My Confection: Odyssey of a Sugar Addict

190 Pages·2016·0.94 MB·English

by  Lisa Kotin

To my mom. And my dad.
CONTENTS
Preface

CHAPTER 1 Macroneurotics
CHAPTER 2 Up the Yin Yang
CHAPTER 3 Belly of the Beast
CHAPTER 4 Shrink Rap
CHAPTER 5 Let the Bingeing Begin
CHAPTER 6 I Take the Cake
CHAPTER 7 Cookie Monster
CHAPTER 8 The First Bite
CHAPTER 9 Will Work for Sugar (and Sex)
CHAPTER 10 My Art
CHAPTER 11 Walking Chocolate Bar
CHAPTER 12 On Broadway
CHAPTER 13 A Womb of My Own
CHAPTER 14 As You Don’t Like It
CHAPTER 15 Endgame
CHAPTER 16 Drama of the Gifted Child
CHAPTER 17 Cakewalk
CHAPTER 18 Psych Major
CHAPTER 19 Sugar Mountain
CHAPTER 20 Freefall
CHAPTER 21 Three Decades Later There Will (Still) Be Sugar
Acknowledgments
PREFACE
In a 2007 scientific experiment at the University of Bordeaux, in France, a group
of rats were placed in cages with two levers, one of which delivered an
intravenous dose of cocaine, the other a sip of highly sweetened water. At the
end of the trial, a rat was found to be 94 percent more likely to choose
saccharine over cocaine.
I am that rat.

