A Year of Life
without
the White Death
On the first of this month I began my second year of abstinence from “sugar”. In truth, we can’t live without sugar. Glucose equals energy in our cells and our blood. The brain in particular depends on the glucose in the blood stream from moment to moment, with no way of its own to store energy. To be factual, my abstinence has been from the highly refined sugars such as the white crystalline essences of the sugar cane and the sugar beet, the syrupy refined juices of corn and sorghum, and some other substances such as wheat and potatoes to which I am both allergic and addicted. During this time I have also limited my intake of the more “natural” sugars, the levulose found in fruit and honey… except for a few slips.
Even from those specific highly refined druglike sugars, my abstinence has not been total. Although I prepare most of my foods at home from scratch, I eat a few processed foods and occasionally I eat in restaurants. By reading labels and avoiding anything that has sugar high on its ingredients list and everything with more than a gram or two of sugar per serving, and by being discriminating in my choices from menus, I get by. I also depend on kinesiology: muscle response testing, to determine from day to day which foods are okay for me at a given time, so that I don’t develop new allergies and so that I get a balanced diet.
The safest cuisine for me is Mexican, as long as I avoid flour tortillas and fried ice cream. I can prepare and eat fried rice at home, but there is nothing–not a single item–on the menu at the Orient Express Chinese deli in Wasilla, without sugar added. These are just a few of the culinary discoveries I have made during this first full year of my abstinence. Another interesting, heartening discovery came around the middle of that year when I quit smoking cannabis. Without the weed I don’t get the munchies, which makes the sugar abstinence that much easier.
I was never addicted to marijuana. There have been no cravings, no withdrawal symptoms from quitting the dope-smoking, such as I experienced when I kicked barbiturates or amphetamines or sugar. Sugar was my lifelong drug of choice. I was addicted to it from infancy, I suppose. Weaned early from my mother’s breast because she was in and out of the hospital a lot, I was placed on a formula made of canned evaporated milk, water and corn syrup. I know the recipe because when I was fifteen and had my own first daughter, after some lactational difficulty my mother suggested I put her on the same formula.
I remember having to sneak sugar in childhood. It wasn’t that Mama denied me sweets. Every dinner included dessert, usually home-baked pie or cake. There was sugared lemonade and Kool-Aid at home and soda pop when we went out. One of our rituals when out shopping was to stop at the candy counter in Sears for fudge. Special occasions brought fancy boxes of fancy chocolates. Saturday mornings meant coffee with cream and sugar, and gooey cinnamon rolls to go with them. …ooohh, why do I do this to myself? Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my chin and take a sip of this cold black coffee… and go get a fresh cup.
….
My mother did try to limit my intake. That’s something any addict will tell you is both hard and hazardous: “…one is too many and a thousand never enough.” Because the pie and cake were limited to dessert after dinner and to birthdays and other special occasions, and the candy was restricted to Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and infrequent shopping trips, I’d beg for jam sandwiches at odd times, put extra spoons of sugar on my breakfast cereal, etc. What Mama objected to the most was my popping into the kitchen for a spoonful right from the sugar bowl. It was the messiness of the sugar-encrusted saliva-coated spoon that I stuck back in the sugar bowl that always gave me away.
The addiction escalated way out of control when she bought the drugstore and soda fountain after my father died. I was eight when we moved into our little room at the back of that store. As soon as she noticed how much of the ice cream and candy I was eating and how many vanilla cokes, cherry fizzes and limeades with an extra squirt of syrup I was drinking, she cracked down, imposed limits, and I had to get sneakily inventive.
I learned first to always wash my glass when I sneaked a coke. When the wet glass on the drainer when she returned from a trip to the stock room or the restroom gave me away, I learned to get my fix directly from the nozzle on the Coke dispenser. To get the most treat in the least time, I’d turn the handle first one way for a stream of pure syrup and then the other for a quick shot of the regular-strength carbonated drink to chase it. Since the whole town was connected directly or indirectly to that Coke machine, I suppose I contributed to the rapid spread of communicable diseases in the three years or so that we had the store. I don’t think Mama ever really caught on (too audacious for credibility, I was) but I do recall her expressing concern at inventory time over the huge spike in Coke syrup use above what it was when my cousin owned the store. She had the Coke man check the dispenser to make sure it was working right.
After I was out on my own, for a few years my sugar consumption was regulated by budget constraints. Then I learned to shoplift and the restrictions were lifted. The only decrease in my sugar consumption that I can recall came when I started doing speed. On one five-day run, I ate nothing at all as I recall. When going to jail put an end to my three-month intravenous amphetamine run, sugar helped me deal with the cravings. Never having acquired an addiction to nicotine, but having gained skill at rolling cigarettes while smoking dope with bikers, I compensated for not having “commissary” funds in jail by rolling cigs for other inmates.
