Excerpted from

The Sugar Addict's Total Recovery Program

By Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.

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Are you a sugar addict? Have you ever wondered why you love sweet foods so much? Does chocolate run your life more than you want to admit? Do you joke about being a '"sweet freak"? Does it ever scare you to feel so compulsive about wanting sugar? The questions listed below will help you understand what it means to be a sugar addict. When I say "sweet foods," I mean coffee or tea with sugar, cookies, cakes, candy, cereal, soda, ice cream, sweet rolls, energy bars, lattes iced with syrups, chocolate, or any food that you know is sweetened with sugar, honey, or artificial sweeteners.

Have you ever tried to cut down or control your use of sweet foods?

Have you ever picked a certain day and said, "Starting Monday I am not going to have chocolate"?

Have you ever been secretly delighted when you are out to dinner and your friends order dessert and urge you in join them?

Are you using more sweet foods than ever before?

Have you ever realized that you used to get one Butterfinger candy bar, but now you buy three at a time.

Do you find yourself stopping at the convenience store for bread and milk and M&M's?

If you don't have your regular "dose" of sugar, do you get irritable and cranky?

Have you ever been in a meeting at work and found yourself unable to pay attention to the agenda because you are thinking about your afternoon double latte?

Have you ever been frantic when you arrive at your friends' house for the weekend to discover they have no sweets in the house and you have no car?

Have you ever gotten upset when someone ate your special food?

Have you ever felt silent rage and panic when you have gone to the refrigerator for the last of the cream pie and discovered someone had eaten it?

Have you ever kept a stash of chocolate in your underwear drawer and been horrified when your daughter found it?

Are you unable to keep a stash anywhere because you eat it first?

Have you ever lied about how much sweet food you eat?

Have you ever told your kids you don't know where the last box of Girl Scout Thin Mints is when you know you ate them and put the box in the bottom of the trash?

Have you ever said, "I don't know what happened to it" when you know perfectly well you ate it?

Have you ever gone out of your way to get something sweet?

Have you ever gone far out of your way to stop at the coffee shop for your favorite drink and sweet roll?

Have you ever chosen a restaurant based on the quality of its desserts even though it's an hour's drive away?

Have you ever binged on sweet or white flour foods?

Have you ever told yourself you were going to have just a bite of ice cream and ended up eating the whole quart all by yourself?

Have you ever gotten a special cake for the potluck on the weekend and ended up eating the whole thing yourself?

Have you ever felt you had a sugar hangover?

Have you ever crawled through the morning with a headache and crankiness that is immediately relieved when you have something sweet?

Is it impossible to "just say no" to sweet foods?

Do you feel inordinately relieved when you finally get your sweets?

Have yon ever made a cover noise like coughing, singing, or humming while you opened the cabinet door to get your sweets?

Is sugar controlling your life?

Are you ashamed and fearful that you will always be out of control?

Would you be horrified to have your friends know how you answered any of these questions?

If you answered yes to two or more of the questions in boldface, you are probably a sugar addict. You are reading the right book. If you answered yes to all the questions, you have come home to the right place! While you may not let yourself admit openly to these secrets, you know they are true. You know that you have hidden candy wrappers under the trash so no one would know you had eaten another. You know you have sneaked cookies before the family came home so they wouldn't know who ate the last ones. You know you have lied, cheated, and stolen for your "drug" of choice. These are signs of addiction, but until now you may not have let yourself think about applying these words to your relationship to sugar.

I understand how powerful these feelings are. I would have answered yes to every question in my sugar days. I am a sugar addict like you, but now I am in recovery from my sugar addiction. This recovery has saved my life, and I want to share with you the solutions I have found. I have deep compassion for what you are dealing with and want to bring you the healing and radiance that my recovery has given me.

My father was an alcoholic and died of alcoholism when I was only sixteen. I grew up with all the classic symptoms of being the child of an alcoholic. I had to stop drinking in my early twenties, but I still had a powerful interest in sweet things. I needed them. I planned my life around them. I kept a supply, got upset if someone ate my goods, and knew the best places to get my "drugs." Even though until recently other people discounted the idea of a sugar addiction similar to an addiction to alcohol or drugs, I knew better, I knew my addiction to sweets was running my life.

