Gimme Some Suga!

My name is Zaimah Habeeb, and I am a sugar-aholic. I do pastries, cookies, raisins, or cake. Chocolate, candy or perhaps a milkshake. I can do an entire Dr. Seussian style listing of all the forms of sugar that I do, I mean, eat. Actually, I think I was right the first time. I eat sugar as if it were a drug, and I love the way I feel when I’m on the stuff. I am addicted to sugar and chances are, you are too. Like all addictions, there comes a time when you have to choose. Either you live to get high and hasten your death, or you fight it with all you got, so you can live the unfettered, boundless, and free life that can only be achieved when you just say no. That time came for me and I haven’t looked back since. Okay, wait, I promised myself that I would tell the truth and the whole truth about my addiction, so the truth is I look back every day. Make that every mealtime of every day. Alright fine, every single moment of every single day, I look back, okay?! But though I may look back, I dare not GO back. Been clean too long to let a piece of chewy brownie with caramel swirl and walnuts on top mess me up. But I’ll snatch those walnuts off ever so slowly, hoping with all my heart that just a tiny bit of brownie sticks to the bottom. And sure nuff, I get my fix the only way my conscience will let me. Contact high. Gotta love it.

I started taking sugar when I was just a little girl. I don’t even think it's altogether fair that I say “I started taking sugar…” because it was really given to me by my mother and aunts and grandmother. At four and five years old, nobody can blame me for taking it. I didn’t have a snowball's chance in hell of staying clean. Let’s just say I was a product of my environment, but I’ll take the rap because although it was my family who started me off, I had to take the responsibility if I wanted to beat the addiction. But beating sugar in today’s day and age is akin to refusing to watch television in a house where you can find a set in every room, and the show constantly playing is your favorite one. It takes a strong conviction and the fortitude of a wise sage. I didn’t have either, nor did I care to because the benefit of eating sugar outweighed any of the disadvantages. Or so I thought. Until one day, I, a young woman, queen of eye-liner and lip gloss, devout follower of magazine make-up tips articles and a fan of all the wonderful perks of womanhood, started growing the beginning of a beard.

It was a couple of months that I had been having strange symptoms leading up to my sugar intervention. After having moved back to my hometown following a divorce, I took comfort in the loving arms of sweet familiar decadence. Having been assuaged and assured in my childhood with lollipops and sweet rolls when my mother wanted to reward us or just have silence, I could think of no better way to get through my challenges than with a full supply of sugary, starchy and corn-syrupy packed goods to lessen the edge off the painful, lonely time I was faced with. When I arrived back in Buffalo, NY from New York City, I was a size 8 with a clear complexion and smooth, healthy-looking skin. By the third month of having eaten sugar with every meal, every cup of daily coffee and every snack, my face had become akin to a zit sanctuary. Bumps would come and refuse to leave despite dousing them with astringents, despite popping them with acute accuracy. I intuitively knew that it had to have something to do with my diet. But I just didn’t care. So I had a few bumps on my face. Who cares, I thought. As long as I’M happy with ME. That’s all that mattered. And with sugar, I was always happy… so long as you didn’t dig too deep.

My father was a bit of a health nut, so despite having been turned on to sugar by my mother, I still had a bit of conscience when it came to some things. Like, I was always a diet-coke kind of girl. No matter what, it made no sense to drink regular soda with all the extra calories and sugar, when I could have an equivalent drink in taste with far less sugar and caloric impact. But this logic soon was abandoned. I remember the day I made the switch from “I’d better get diet” to “I’ll have a cherry-coke with NO ice please”. I had been frustrated with my inability to fit a few pairs of pants and suit jackets before heading to work. I found a pair of pants I used to wear after I had my son that were a size 14 and lo and behold, they were loose! Ha! I actually had room to grow. The way my mind rationalized this is worthy of being studied by economists and sociologists. So, here I was. Moving from pretty dead on deluded territory of ordering my cheese Danish with a diet coke, to a less deluded, yet completely surrendered place— ordering my cheese Danish with full fledged coke. I call this territory I was in, “O.O.C.” or Out of control. I was walking on thin ice and my body was not doing well with it.

