At the age of 45, I woke up. After grieving my mother’s death, I realized that my husband and I were unlikely to realize our dream of having children. Wondering what life had left to offer now that all of my parents were deceased and no children to raise, I embarked on a multi-faceted spiritual journey.
I knew God wanted more for me than drinking a bottle of wine and watching reality TV every night. I started studying A Course in Miracles, listening to a wealth of well-known spiritual teachers and meditating. I was waiting for God to give me a big mission that would get me off the sofa and back to life. Over and over I heard these teachers reference the spiritual nature of addiction recovery. After over 10 years of trying to control my drinking, I accepted I am alcoholic and got sober.
What happened next is nothing short of miraculous. After several months of relying on sugar in the absence of alcohol, being told that it was normal to crave it in sobriety, I embarked on a paleo-style sugar detox. After several weeks, I felt so good that I continued it. In my day job as an Alzheimer’s disease clinical trial coordinator, I worked on a trial testing ketones as a treatment for Alzheimer’s and learned about the ketogenic diet. I made the minor transition from paleo to keto and felt my brain healing. My sugar cravings disappeared. I started to experience side effects from the antidepressant I had been on for years and lowered the dose with my doctor’s support.
At 5 months of sobriety, a friend introduced me and my husband to a drug addicted woman wanting to put her baby up for adoption. Our son is now a thriving 6 year old. Only in learning to love myself and accepting my own addiction and could I have opened my heart to my son and his birth mother.
WHY I WANT TO HELP YOU
For me, sobriety from alcohol for almost 7 years has been a lot easier than sobriety from sugar. When I am off the sugar wagon, the negative internal dialogue and the mindless drive for sugar feels a lot like it did when I was drinking. I know enough alcoholics to know that I am not alone. I believe it is not a separate addiction, rather in many ways the same addiction with different, but still serious consequences.
I want to create a safe place where alcoholics and addicts that turn to sugar and other processed carbs in an alcoholic fashion can come together in fellowship and learn the role diet and nutrition play in our “isms.” I hope to guide others through the process of discerning how to eat in a way that allows us live happy, joyous and free.
THIS SITE
SugarSobriety.com will be a resource for anyone interested in understanding how what we put in our bodies affects our spiritual, emotional and overall well-being. You will find information on alcoholism, addiction, spirituality, and the ketogenic diet. Complete abstinence from sugar is not necessary for everyone or necessarily for the long-term. Rather, an understanding of sugar’s impact on your sense of spiritual connectedness, mood and well-being is the goal.
Michelle Herman
SugarSobriety.com