Confessions Of A Sugar Addict

How much pie is acceptable to eat in one sitting? In one day? Because I’m pretty sure I crossed the line on both counts.

Hi, I’m Kelli Beck and I’m a sugar addict.

After a twelve-day work week, thirty-one hours of overtime, and a taxing midweek mental breakdown, some much-deserved R&R was on the agenda for the weekend.

Thus began The Great Sugar Binge of 2014.

It started on Thursday, my husband’s birthday. My mom dropped off a big bowl of candies: a bag of snack-sized Snickers, a sleeve of snack-sized Snickers, a bag of Snickers bites (I bet you can’t tell what my husband’s favorite candy bar is), a bag of peanut M&M’s and a bag of peppermints.

Thursday night both the peanut M&M’s and the Snickers bites were devoured betwixt the two of us. When Friday showed up we celebrated a hard-worked week by eating gas-station pizza, the sleeve of Snickers, and for good measure we popped open the big bag of Snickers as well. What was going to be a night of junk food and a marathon of terrible 80s horror films turned into a sugar crash that took us both out by 8PM.

I woke up on the couch at 8:30AM, the debris from our candy-bar massacre spilled out across the coffee table. I got up, threw away the wrappings, and my eyes fell upon a glowing box of breakfast wondertude. I stood stunned, salivating at the promise of a gloriously sweet breakfast of champions: the peanut-butter Pop-Tart.

I knew I shouldn’t. As a reformed sugar-holic, I know the slippery slope of sugar surrender. I’ve been down this path before and it leads to menace and mayhem—to sugar crashes darker than any narcoleptic nook I’ve ever seen before.

I hadn’t even finished weighing the pros and cons before I was back on the couch shoveling the sweet trickster down my gullet and gluing my eyes to the telly where some children were being taught a valuable lesson about the consequences of killing your family and starting a creepy corn cult.

To solidify my fate as a full-blown sugar addict once more, I got off the couch and changed into my pajamas. That’s right, kids, I fell asleep at 8PM on a Friday night. Not only did I go to PJ City when I should have been in the shower and gearing up for my day—I did so at noon. Then I traveled to my mother’s house where we chatted, watched a movie, and consumed a(nother) bag of peanut M&M’s. When I left, my gracious mother handed me a homemade coconut cream pie to take with me. My bleary sugar-high eyes were spinning in their sockets. I had just hit the jackpot.

Which brings us to Sunday, and the question posed at the beginning of this post. I’m going to be honest with you here because, well, why stop now? When confessing about a dark hour spent in the throes of addiction it’s best to go balls to the wall, isn’t it?

I ate a sensible breakfast. Really. No sugar added. The midmorning snack was where things started rolling. Around 9:30AM I cut into that coconut cream pie. Twice—because if your piece of pie does not equal a quarter of the pie, then there’s no point in even eating it at all.

I watched Harry Potter and delighted in the smooth creamy taste of coconut enveloped in silky custard atop a buttery, crisp, flaky dough baked to perfection. There was even chocolate in that pie. Just a little bit, enough of a hint that I considered going back for just. One. More. Piece.

But I didn’t. I waited. I continued my sloth-like Sunday by snacking on a couple Snickers bars, lunching on Ramen noodles and cheese, and it wasn’t until about 2:30 that I went back for another piece. This one was even larger than the first, because my husband said to save him a piece. Just one would do him fine. And that’s what I did. I saved him just one-quarter of the pie-sized piece, of course.

It’s safe to say that I missed family dinner on Sunday. When my husband returned from his weekly football fun day, he brought with him a pumpkin roll his sister had baked from scratch.

I told him he was crazy to bring that delicious whipped-cream-covered treat into the house after all the pie I’d eaten! How dare he! I wouldn’t eat it that poison. Not even one bite.

But he left me alone for more than five minutes and the pumpkin roll called out to me. I answered the call somewhat hesitantly, but by the time Raymond made it back into the living room I had devoured the whole thing. Because I’m a junk-food junkie, and that’s just what I do.

So how much pie is too much pie? Certainly three-quarters is too much. Much too much, considering pie was only part of the story. This next week will find me on good behavior. Nary a crumb nor morsel of sugar-laden snack will pass my lips until I learn a little self-control.