At first, though, I thought the primary problem was my weight. I sincerely believed that if I just lost weight, everything would be okay. But over time, I came to see that the story of my weight was far bigger than just too many pounds - it was part of the story of my sugar addiction. I didn't realize it, but my sugar addiction was associated with my mood swings, depression, fatigue, fuzzy thinking, PMS, impulsivity, and unpredictable temper. I had no idea that all these things could be connected to what I was eating. After all, I was just eating sugar, not using heroin or alcohol.

I finally came to understand my own addiction through my professional work with addicts and alcoholics. I moved to California in the mid-eighties after an active career in public health, looking for a way to continue my long-standing commitment to helping others. Eventually I started and became director of an alcohol and drug treatment center, not then understanding how that would shape my own need for recovery.

Unaware that addiction treatment historically had at best a 25 percent success rate, I almost immediately became concerned about the lack of success we were having in our treatments. Six months after we began the center, I started looking for variables that might improve treatment outcomes. Initially, I looked at the issues that have traditionally been thought of as important in treatment: length of time in treatment; skill of the counselor; group versus individual work; twelve-step program involvement. None of them seemed to have any particular impact on our clients' ability to stay clean and sober.

During this time, I had changed my own eating because I wanted to lose weight. I had started on a diet that was very similar to what you will be reading about in this book: no sugar, moderate amounts of complex carbs, more protein, and regular meals. The results stunned me. Not only did I lose weight, I felt incredible. My cravings went away. My mood swings disappeared. I felt focused and clear and excited about life. I stopped feeling compulsive about food and sweets. These changes convinced me that something more than weight loss was going on. I had dieted before but had never felt like this. This felt like recovery. As a result, I got really interested in the relationship between diet and addiction.

I started to ask my clients about their diets as well as their patterns of drinking and using. While my clients were drinking or using, few of them cared about sweets. As soon as they got sober, however, their interest in sweets and refined carbohydrates like bread and pasta skyrocketed. The more they had, the more they wanted. Although many were sober, they still acted addictively toward their sweets. Their behavior resembled their old drinking patterns.

They continued to be moody, impulsive, and irritable even though they had stopped drinking. Historically, these behaviors have been attributed to detoxification from alcohol or a slate called a dry drunk. Because of my own experience with diet and mood, however, I suspected they stemmed from something biochemical. My clients were eating in the same way I had been eating. We had the same moods and emotional symptoms. Maybe, I thought, we shared a similar brain chemistry. Maybe we all were sugar addicts.

During this same time, seemingly by chance, I came across an article in an obscure journal that made a connection between alcoholism and sugar. The article suggested that there could be a correlation between diet and the ability to achieve sobriety. Because of my own personal history and what I was seeing with my clients, I intuitively felt that this connection had to be true and thought it might even be the link I sought for improving treatment outcomes in our clinic.

I followed my intuition. Drawing on my own experience, I developed a food plan for my clinic clients. When they followed the food plan, the number of people getting and staying clean and sober increased dramatically. During this same period I also maintained a private practice helping people make life changes. While the clients at the clinic were predominantly alcoholic men, my private clients were mostly overweight women who were depressed, dealing with mood swings, chaos in their lives, and low self-esteem.

I started to ask them, too, about what they ate, which surprised them. After all, they were there to talk about what they fell, not about what they ate. I was floored to discover that their diets were very similar to the way I had been eating before I changed my diet. They skipped meals, ate huge amounts of carbohydrates, and basically lived on sugar. But they were willing to try almost anything to get better, even if they had to change what they ate and when they ate it.

As my private clients began to use the same food plan I had developed for the clinic, they experienced the same miraculous turnaround my clinic clients and I had: their depression lifted; they got clear, focused, and purposeful; and many lost weight. All were excited by the changes they experienced with what we called "doing the food."

Tags: Nutrition