In those days before non-smoking institutions, tobacco was supplied free of charge to indigent inmates and cheaply through the commissary to those with limited funds. It came in small paper pouches of Top or Bugler, each with its own pack of papers. The papers had to be made to last through the entire supply of tobacco, or else a woman might find herself smoking toilet paper or magazine pages. The Bible-thumpers became incensed when one would rip a page from the Gideon, but that was the best paper. Most of them could roll two-paper joints… er, cigs… but not one-paper ones. I could sit down on comissary day and neatly roll up the whole pack of tobacco, pack the cigs back into the pouch for them, and tuck away two or three extra papers to trade later for someone’s dessert or a candy bar. In exchange for my rolling expertise, they would pay me in Pay-Days, Butterfingers and Hershey bars.
Thus I supported my habit, even without money and with no way to steal any sugar. In prison, I fantasized about a job in the kitchen with unlimited access to the sugar bin, but it was never to be. Instead, I got my mom to send me some money for my commissary account, $30.00 in fifteen months as I recall. Every comissary day I bought two or three bags of cinnamon balls, hot, spicy and sweet, and cheap at only 39 cents a bag.
That locked-up era of my life occurred around the turn of the decade from the ‘sixties to the ‘seventies. When I got out, sugar and caffeine substituted for amphetamines and I managed to stay (I thought) off the “hard” drugs. I now know that sugar as a drug is just as hard as any of them. When I say this at Narcotics Anonymous meetings, it draws laughter, but those doing that nervous laughing are themselves substituting sugar and caffeine for other more expensive addictions. Greyfox tends to support my view, but I’ve heard him say in some of those meetings that he can’t see himself ever standing outside a Starbuck’s offering to trade a blowjob for a double latte. True, perhaps, but nonetheless sugar has tremendous personal and societal risks and costs, as does caffeine.
I’d been out of prison about five years when I became seriously ill with reactive hypoglycemia. Adele Davis’s books helped me trace the problem to my sugar addiction and I made my first attempts at kicking the habit. The story of one of my early relapses has already been blogged: my “last” brownie binge.
On Doug’s birthday this year, in July, I brought home a New York style cheesecake for him, his favorite. Those things are small but powerful. Knowing that if he cut it himself he might eat half of it at a single sitting (I kept him sugar-free through infancy and early childhood, but he got the sugar jones when he started public school: cafeteria desserts, holiday parties in the classroom, etc.), I sliced it into six servings, spooned some strawberries and whipped cream over one and served it to him.
As I cleaned up the countertop and put the cake and berries and cream in the fridge, I unthinkingly licked the residue from the knife I’d used to cut the cake. As soon as I’d swallowed the cloyingly sweet goo, I realized what I’d done. Up to then, it was automatism–I just did what I’d done thousands of times before, licking the spoon, the knife, my fingers, as I’d seen Mama do thousands of times before me. It didn’t precipitate a relapse, but I did have intense sugar cravings for days afterward.
My other “slip” this summer was one night when Greyfox and I were watching videos at his little cabin in town. Video is another addiction we share and are working on. We don’t seem to be able to moderate it. Again, one is too many and a thousand never enough, it seems. Abstinence or excess is the way of the addict, no middle ground. That evening we had bought a two-pound box of sweet Canadian blueberries. We sat there with it between us as we watched some of the first season of Six Feet Under, and ate the whole thing before we realized what we had done. Even levulose, fruit sugar, is addictive and must be consumed with restraint when one is trying to kick the addiction.
I have not addictively consumed fruit since then, nor have I unthinkingly popped any forbidden stuff in my mouth again. Greyfox is still occasionally overdoing fruit. It’s amazing how fast a bunch of grapes or a bag of apples disappears around here. We’re working on that. He rationalizes it as better than bingeing on alcohol. I rationalize cutting him some slack because when there are so many battles one must pick ones fights, but it’s something we must deal with sometime, “…substituting one drug for another releases our addiction all over again.”
While Doug and I were in Anchorage last Tuesday, Greyfox decided he wanted to rent a video, so he took a couple of small jugs with him and filled them on the way home from the general store. That was the other run I missed, though I can’t honestly say I really miss going to the waterhole in this kind of weather. It has been cloudy, damp, foggy and drippy, not to mention chilly.
I was in town the day the first punkins appeared in the supermarket, when they were all one price instead of sold by the pound. I picked one not to suit my budget but because I liked its shape: a huge pear with an interesting thick twisted stump of stem on top. That was the same day that the winter squash went on display and I stocked up on scads of them. I hadn’t fully intended to eat much if any of Jack, but those scraps are so sweet that I’m going out later to fetch his burned-out shell and see what I can salvage.
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