Nervewracking: A Tale of Sugar Withdrawal

Jackhammers thudded into the cement outside my office window with a bone-jarring intensity. My head had started to hurt even before getting to work, but this was almost laughable in its assault on my sugar-withdrawing body. In the last five days, it had felt as though my nerve endings were just too close to the surface. Everything seemed to be a colossal effort to accomplish, and my patience with everyone was also pushed to the Nth degree. That morning I had considered getting rid of my two dogs, who insisted on barking and jumping up on me with wet paws from the freshly rained-upon yard.
Not everyone has such extreme withdrawals from sugar, but I have always been super-sensitive to the stuff. When I eat sugar, it is far more soothing to me than the average person. And the next day, I have sick headaches and my energy level suffers unless I have a little “hair of the dog” and eat more sugar, or ride it out for three days of withdrawal.
But this was worse. It was a more complete withdrawal since I was also avoiding white flour and other refined carbs, so my body was reacting at a cellular, emotional and spiritual level. It was not happy. Physically it had become dependent on getting endorphine bursts from the carbs, and had gotten lazy about producing its own sense of well-being without an artificial source.
Emotionally, I was struggling with feelings of unfairness and grief over losing my closest friends, ones who had been there for me when others seemed too busy with their own lives. My friend food had turned on me though, and was now threatening my health. This was what I needed to focus on, I told myself. Not on the cultural obsession with thinness. Not on the distorted value we force on women to be a certain size or shape. It really was a health issue for me. If I did not lose some weight, the stress on my knees was certain to put me in a wheelchair within the next 10 years, I was sure.
But fear is not a good foundation for any project, behavior change, or new perspective on life, so my acceptance of this much-needed change hinged on moving to a spiritual level. I needed God’s grace to stick with my plan. I needed an awareness of God’s love for me that transcended what I looked like, forgave me for treating my body so recklessly over the years, and reassured me when I felt completely alone without my former best friend. And most importantly, I needed a transformative change in my personality that I knew was possible from getting sober in Alcoholics Anonymous – a change that had completely eliminated my desire or need to drink.
Had I simply switched addictions, and therefore not really experienced transformative change? It was not so simple. Seeking the high that alcohol produced seemed to come from a very different place in my psyche. It was more social, more motivated in feeling competent and successful. It was not the survival-based sense I got from food that the word was safe, and I was going to make it another day.
This probably sounds pretty melodramatic, but think about it. Food is about as basic as you can get. The instinct to eat comes to us almost immediately after we are born. Disrupt that instinct in a baby, and you get a pretty distressed baby, perhaps even one who is afraid for her life.
And so my addiction to food probably goes so much more deeply than that to alcohol that I am dealing with more deeply-embedded spiritual needs. After 23 years of being without alcohol, and the spiritual and emotional work I have done, perhaps now I can begin to tackle this more insidious and pervasive addiction to food.
If the jackhammers weren’t pounding, literally, outside my window. If crazy people would quit speaking their craziness as though it were truth. If dogs would quit being so jumpy and barky, and if computers at work would quit being so finicky. If life would just be easy and effortless and unfold miraculously. Okay, maybe there’s hope for that last one, but waiting until everything is perfect is one of the procrastination methods my disease has always used to put off doing the healthy thing I need to do. That disease would prefer it if I was dead, or at least immobilized by the intake or behavior of one of my addictions.
So I need to get into the spiritual response to the nerve-jarring, impatient, grief-stricken frame of mind I am in. “Holy Jesus, I take delight in you love,” I pray, using the words of one of my favorite prayers, even though I cannot feel their truth through the edginess. “Increase my faith in that love that I may let go of all depression and worry,” I continue from the prayer, which is a paraphrase of something Julian of Norwich wrote. What if I so completely believed in that love, so fully allowed myself to be embraced in that love that I could let go of the need for food to give me the assurance that God offers? I cannot imagine such a faith at this point; I can only act as if I do.
And so I show up one more day, today with jackhammers and malfunctioning internet, and offer myself hopefully to life: nerves on edge, lonely and in grief. A food addict in recovery. Just for today.