My Two Greatest Addictions - Part One

A couple of weeks ago I celebrated my three year anniversary of sobriety. You may have read about it in my most recent blog post titled Another Hurdle Cleared. Over the last three years I have talked and written about what I like to call my intentional choice of sobriety. I gave up decades of being a daily wine drinker with the intention of creating a different path forward for myself and my family. After years of including wine in my life on a daily basis, I decided that I was going to try to modify that pattern of behavior for my own health and well being and so that my daughter Emma did not grow up in a home where daily alcohol use was a normalized behavior. 

There are a plethora of reasons why it was a good idea for me to make the choice of intentional sobriety. I save tons of money that I no longer spend exploring new wines. I feel better in the morning because I sleep more restfully than I did when I still drank. My productivity levels, which have always been high, are even higher now because I don’t check out energetically every evening after my second glass of wine. That's just a small sample of the benefits I have experienced so far, but if I had to pick one thing as the most important reason why it was a good idea for me to give up drinking, it is this reason…

I am an addict. 

I have become addicted to pretty much everything I have liked or enjoyed in my life. I bought a pack of cigarettes from a vending machine at the Chatham grocery store with my buddy Karl before we were even teenagers and by high school I was smoking on a regular basis. I had my first beer at a party at my friend Brian’s house as a freshman in high school and before long, alcohol was woven into every aspect of my life. Coincidentally, I met a beautiful young lady at that same party who would become my first legitimate girlfriend, which led me to becoming addicted to having a lady in my life at all times. In fact, I have had a girlfriend or wife in my life non-stop for over 45 years. Another one of my friend’s dads used to bring home NFL parlay cards from his office. He would let us fill them out with our picks and then he would turn them in so we could try to win money in his office pool. 

Sex, drugs, alcohol and gambling are some of the most common addictions and I was exposed to all of them at a very early age, but I didn’t stop there. The way I am wired, I have a tendency to become addicted to pretty much everything that brings me pleasure in life, even simple things such as kite flying, windsurfing, bonsai cultivation and so many other things that I have obsessed over for a period of time in this lifetime. 

Eventually I began to rely on that pleasure to cope with the pain of my everyday life. Ultimately the novelty wears off and the thing becomes routine. Things that are physically addictive like nicotine and alcohol tend to stick around and become habits. Things that are short term fascinations like kite flying and bonsai cultivation slip away as memories of a hobby once enjoyed only to be relegated to boxes in the basement or the garage.

Martial arts, yoga, collecting baseball cards, cycling, personal growth work, public speaking, storytelling, men’s community work, you name it and I can become addicted to it. When I start to do something that sparks joy in me, I am all in! If I had to identify my two greatest overarching addictions in this lifetime other than nicotine or alcohol though, I would have to say that they are these two things…

Sugar and People Pleasing.

Before I share more of the story about my addiction to sugar and to people pleasing, this feels like a good time for me to elaborate on what I have learned about addictions in my many years of personal growth work and therapy. People who have addictive personality traits often have a number of characteristics in common:

• Desire for immediate gratification
• High levels of creativity that they need to find a way to express
• Comfort with secrets or lying
• Ease with risk taking behaviors
• Difficulty with self-regulation
• Attention Deficit Disorder diagnosis
• Early childhood trauma
• Exposure to drugs and alcohol
• Family history of addiction
• Impulsivity
• Mental health conditions like anxiety and depression
• Neuroticism or high levels of sensitivity or nervousness

If I had little check boxes by each of those, I would say that I would check nine out of the twelve boxes. I’ll leave it to you to guess which ones, but suffice it to say that I am not much of a daredevil, truth is very important to me and I am one of the most focused people I know. You can do the math from there if you like. 

So about that sugar addiction? 

How can one not be addicted to sugar? It tastes amazing! It creates a euphoric state and a burst of energy for a short period of time that can make one feel temporarily invincible. In some ways it’s a bit like cocaine except for the fact that you can buy it legally in a one pound bag for no more than a few dollars at any corner market instead of in little vials for hundreds of dollars from a guy named Gremlin at the Frat house. 

I’ve given up sweets for Lent many times in the past, but with sugar in pretty much everything we eat, it can be nearly impossible to avoid. If it weren’t for the fact that sugar is addictive and it can ruin so many aspects of one’s overall well being it would be one of nature’s more perfect foods. So what has sugar done to my overall health through the years you ask? 

