Sometimes keeping sugar at bay, denying it consumption, feels like holding the breath. Its intensity is like remaining afloat without a life preserver, treading water, and hoping that willpower and strength sustains its absence. Additionally simple sugar weakens physically and psychologically by its addictive nature.
For many, like a drug, sugar has the same numbing effect as heroin. During an author’s interview, she commented that heroin use feels as if everything will be okay, and reduces emotional and physical pain. Any worries become all right, she added. Sugar alleviates emotions depth into dormancy. Making everything okay, all concerns slip away, and pain ceases to exist. Like an addictive drug, ceasing to utilize this substance, an aching, wanting, or need continues.
Substance abuse and addiction, its destructive element destroys physically, emotionally, and acts as an escape from reality. With food addiction, it increases the waistline, infiltrates with toxins, and slows the body’s ability to digest and function properly. Psychological need eventually affects one’s quality of life. Cycling like a merry-go-round, fearful of the pain associated with eliminating sugar, consumption increases.
“It’s not jumping out of a plane that will kill you; it’s the landing.” Landing gear for sugar detoxification simulates removal of an addictive substance. It challenges physically with headaches, exhaustion, and a mental pull to retreat from indulgence. Bodies across America utilize sugar and food as a numbing agent visibly. The addictive substance aids and abets us from feeling emotions, stress, and pain. Without “using,” acknowledging, feeling, and expressing emotions, alters the need to numb. Addressing the purpose for emotional and physical escape via an addictive substance supports recovery.
Although “everything in moderation” seems a solution, this need not apply to sugar addicts. Moderation leads to greater ingested amounts infiltrating the body through loss of control. Small amounts trigger the physical need for more to reach the same initial high or numbing effect. Like alcoholics, the addictive nature warrants self-control, an elimination of the substance, and a diligent path to recovery. Although socially acceptable and legal, sugar remains a destructive, health problem. Struggling with this affliction, elimination may be the ultimate solution. If asked to work in a bakery or candy store, sugar addicts need not apply. This is a recipe for disaster.