I am three, just awakened from a nightmare and standing in my crib. I hold onto
the rail and cry for my mother, who has just returned home from shopping. As
she enters my room and approaches my crib, I reach for her, crying to be held.
She lifts her arm and, instead of hugging me, she hands me a chocolate See’s
sucker. The classic, square kind. The kind that is so hard, no matter how long
you lick it, it seems like it could last forever—that is, unless you can’t hold out
and just bite the damn thing into pieces.
But my sugar addiction started before I ever took my first bite. Before I even
had teeth. Rumor has it my mother lived on chocolate éclairs throughout her four
pregnancies. It must have quelled her nausea. Or something. While the sugar
gene skipped over my brother, my two sisters and I inherited it in utero. Once I
was born, the last of four kids in six years, my parents were so exhausted that for
a short time they actually rigged a bottle of sweet formula over my crib so they
wouldn’t have to get up for my 3 a.m. feeding. If I got hungry I could just open
my mouth and suck.
That my dad was a dentist had little influence on the amount of sweets
brought into our home. And I knew every corner in which to find them: In my
mother’s lingerie drawer. In the dark recesses of her fine leather pocketbooks.
The freezer. The pantry. The empty cottage cheese container I filled with candy
and stashed in my own underwear drawer. The Mason jar stuffed with candy
collected by me and my cousins for our clubhouse. As president and treasurer of
our little club, I felt entitled to dip into the collection as needed. Which was
often.
Growing up in the ’60s, we had no idea sugar would one day be considered a
toxic and addictive substance, just like tobacco and booze. Dr. Robert Lustig, a
pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, with a
special interest in childhood obesity, and author of Fat Chance: Beating the
Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, links sugar to heart
disease, hypertension, and many common cancers. In her book Suicide by Sugar,
Nancy Appleton claims sugar can contribute to everything from eczema and
Alzheimer’s to impairing the structure of your DNA. It doesn’t matter if it’s
high-fructose corn syrup or derived from an organic beet. Sugar is sugar. And
my drug is everywhere. It’s in everything. It can make anything taste better,
Lustig claimed in a 2012 UC Berkeley lecture, even dog poop.
I don’t know if what they are saying about sugar is true. All I know is what
happened to me. Maybe one day I’ll be able to eat a cookie. For today, one is too
many, a thousand are not enough.
This is the story of where my addiction took me once I left home for college
and careened into my twenties, with pieces of my early childhood and
adolescence thrown into the mix. It follows my trail of cookie crumbs from
macrobiotics to Overeaters Anonymous meetings to therapy to vitamins to men
to more therapy to more vitamins to more men and then . . . back home. Where
the fudge really hit the fan.
The story ends when I graduate eight years later (yes, eight years later). But an
addiction doesn’t die with a diploma, and so at the end of the book I bring you
into my life now. Which, despite all I now know about the ill effects of sugar,
and despite the plethora of sugar-free choices now available, still presents me
with a daily struggle to stay abstinent. Or, on the other side of the coin, a daily
opportunity to choose life. Because, while I never did find that one magic
medicine, or mantra, or man, or menu to make me whole, what I discovered
nearly three decades later is that I am not alone. That might be the greatest
discovery of them all.
CHAPTER 1
MACRONEUROTICS
I awaken after yet another night of debauchery. A bag of Pepperidge Farm
chocolate-filled Milano cookies, two sesame bagels with peanut butter, a bag of
peanut M&M’s, a pint of mint chocolate chip, and cheese. Lots and lots of
cheese. Real cheese, though. Not the fake Velveeta crap. I was raised in a health-
food house. I avoid junk food.
In the fall of 1978, there’s little talk of eating disorders, but I know something
is wrong. Nobody gets that I have a problem because I’m nowhere near fat. I’m
also not anorexic. Nor am I bulimic. The only explanation for my thinness is my
rocket-speed metabolism, my danceresque physique, and fasting after I binge.
Plus I worry. A lot. That must burn a few calories.
I clench my jaw, swallowing repeatedly to squelch the wall of nausea that
rises up the back of my head. My pupils pulsate, probably from all the fat, sugar,
and shit lodged in my gut. I have a cramp in my lower right side, a pocket of
pain that gurgles when I press down into it. It started after I left home three and a
half years ago, at seventeen, and began sugar bingeing. The family doctor called
it irritable bowel. He got that right. My bowels must be pissed off—and stingy,
too, considering I only take a crap about once every two weeks. I don’t want to
have to crap. It’s so menial. I don’t want to have to pull down my pants and see
that subtle but developing roll of womanly gut and those slightly wider thighs
that didn’t used to be there. I don’t want to have to sleep. Or breathe. Or chew. A
chiropractor told me I was full of shit—literally—and sold me a can of volcanic-
ash shake mix for twenty-five bucks. I never tried it. I’ll shit when I’m ready.
People always say that people with eating problems have no willpower. I’m the
willfullest fucker I know.
I tell myself I will quit bingeing when I get diabetes. I heard somewhere that
diabetes makes you dizzy, so after a binge I always roll my eyes around inside