Last year when we returned from our annual Thanksgiving weekend adventures to visit family in the Wisconsin Dells, I knew that something wasn't right inside me. I had recently engaged with a new wellness practitioner who had helped me identify an imbalance between my body's systems. After years of feeling out of sorts and not being able to drop below 200 pounds despite that fact I was two years sober and no matter how much effort I put into it, I knew something larger needed to change. Days before our departure to Wisconsin last year, my new functional medical practitioner shared her diagnosis with me. She suggested that all the little things that didn't seem to be quite right for me were tied to one main thing; my gut health, or lack thereof.

Far beyond the measures of cholesterol, blood glucose and all the other basic markers of health that many western doctors rely on are two other numbers that I had paid far less attention to through the years; testosterone and candida albicans. I'm guessing that all of you have heard about testosterone and that far fewer of you have heard about candida, but suffice it to say that my testosterone was too low and my candida levels were way too high.

Candida is a perfectly normal part of our digestive tract and even plays a role in maintaining gut health. When one has a candida overgrowth on the other hand, it can lead to significant health issues. A year ago when I had my bloodwork done, my candida levels were more than five times what is normal, suggesting that my candida infection was not just in my gut and intestines any longer, but that it had become systemic and had probably been there for years or even over a decade. 

My new wellness practitioner laid out a treatment plan, most of which was going to require me to go on one of the most specific nutritional cleanses of my life. I have done many cleanses through the years so I was no stranger to cutting out carbs, eating raw and organic or even doing liquids only for a period of time. What I had never done though was cut out ALL types of sugar for an indefinite period of time. Since this new nutritional protocol was going to require some significant lifestyle changes and it was the holidays, even my new doctor said that I should consider just cutting back and then switch to the sugar elimination diet after the New Year. 

I thought about it for a couple of days after we got back from the Dells last year, but ultimately decided that if I had been feeling crappy for years and I finally knew what the reason was, why should wait any longer to start to feel better just for the sake of a few Christmas cookies and a glass of eggnog or two?

So this past Monday I celebrated a different kind of sobriety. I celebrated my one year anniversary of eating a zero sugar diet. No treats. No sweets. No gluten. No grain. Nothing that either contains sugar or can be easily converted to sugar by the body. Candidiasis is basically a massive overgrowth of yeast in the digestive system. Just like when you are making bread, sugar feeds and activates yeast. Taking away the food source for my systemic yeast overgrowth would eventually kill it off entirely and gradually heal all my body’s systems. The results over the last year have been truly astounding. 

I have lost over 30 pounds. I have more sustained energy than I have had in decades. My skin has been the clearest it has been since my pre-teen years before acne. A brain fog that I had lived under without even noticing lifted in the first 90 days of no sugar. My total testosterone increased from the high 200s to over 500 even before I began to supplement. And perhaps most shockingly, my total cholesterol dropped from 260 to 180 all while eating a protein rich diet with lots of meat and eggs. Just like my functional medicine doctor predicted, my high cholesterol was a by-product of a liver that had been working furiously to clear out toxins from my systemic fungal infection for decades. 

Will I ever go back to eating sugar you ask? 

Using my three years of life without wine as a reference point, I would say that it is unlikely that I will ever again include regular sugar consumption in my daily life. I have worked too hard and come too far to risk becoming addicted again. That being said, I fancy the idea of having a bite of key lime pie or a sip or two of a great cabernet if I feel like I can trust myself to stay strong. Living a life without sugar and alcohol has required great effort, but it has been totally worth it for me, for my family and hopefully for many others. 

About that addiction to pleasing others? 

Stay tuned for part two where I will share more about how my work with my coach/teacher/therapist David Bedrick helped me learn not just to accept my addictive tendencies, but to embrace them as a superpower. That my friends, has been one of the greatest pieces of wisdom I have gained in this lifetime! 

Thanks for taking the time to read this all the way through. I know it was a long post, but it was too important a story for me not to share. As always, the number one purpose of my writing is as a form of therapy for myself. If it engages and inspires others then that is the cherry on top of the sweetest sundae I can imagine and for now, imagining that sundae is more than good enough for me!