ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 297: A Sugar Addict

In these past two years I’ve eaten lots of chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies, coconut mounds, peanut-butter cups, and chocolate eclairs. My staple, though, for months and months, has been semi-sweet chocolate morsels.

A few months ago, as I watched my hand pick up yet another bag of semi-sweets from the grocery shelf — my second bag that week — I thought to myself: This is my dope. This is my cocaine. I have to stop this. It’s no good for my teeth or my body. And I eat too many at a time. It makes me feel stuffed, heavy. I feel guilty.

So I stopped buying the semi-sweets . . . for a week or so. Then I bought a jar of Nutella, a blend of chocolate and hazelnuts that goes down like smooth whiskey. I finished that small jar, then bought another. Then bought a big jar. Then another. I cadged spoonsful between sips of tea — anytime, really, that I told myself I needed a pick-me-up, either physically or psychically.

Jesus, this is how addicts behave. They give up . . . correction — I give up . . . one thing only to take up another that’s equally harmful or beyond my control. Sugar and chocolate are becoming another one of my addictions. Yes, I’m powerless before a jar of Nutella.

A few days ago I threw out an unfinished jar of Nutella. I’m now limiting myself to cups of cocoa I fix with skim milk and only a little sugar. If I want something sweet — and I often do — I spread orange marmalade or strawberry jam on whole-wheat toast. I think of European wine drinkers; they don’t drink their wine — made from grapes at their roundest, sweetest, most succulent moment — without accompanying it with food.

Ellen Gilchrist talks of sugar in an early chapter of The Writing Life. When she consumes sugar, “my blood-sugar levels rise dramatically and insulin has to rush and get rid of the sugar. My body is so good at this that it gets rid of all the sugar in my blood and I am savagely hungry for more of the source of the sugar.”

Alcohol is a highly concentrated form of sugar, Ellen writes, and most alcoholics are hypersensitive to sugar. So the alcoholic has a drink, which sets up an insulin overreaction, which sets up a craving for another drink. More sugar, really. And on and on. Never enough.

When I first read her chapter on sugar, I didn’t buy it. Then I thought of Ernie. He’d dump teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into a cup of hot tea. If I offered to bring him a cup of tea, he’d call out: “Be sure to put enough sugar in it.” All day long he drank this tea-flavored sugar water.

Ernie was a hypersensitive man. His body had big reactions to sun, to water, to bee stings, to penicillin, to what went on around him, to people and their comments. Why wouldn’t his body be hypersensitive to sugar?

Alcoholics know that one drink is too many and a hundred drinks are not enough. For me, one tablespoon of Nutella is too many, and a dozen are not enough. So . . . keep those far jars of Nutella out of my kitchen!