How sugar addiction hijacked my life

“The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.” 
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

What is food or sugar addiction? 

In my own words, addiction is when I can't go without something. I can't seem to stop myself. Maybe I wake up thinking about it. Or something stressful happens and all the sudden I'm in my addiction without realizing it. Trigger-->craving-->pursuing-->attaining-->ritualizing.

So for food and sugar addiction this might look like:

Feeling upset at work-->craving cookies, thinking about cookies, feeling disracted at work imagining cookies-->leaving work to go buy them-->buying them-->eating half a box alone in my car.

Have you ever done something like this or similar? How is your ritual the same? How is it different? What are your triggers?

Why was sugar addiction destructive? 

1. It hijacked my life, decreasing my focus and productivity.
2. I felt crappy after eating the sugar I craved.
3. My energy levels would go up and down depending on the sugar I consumed. I was all over the place.
4. I could put on more weight/bodyfat than felt healthy for me. Extra body fat can decrease positive health outcomes from surgeries to heart health.
5. I felt out of control with my food habits.
6. I spent a lot of money on sugar items, which aren't food. They're more like drugs. They don't have valuable micronutrients or fiber--just empty calories.
7. Being in my addiction took me out of mindfulness and being present which in turn kept me at a distance in relationship with others.
8. Staying in addiction kept me having the tough conversations I needed to have with others and myself.

I'm sure I could think of more reasons sugar addiction was not good but I'll stop there.

How did I know sugar was a problem?

I knew sugar was a problem because of the high speed and force with which I would consume it. It didn't feel healthy. It also seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I always craved it. If I was on a "diet," no amount of willpower could stop me from reaching for sweets if I felt stressed or triggered enough.

I would dissosciate while eating sugar meaning I would no longer be in my body. I had no idea if I felt full or not. In fact, I didn't really know what full felt like in general. I relied more on visual cues and counting calories. I didn't know what my body felt or how it felt when I ate certain foods.

I can remember a time when I felt stressed because I had to move and I felt lonely because my partner had moved out back to California ahead of me. It was around Easter and I purchased a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter eggs individually wrapped. I was sitting in the moving truck ripping open the yellow packaging and inhaling the waxy chocolate coated peanut butter candies. I had shoved 10 of them in my mouth before I stopped to breath. I didn't feel anything. I probably could have eaten 10 more.

That's different than how I am today. Now if I have one bite of sugar I feel it in my body. I can't binge eat anymore. It doesn't feel good.

How did I make the shift away from sugar and food addiction?

1. Committing to quit sugar cold turkey. By announcing it on FB and regularly updating my network, I was held accountable.
2. Committing to healing the deeper places that were teh root of my addiction. This included reading books on addiction and emotional health and getting therapy. 
3. Practicing being present in my body. This included doing lots of yoga and taking time each day to ask myself how I felt in my body. Vipassana meditation was also key, in which the meditator scans the body piece by piece and notices any sensation, over and over and over. I did this daily.
4. Learning what self-love is and how to practice it. Learning how to speak kindly to myself and ask myself what I need. I sought out meditation teachers, life coaches, and therapists for help.
5. Committing to showing up each day even if I felt uncomfortable. Change feels physically uncomfortable in the body. Many of us can't handle bodily discomfort and many of us have a good reason why we learned to dissociate. For me, I think I had done enough deep healing work with coaches before quitting sugar that I felt a solid base for taking on new discomfort.

“At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction—and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.” 
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction