Lisa Kotin - My Confection: Odyssey of a Sugar Addict

To my mom. And my dad.

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 Sees sucker. The classic, square kind. The kind that is so hard, no matter how long you lick it, it seems like it could last foreverthat is, unless you cant 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 clairs 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 wouldnt 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 mothers 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 Alzheimers to impairing the structure of your DNA. It doesnt matter if its high-fructose corn syrup or derived from an organic beet. Sugar is sugar. And my drug is everywhere. Its in everything. It can make anything taste better, Lustig claimed in a 2012 UC Berkeley lecture, even dog poop.

I dont know if what they are saying about sugar is true. All I know is what happened to me. Maybe one day Ill 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 doesnt 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

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&Ms, 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, theres little talk of eating disorders, but I know something is wrong. Nobody gets that I have a problem because Im nowhere near fat. Im 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 offand stingy, too, considering I only take a crap about once every two weeks. I dont want to have to crap. Its so menial. I dont want to have to pull down my pants and see that subtle but developing roll of womanly gut and those slightly wider thighs that didnt used to be there. I dont want to have to sleep. Or breathe. Or chew. A chiropractor told me I was full of shitliterallyand sold me a can of volcanic-ash shake mix for twenty-five bucks. I never tried it. Ill shit when Im ready. People always say that people with eating problems have no willpower. Im 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 dont just go to the darkest place. I live there. I own real estate.

I should be happy. Im 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 theres no money in mime. My parents are supporting me. But I really should be happy. I chose to be here. Ive 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. Its 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.