my head to make myself dizzy so I can make sure it stops. Otherwise it might be
diabetes. Of course, my biggest fear is cancer. At this time no one is talking
about the cancer/sugar connection, but I have my suspicions. Or maybe I just go
to the darkest place.
Actually, I don’t just go to the darkest place. I live there. I own real estate.
I should be happy. I’m living my dream, rooming in an old farm house and
working with a professional mime troupe in a small New England town. Well
. . . semi-professional. Everybody knows there’s no money in mime. My parents
are supporting me. But I really should be happy. I chose to be here. I’ve already
dropped out of two colleges, worked with three performing arts programs, lived
in seven different cities, and only just turned twenty-one. For my birthday my
mom sent me twenty-five dollars. Cash. I spent every dime on sugar. Before
noon. Alone.
The only person who gets my problem is my sister Sarah. Fourteen months
my elder, Sarah has always been my higher power. My heroine. As my
Brooklynese father used to say, “If Sarah jumped owaf the Golden Gate Bridge,
Leeser would follow.” It’s true. I would put her in a needle and shoot her into
my arm if I could. Instead, I turn to sugar, and then to her to save me from it.
“I can’t stop bingeing!” I cry into the phone to my sister. She recently quit
sugar under the guidance of a hardcore Japanese healer. He put her on a strict
diet of brown rice and some putrid smelling medicinal teas, and her bladder
infections disappeared. Not a granule of sugar has crossed her lips since. “The
pain in my side won’t go away! I don’t know what to do!” Sarah tells me about a
macrobiotic study house in Boston. She suggests that I check myself into sugar
rehab so the food nazis can kick my ass and cure me. It will be macrobiotic
lockdown. No white flour. No milk products. No animal fat. No caffeine. And no
sugar. Those macros know sugar is the devil, even more than booze or
cigarettes. It’s the ultimate yin. Meat is the ultimate yang. In the middle of the
food scale is brown rice. Brown rice is like their god. Chew your rice, balance
your diet, and you can solve any problem, cure any pain. Your lover just dumped
you? You’re too yin. Eat root vegetables and red adzuki beans. Got a migraine?
Too yang. Try stewed apples with barley malt. Got heartburn? Lost your job?
Got a brain tumor? Find your balance. Chew your rice. Chew, chew, chew. As
for me, I am yin incarnate. If there was a macrobiotic dictionary and you looked
up “yin,” you’d see a picture of my face. A little frosting smeared on my lip.
It is lunchtime when I arrive in Beantown. Thank God. The sooner I get that
miraculous macrobiotic food into me, the sooner I will find salvation. I lug my
bags from the back of the cab and peer up at the austere, ivy-covered Tudor.
Good. This is just what I need. A severe, sober setting where I’ll be forced to get
my shit together. Or take a shit, with any luck.
I ring the bell and am greeted by Enid, a small, poker-faced gal with mousey-
brown hair. She’s as warm as cold rice. “Hi,” I mutter. “I’m, um, Lisa?”
“I know that,” she says looking slightly disgusted. “We’re expecting you.”
“Oh . . . great!” I say reaching for my bags. She stops me and points to my
feet.
“Remove your boots first,” she instructs. I learn it’s a house rule, to prevent
tracking in dirty snow, along with the bad vibes of the civilian, omnivore world.
I remove my boots and follow her through the dark, wood-paneled vestibule that
spills into a large, dimly lit dining room. There, about a dozen sallow-faced,
scrawny men and several beefier-looking women are seated on floor pillows
around a long, low, Japanese-style dining table. There is no conversation. Just
the steady sound of chewing, the occasional chopstick gently tapping the side of
a bowl, and the sporadic smacking of lips.
Enid leads me to the end of the table where her husband, Marty, sits crossed-
legged, chewing away. When I called to reserve a space in the house, I told
Marty about the sugar and the side pain. He said he was sure macrobiotics could
help. I hope he’s more welcoming than the wife. “This is Lisa,” she flatly states,
then zombies off.
“Welcome!” Marty says and motions for me to sit across from him. “Please!
Sit!” He reminds me of a younger version of my dad—only with hair. And
enlightened. Taking my seat, I am amused by the juxtaposition of this gruff,
frizzy-headed, obviously—I assume—ex-Brooklyn Jew sitting cross-legged,
chomping open-mouthed on the allegedly sacred food. He should be eating
bagels and lox, wiping cream cheese from his lip with the back of his sleeve.
Enid returns to slide an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks before me and
Marty gestures to the bountiful spread. “Please! Ga-head!” There are platters of
brown rice, dark-red beans, and vegetables. Squash, to be exact. Green and
yellow, steamy, watery squash, the gag-worthy legume I always feel pressured to
savor as a vegetarian. I loathe squash. In fact, I can’t stand most vegetables.
When you’re full of sugar, the last thing you want are vegetables. I wish I
wanted to eat them, like my sister Sarah. If I eat like her, I think, maybe I can be
like her. When she went vegetarian at age ten, I followed right behind. My mom
took a vegetarian cooking class to accommodate us. My dad suffered through
multiple lentil-cheddar loaves and carrot-raisin salads. “This health food is
killing me!” he loved to say. He never recognized my vegetarianism. Sarah got
all the credit. If we went out to dinner, he’d gloat to the waitress, “My dawter’s a
vegetarian. It takes great discipline, you know.” I wanted to put my face in his