Hello, I’m Leilanie and I’m a sugar addict.

There, I’ve said it! The cat is out of the bag! Admitting something is the first step to recovery. So, shall we have a dialogue about it? I’d like to. Sugar addiction is very real, though not treated nearly as seriously as drug or alcohol addiction. But heart disease, diabetes, cancer and numerous other ailments that are a result of sugar addiction are very serious. Yet there is no stigma about it. It isn’t treated as taboo. People would not offer a recovering alcoholic a beer, but would happily offer a sugar addict a cake. Why? Because sugar is socially accepted.

There is a world of difference between having a sweet tooth and a full blown sugar addiction. I am one of the latter folks, sadly. For me, this means bingeing on chocolate, cake and starchy foods to get a ‘high’ then feeling guilty. Recently I have started my former bad habit of secretly bingeing in the hope that no-one sees. You see, if no-one sees then it didn’t happen. Doesn’t make sense, does it? No. But then addiction doesn’t.

To date I have found no cure for my sugar addiction. I think about junk food ALL the time. I think about my next snack while I’m already eating. I try to justify decisions to buy sweets or reasons why I had to eat all the desserts in the cupboard. Is this a problem? Yes, a big one. Is it an eating disorder? Yes, I would say so even if conventional advice would disagree. At my worst last year I had food blackouts and legitimately did not know why whole multi-packs of biscuits were missing from the cupboard when I knew I had bought them.

So folks, I’m now back on keto as I did last year, though this time not for weight loss but to short-circuit my increasingly desperate need for a sugar fix. It’s the only thing that suppresses my appetite. I’m planning to come off low carb/keto when I can trust myself to not eat an entire box of delicious salted caramel Lindor chocolates in 10 minutes as I did yesterday…😱 Wish me luck!