I feel so awful today.  I haven't had any dessert since Thursday.  It's killing me today.  I want it so bad.  I've been eating other stuff I shouldn't, trying to fill the void, I know.   But no dessert today… the sugar I crave like a drug.  I just want to cry at how hard it all seems sometimes.  I know it's not.  Real life is hard.  Disease, poverty, despair.  Real issues.  Real pain.  This is addiction.  And yet it consumes everything.  It is the only thing that exists.  Nothing else does.  Just the drug of choice.  When can you get it, how do you feel once it's in, when can you have it again.  When it gets bad, everything else falls away.  You function less and less well as time goes on.  At first you maintain it all, no one really knows.  Then the cracks come.  Then the holes.  The holes are developing around me.  I've gained 50% of my body weight in the last 9 years.  I just get by at work, I don't really excel anymore.  My house is a mess.  I haven't showered today.  I'm exhausted.  My family's not taken care of.  I'm a wreck.  I need help.

I met a friend for dinner Friday night.  We talked for 4 hours.  When I left I felt like my old self, on top of the world or at least headed in that direction, much closer to gaining control again.  She was so honest with me.  Look at you, I remember when you were an athlete, you worked out everyday, I used to admire you so much.  And when you went back to college and earned a whole new career while being a mom and a wife, wow I really looked up to you.  What's happened to you?  You don't want to keep going down this road, you're killing yourself.  You're miserable.  The anti-depressants don't help.  And you're just letting your life pass you by now.  You have to change.  You can do this.  You can get it all together again, I'll help you. 

Yesterday I was still riding the high of that conversation, feeling no need for sugar, thinking maybe I could even cancel the appt I made with the eating disorder therapist and get it all together on my own.  But I can't.  I don't know what's wrong with me.  Or how to get back to who I used to be.  All I want to do is go sit down with a package of some kind of sugar.  My entire being is screaming for it and my soul cries from the struggle of resisting it. 

A doctor told me once that children of alcoholics who avoid alcohol often find themselves having a problem being addicted to sugar because they have a very low supply of certain chemicals in their brain.  These chemicals bind to receptors, but the receptors in a person with a low natural supply of these chemicals don't get stimulated much.  The first alcoholic drink of a person like this fills that void.  Floods these receptors, causing a crazy reaction normal people don't feel because their receptors have always been stimulated an adequate amount.  So these receptors now know what it feels like to be so stimulated and they want that again and again.  But of course the body can't supply it on its own… so it craves what can… the alcohol.  He said sugar will fill the same void.  If you're genetically pre-dispositioned to be an alcoholic, have these lack of chemicals in your brain, and you don't drink, you'll often get hooked on sugar instead.

Also why depression and alcoholism or sugar addiction often go together.  The same lack of chemicals.   It's all interrelated.  The alcohol is a way to self-medicate for the depression caused by the lack of chemicals, but it makes the situation worse, deepening the depression, deepening the need for more alcohol.  The cycle continues, spirals out of control. 

Have I talked long enough?  Talked my way out of going to the kitchen and making up some brownie batter that will never see the oven or grabbing the car keys and going for some chocolate?  Ah hell, who am I kidding.  SOME chocolate? 

I think I made it.  For now.  I'm gonna go get a shower.