Grieving My Sweet Tooth

Feeling my addiction losing its hold makes me sad.

My physical and emotional dependence on processed sugar has caused me decades of pain. My childhood was so scary 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 because I thought a life without cake was a life without color.

Since 1994 I’ve worked with therapists, healers and doctors, and finally managed to untangle my physical need from my emotional dependence on sweets, and lately 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 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.