For a snack, I would buy a pack of Good & Plenty’s and Mike & Ike’s. I felt good eating those chewy little doo-dads. Even if just for the few moments I had when I was popping those little sweet tokens of joy into my mouth. I would savor the taste and give my body the level of sugar it was used to receiving. Folks around me began to notice some of the changes. Though I hadn’t been with a man since my divorce, my stomach was becoming round giving the impression that I was with child. A friend of the family asked me a question that I knew I deserved to be asked. “ Are you pregnant?” She asked. I said “No, I’m just getting fat, but thanks for the reality check.” Did that stop me. Yeah, I skipped desert that night. But the next day, I was right back on it. I had an orange scone for breakfast, and then bought another one and asked for the cook to put extra orange glaze on top. I was thoroughly O.O.C. but, I just couldn’t get a grip.

In month six, I got my period as usual, and 3 weeks later, I had another one. Since I was about 15, I was diagnosed as having cysts on my ovaries, like millions of other women. I was told through diet maintenance and exercise I can keep them from painfully breaking and growing. I was far off the track the doctor had set me on back then. So I figured, oh great, those cysts must be acting up again. So now I was having two periods every month, my face was breaking out, my body hair was getting more profuse and thicker, and to cap it off, my hair was thinning at my temples. My body was bloated and my energy level was null and void. I am an avid Googler and MD website surfer and I began to remember a condition I had learned about years before when I was researching polycystic ovaries. I Googled my symptoms and lo and behold, I was displaying nearly every symptom (except skin tags) that came with the condition of PCOS, Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome. I should have known. But when you have sugar as an outlet, a lot can get swept under the rug 'til something major happens to wake us up.

So here I was, having all the symptoms of a potentially devastating condition, and on top of it, I was consuming the one product that caused the condition to worsen. Sugar. My blood could have been used as a substitute for cherry Kool-Aid, and here I was finding out that a high diet of sugar and simple carbohydrates had set me on a downhill track with the finish line being diabetes, cancer and worse, death. I went to the cupboard, took the only box of cookies I had left, my favorite, Famous Amos—the ones with the chocolate chips and pecans, and ate one last cookie before I would throw the box away and begin a new life without sugar. But once I ate that one cookie, despite my best intentions, I couldn’t resist eating more. Of course with a complimentary logic to go with it of “okay so just finish off the box and then no more!” But that mentality is only a ploy for a sugar addict. And this is a fact for all sugar addicts, not just me. So don’t let them tell you any different. One hit, leads to two. Two to three and three leads to the whole box, maybe not now, but a sugar binge is always a tomorrow away. The next day I ate absolutely no sugar. The day after my utterly and completely no sugar day, I had to reward myself for accomplishing the extraordinary feat of not eating any sugar the day before. My reward was chocolate pudding with whip cream and brownie chunks. Utterly and completely O.O.C.

My seventh month of practically taking sugar every day had arrived and I was at work, contemplating how I was going to get the money for whichever bill was due this month. As I was thinking, I was unconsciously scratching at my lower jaw in one place in particular. I had been itching all over the side of my face, and on my chin, and there was one spot that just wouldn’t let up. My coworker, a handsome gentleman who always used to hit on me when I first arrived, but had ceased, surely due to my expanding size and reclusive ways I had adopted due to my sugar guilt from my inability to get sober, asked me a shocking question that I immediately took offense to. “Are you growing a beard?”. He asked, inquisitively. I felt as though I had been slapped. Due to having read so much about PCOS and the affects of the hormonal changes that impact the body when sugar is not controlled, I was on the defense. “What? No! Of course not. Why would you ask that? Why? Why, do you see a beard????” He looked surprised at my reaction. “No, no, not at all” he said, as I leaned my face towards him with my head tilted at an uncomfortable and inappropriately close angle to insure that he could inspect my face and give me a complete review of what he had seen. “Well, why’d you ask that then!” I demanded. “Just 'cause, that’s what I do sometimes when I’m growing a hair on my face that might be stuck and is trying to grow in.” He said. Well, I thought, that’s funny, I laughed, happy that he had seen no beard, and thrilled that my sugar habit had not taken me to the next level of physical abnormality. Stuck and trying to grow in… I thought about what he had said. And just to be safe, I decided it was the best decision, the most mature and responsible decision, and with the highest ounce of prevention, that I switch back to diet coke.

