It’s not my fault that I am a sugar addict. Nobody really studied sugar addiction until recently, and because sugar is not illegal and contraband, it doesn’t really cost all that much money to be hooked on sugar. While sugar’s negative effects are devastating, using sugar does not leave one a drooling mess when you are ‘high’ on it.

I am addicted, though. When I take sugar, I get a rush and my heart hammers. I sweat a cold sweat. Using sugar makes me hungry, too. I am much more prone to eat other things that are not good for me, like bread, pasta, potatoes, if I have used sugar recently. Call sugar a gateway food–it leads to the harder stuff.

Because our schedules are so screwed up, I am working seven days a week, ten hours a day, we went out to eat hamburgers and fries for dinner a couple of days ago. Of course I was hungry soon after I ate, a common side effect of both white bread and sugar. Sugar because I got a Pepsi to eat with my burger and onion rings.

The next day we had smoked ribs in a pot luck style dinner at work. Someone thoughtfully brought canned sodas. Guess what? I could not resist a twelve ounce Coke for lunch. See where this is heading? My sweetie made a really great lightly sweetened desert for this potluck. It was the kind of desert that normally would satisfy the desire for desert without throwing one into a sugar spiral. However, I was already in a sugar spiral. The next day I ate about ten pieces of this desert total. They were small pieces.

Now I need some dedicated sugar detox time. No pasta, no potatoes, no sugar, no bread. I may even need to limit my fruits until I get back into the swing of no sugar. I am addicted. I need to be careful how close I let my temptations get to me.

I will always be a sugar junkie in some stage of recovery. It is the price I pay for being born in the US during the last half of the twentieth century. Anyone born here is liable to be a junkie just like I am. We are clueless to our condition, we are getting fat, we are getting sick. These days it is harder and harder to not know that your problem is sugar. The news is spreading far and wide. Someday there will be label information telling you what percentage of your recommended daily allowance of sugar is contained in your foods, but for now they are all ‘too much’. For now, I have to avoid all of the processed foods. For now I can’t be fooled into eating low-fat versions of anything, because they have been enhanced with sugars.

This week, I have to be good and go cold turkey off the sugar.