family. I just don't have the "gene".

But sugar. Sugar is another story, for me. I started having recurring dreams of swimming in cake batter with my mouth wide open when I was three or four. I started baking when I was seven so I could eat some of the batter or dough unsupervised, and I always know the best places for bread or pastries of the highest quality within weeks of moving anywhere. I have jokingly called myself a sugar addict for years, but what is really exciting, what I have learned from this book, is that this is correct! Like any addiction, it is not a question of laziness or discipline; it is a question of balancing my brain chemistry!!!

Much more on this. But now I must go eat a potato with its skin, and get a good night's sleep. Part of the program. Potatos not Prozac! Sleep well everybody.

Potato Chips Are Sugarfree

Note to self: Just because I stop eating sugar does not mean I can eat a bag of potato chips at night and expect to lost weight.

Is this really just about losing weight? Really, for me, it is much more about regaining a sense of confidence in myself. I want to prove to myself that I can be a disciplined person, that a substance, any substance, does not have power over me. This my body!! I am stronger than that, and I intend to prove that to myself, once again in this middle of my life, when I could go very soft, but instead I am going to get very strong.

Sugar is not food; it is a substance that has been unnaturally added to many foods, and many things can be made from it, but that does not mean it is meant to be eaten. People make sculptures from sugar and white flour; doesn't it strike you that the same cannot be done with bananas, or lettuce, or meat, or even whole wheat flour?These things sustain life; they get moldy if left in the open air, as they begin to feed the spores and bacteria. A sculpture made from white flour and sugar can stand indefinitely; lifeless. The little pastries that I buy at the French Pastry shop here in town are miniature sculptures of sugar and white flour, and I have been putting them into my body for years. Today what I think about that is: ugh.

Last night I did go out and buy "Coconut Bliss", an icecream sweetened only with agave and made with coconut milk. It is outrageously good. I am not going to try and do this without good food, or treats once in awhile. They will just have to not have sugar in them.

Do I Dare?

"If you want to know who you are, quit eating sugar" - Deb Rocker

I am summoning my courage to declare myself lost, and to follow one thread, one simple thread to find my way back: no more sugar this spring. For the three months of spring. From there, I don't know. It would be ridiculously easy to return to a sugar-eating life if, after not eating sugar for three months, losing weight, evening out my moods, I find that I am desperately unhappy and want to get back to sugar addiction. Donuts are not going anywhere in three months, I tell myself. If something huge happens and the planet is no more, and silly me I gave up sugar just two months before when I could have been eating chocolate mousse every day, well, that is exactly why I am sitting here on the brink of sugarlessness summoning my courage. Because to let go of sugar, when one is a life-long addict, is no light thing.

I have tried this before. I know the demons who line the path that will appear with this first step, and they know me. At the moment, they are laughing at me. They have won every other time. They do not fear me. They think me weak.

I do not dare say I will not eat sugar for a whole year, because it could set off hysterical laughter, which is similar to crying, and I don't want emotions to get in the way right now. Especially fear. I am holding onto my clarity. I am quitting sugar this spring because I am in a body I would not have recognized five years ago, and there is a mindset that comes with it that I am not ok with. I have gotten shockingly used to being in a fattish body, though never comfortable; I spend every day in discomfort. My memory of my slimmer self is fading, and that is the most shocking of all to me. I am on the verge of having to buy all new clothes because I am bursting out of my other ones. I do not want to make that step. I am so tired all the time. I find too much pleasure in life through sugar, and cannot seem to come up with other pursuits. I want to become an authentic person. I want to create more with my life. I want to learn how to be a disciplined person, so I can actively create what I really want with my life. I want to believe in myself again.

And so, in the search for my own integrity with myself (i.e. when I give my word to myself I keep it), I am following this one thread - no sugar for the next three months. That is all forms of refined sugar (and also maple syrup and honey, brown sugar, anything crystalline and sweet). I believe I will still allow myself Agave, as it does not spike the blood sugar level as it is absorbed, and is not a processed sugar. No refined flours either, or things made from them.

And so it begins. Knowing the path, knowing some of what is waiting, I take this first step. Spring is here.