It was my eighth month of being back home, and I was feeling tired of numbing my pain with sweets. Not because I was tired of the sugar, that’ll never happen, however it just wasn’t working. And secondly I was getting sick of looking in the mirror seeing this new woman who just didn’t look like herself staring back at me with absolutely no answer to my question when I asked, who are you? Whereas previously, it only took a box of Good& Plenty’s and Mike& Ikes to satiate my sugar cravings when they hit, now it was an all day grazing process. Wake up, something sweet for breakfast at 7am, a snack at 10am usually comprised of a cookie or a bag of nut and raisin mix, followed by a lunch almost always with a bread or breaded product and a desert following like a Danish or cookie or donut or chocolate bar. Sometimes even two out of those options. And I would go on like this, all day, and increase my dosage of sugared or sugary products when I felt bored or was dealing with an emotional trigger event like a lack of money, or a lack of relationship, or a lack of space, or a lack of internal well being which I God forbid dare take a moment to reflect on lest I see that maybe my use of food and sugar as a consistent resort, was not as effective as oh, say, facing the problems and utilizing prayer or reflection or meditation to solve. No, I couldn’t possibly reflect on God, that would be yet another reason for me to get sugared out, only this time in order to feel better about how detached I was from Him.

As I applied my lip gloss, I was feeling weighed down, literally by the excess weight I had gained over the last eight months, but I especially felt like my soul was being smothered. I felt a sensation on the side of my face and something told me to turn on the second light near my mirror which I had begun to leave months ago, probably because the more light we have to see ourselves, the more of ourselves we can see, and I didn’t want to see me. But as I itched the side of my face, I had to see what was causing all that itching once and for all. I turned on the light and turned my head. A hair. No, two hairs. Long and straight, as if someone had placed two hair plugs on the sides of my face, half an inch apart. I turned even more and noticed that the usually fine light brown hair that barely covered my skin was now growing in dark, thicker and it didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what I was growing. I was growing a beard. I was frantic. I had let myself go for eight months straight. And now the effects of being OOC, had led me to need an SOS. This was the straw that broke the camels back. What I had neglected to care about before, the diabetes, the cancer, the weight gain, it all struck me in a real and not so future sort of way. I had to change, and I had to change at that very moment. Before I killed myself, and if that never happened, than I had to change myself before I got married again and had to share with my husband that a great way of having Quality Time was shaving our beards together.

I already knew what I needed to do. It was just a matter of doing it. Not trying. Not giving it a chance for a day, or a week. The time had come for me to agree with my father who always said, “There is doing, or there is not doing. There is no trying.” I emptied my purse of every random peppermint and sugar item that I usually kept a regular stock of in my side pockets. I traded the sugary foods I’d feed my body daily, for fruits and salads, proteins and legumes. I started back a habit I used to feel empowered by. Running. One day at a time, I told myself overwhelmed by the task at hand. I would pray in a staccato way usually, here and there, not making it a sincere priority in my life. I knew I wouldn’t be able to succeed at ridding myself of my sugar addiction and emotional eating to boot, if I didn’t have something greater to sustain me than what I had left. God was going to be my greater something. At the end of my eighth month, I stepped on a scale to see just how much weight I had gained, since I usually only acknowledged my body’s weight fluctuations through clothing size (I was a size 14), it wasn’t my habit to step on scales. But while visiting my grandmother in the hospital one day, I saw a scale in the hallway and figured, heck, why not. In the summer, before I came to Buffalo, I was a member of a gym, and my last weigh in with my trainer was at 165 pounds, with a height of 5 feet 10 inches. The scale was now at 200lbs. I had gained 35 lbs in eight months. And sugar is without a doubt, the culprit. Here I was now with an extra 35 lbs, to add to the same sadness, loneliness, and purposelessness I felt the day I began my eight month long sugar binge.

Eventually I know I’ll grow to the point where I won’t even want sugar. But until that day, I’m taking it one step at a time, taking in healthy foods for my body and seeing the results are a motivation in and of itself. So far my anti-sugar lifestyle has practically reversed all of my previous symptoms, and I feel great. Literally like I have enough energy to have my blood used as a secret source for some brand new energy drink. I’ve also added the healing habits of meditation, prayer and reading helpful literature to solve the problem truly, inside my soul. The answer must be, now and forever, no, when my body and my emotions say, “gimme some suga”. Cause life is so much sweeter without it.