Sugar addiction – 3 Stages of Healing

For much of my life, sugar has been my drug, my fix, my heroin, my crack cocaine.

While gorging on sugar, I am absent from life. I ignore my children’s plea for a bedtime snuggle because I want to inhale a box of raisins. I close down my heart. I care more about getting my sugar fix than noticing the hurt of those around me. I am envious of thin, healthy women, hating them for their easy relationship with food.

I am self-absorbed, wrapped around my own pain, and yet consumed with wanting more and more sugar. Even when I’m not eating it, I’m stuck, because I’m thinking about what I should or shouldn’t eat.

Here’s how I changed that, and what you can expect as you travel through the 3 stages of healing from sugar addiction:

Stage One:

When I committed to giving up sugar, at first, it was all about me. This will probably be true for you, as well.

Your health is a top priority during those first few weeks. Your sugar abstinence is like a new plant that needs watering, care and protection from the elements. You will need to be vigilant, which means focusing a lot on yourself – even though healing yourself will benefit those around you. Your abstinence is crucially important because slips can send you back into full blown sugar bingeing.

The challenge with overcoming an addiction is that it’s easy to stop there – to get stuck in stage one. I did that. I stayed stuck in stage one long past when I needed to move on, and, as a result, I became obsessive about food. I was as fixated about not eating sugar as I had once been about eating it. I wasn’t free. My thoughts still centered around food – only this time, I was congratulating myself for being “good.” I was still self-absorbed. I still hadn’t found the freedom that I wanted.

The solution wasn’t to go back to eating sugar, but to move onto stage two. How do you know when you’re ready to move out of stage one? When you start to feel like you deserve praise for your healthy eating, or when you start to feel like a plant that has outgrown its pot.

Stage Two:

Here’s what you can expect in stage two:  you take your process deeper. You aren’t so physically challenged to stay off of sugar (thanks to your sugar abstinence), so you have some breathing room:   a physical, mental, and emotional space where you can begin healing the thoughts that led to the drive for sugar in the first place. This means facing and healing the deeper wounds that made you seek solace in food, creating new patterns of thought and behavior that don’t lead to the cookie jar. It’s understanding, “Why do I use sugar to meet my needs?”

(This is why, for those of you who want to find freedom from sugar, I first recommend reading my book, Overcoming Sugar Addiction, because it tells you how to get to abstinence, stage one. Then I recommend taking the Sugar Addiction support program to work on stage two – healing the beliefs and wounds that have caused you to turn to food.)

Stage two, frankly, is hard work. Hard because it takes courage to face your wounds, to feel them, to mourn them, and to let them go. (I used many coaches and counselors during this stage of the journey and highly recommend them for support.) And yet stage two is even more rewarding than stage one – because you are willing to dive deep into yourself and heal the cause of your sugar addiction at the root. This feels much better than merely applying a band aid (sugar abstinence) to the problem.

In this stage, you will also learn how to meet your true needs without food – a recipe for a nourishing life. This becomes its own reward.

Stage Three:

Stage three is where you move on; where you stop focusing on sugar and food and live your life. To facilitate this, it helps to offer your sugar abstinence to something greater than yourself. How can you use your sugar abstinence to serve others? How can you make your sugar abstinence a spiritual practice – something that arises from your very soul?

Here’s why this is important:  aligning your sugar abstinence with your deepest values is how you find the motivation and focus to stay the course – because let’s face it – there will be times when you don’t feel like sticking with it.

Vanity – a desire for a beautiful body – isn’t enough to keep you going over the long haul. Neither is concern for your health – for many of us, it’s too abstract. (It takes time for the negative consequences of sugar bingeing to show up in the body, so we may not feel this connection strongly enough to act on it.) Discipline isn’t enough either – because each of us has a little rebel that likes being bad!

Hooking your practice – your sugar abstinence – onto your deepest values is what will enable you to stay committed when you want to indulge, give up, when it feels hard, when you start to feel sorry for yourself, when you feel deprived, when you just plain don’t want to, when you try and convince yourself that one chocolate/piece of pie/box of raisins won’t hurt. The practice itself takes over. It’s your own Olympic moment, your hero’s journey – where you face the test of commitment and strength and show yourself, “I am stronger than I thought.”

There are a million ways to live a hero’s journey. But for those of us who are sugar sensitive, of who overeat, our journey is with food. I say:  embrace it. Make this journey your spiritual practice, how you bring your deepest beliefs and values up to the surface of your daily life, to every meal and snack.

For me, my spiritual practice is love. I want to open my heart and serve the world – something I can’t do when I’m drunk on sugar, when I’m absorbed in my own pain and remorse, when I’m dishonest, hiding my gifts behind excuses of, “Potato chips aren’t sugar, I can eat half a bag.” It is love that keeps me on this journey.

Traveling the circle

As you journey through stage one, stage two, and stage three, you’ll see that these stages aren’t linear, but cyclical. For example, when you’re going through a challenging or stressful time, you may need to return to stage one, where you are more vigilant about your sugar abstinence in the face of external stressors. (For many people, this includes the holidays, big life changes like moves, new jobs, new babies, illness, separations/divorces/marriages/new relationships, and money stress.) During these times, give yourself deep structure, support and discipline in order to navigate this rocky terrain.

If you’ve been in stage 3 and move back to stage one, don’t look at this as a sign of “failure” or moving backwards, but as a sign that you’re in a different cycle. Don’t judge the stage you’re in. They’re all valuable; they’re all necessary.

For example, this year has been one of tremendous change and financial challenge for me – two buttons that historically, have sent me diving into sugar and food. In fact, I even slipped up and went back to raisins – my favorite sugar treat. I used this as a learning opportunity, as a wake-up call that pretending to be in stage 3 when I was really back in stage one will only lead to a raisin binge. Once I gave myself the extra support I needed to stay off sugar (what stage one is all about), I was able to say no to sugar again. The raisins are safely tucked away.

Going back to stage one or stage two is actually a sign of growth. It’s a sign that things that you had kept blocked or under the surface are now rising, ready to be processed, like shrapnel coming to the surface of the skin. Welcome these times. Welcome the relief that this processing will bring you. Treat them as one more cycle of exploration, one more revolution around the axis of sugar, where you push your edge and probe deeper into false beliefs and painful patterns. You will remove more kinks and blocks and find greater healing – if you don’t resist them.

As you go through your healing from sugar addiction, you will find yourself progressing around and around these cycles. If you accept this as a natural part of the growth process, you can even learn to enjoy those moments of growth, even as they may also be painful.

What stage do you find yourself in, with regards to sugar? And, more importantly, where do you want to go? How can you use your journey with sugar as a pathway for growth, as a rabbit hole into new ways of living in the world, opening your heart to a world that needs your unique gifts?

For more support in freeing yourself from sugar addiction, start by downloading my ebook, Overcoming Sugar Addiction and signing up for my quarterly newsletters. For additional support, take the 12 part, self-paced Sugar Addiction support program. This program comes with access to our private support forums, where you can meet other women on a similar path for encouragement on your journey. If you’re experiencing financial difficulties, apply for a scholarship. We give out as many scholarships for our programs as we have paying customers.