Confessions of a Sugarholic
by Steve McGill

My addiction started before I even knew it had started. As a young boy of four or five years old, visiting my grandmother’s house in West Philadelphia during holidays, where she baked apple pies loaded with sugar. They were soooooo good. During dinner time growing up, the main course was always followed by dessert. Sometimes my mom would make chocolate cake with vanilla icing, or marble cake, or pound cake, or apple cake, or applesauce cake, or apple pie with ice cream. There are probably more that I’m forgetting. Of course, growing up in the Philly area, the go-to snack choices were the various TastyKake products. My favorites were the Butterscotch Krimpets, the Koffee Kakes, and at the top of the list were the Chocolate Juniors. And always, donuts of all kinds were a constant presence, as Mom would buy a dozen every time she went grocery shopping. I loved the jelly-filled and the cream-filled ones, but constantly had to fight my older siblings for them.

Throughout my life, sugar snacks have been an integral component of my diet. Besides the items above, I’m all about some pastries and danishes. If I eat dinner at Olive Garden, I’m all about the strawberry cheesecake for dessert. If I go to a sub shop, I’m all about the chocolate chip cookie for dessert. If I go grocery shopping with wifey, I’m bound to throw some oreos into the cart. However, for the vast majority of my life, I never considered my love of sweets an addiction. No matter what I ate, I could always run it off. As a senior in high school, I stood 5-11 inches tall and weighed 165 pounds. In college I bulked up to 175, but that was ten pounds of muscle from working out in the weight room regularly.

Besides, eating donuts and chocolate chip cookies didn’t constitute an addiction. I mean, who doesn’t like a sweet treat every now and then. Alcoholism, now that’s an addition. A drug habit, that’s an addiction. Smoking cigarettes, that’s an addiction. Alcoholism and drug abuse ruin lives, tear apart families. Cigarette smoking can lead to multiple types of cancers besides the fact that it funks up the air and makes everything smell like smoke. But eating sugar snacks doesn’t ruin lives, eating sugar snacks doesn’t tear apart families. Eating sugar snacks doesn’t funk up the whole room.

I didn’t begin to think of my habit as an addiction until I tried to stop. It was sometime around 2004-05, when I started to embrace distance running as a means of replacing sprinting and hurdling, as those activities had become way too taxing on my muscles and limbs. I was around 38 years old at the time, and weighed about 185 — ten pounds heavier than my college weight but I was still in pretty good shape. But as I started to really get into distance running, 185 felt too heavy. I started running 5K’s and 10K’s and was really enjoying it. The next summer, after the school year ended, I made it a point to discipline myself when it came to the sugar snacks so that I could drop time in the road races. For that whole summer, I limited myself to one sugar snack per day — a Nutty Buddy, which is a time of ice cream cone with a sugar cone. Other than that, I snacked only on fruit — oranges, tangerines, grapes, bananas. My weight dropped throughout the summer, and the runs benefitted, as I felt lighter on my feet. I could run farther with less effort. Within a month I was back down to my college weight, and within another six weeks I was all the way back down to my high school weight of 165. 

One day I happened to see the mother of one of my former athletes in Target, and I looked so thin compared to the last time she had seen me that she asked me if I was sick! But I wasn’t sick at all. I felt great. I was running seven miles a day on weekdays and going for longer runs on the weekends. I wasn’t even bothering with 5K’s anymore, but just 10K’s and half-marathons. 

For the next eight years or so, I returned to my sugar-snacking ways, but I was running so much that it didn’t matter. My weight settled around 170-175 and stayed there. I still felt great on all of my runs and ended up running two full marathons (I hit the wall in both of them, but that’s another story for another day). 

Then in 2012-13, when I was 45-56, I was hit with two major life-changing disasters in consecutive years. First, one of my former athletes committed suicide. He and I were still very close and the loss devastated me. Then a year later I lost my teaching job after teaching at the same school for nineteen years. Though I continued to run, my sugar-holism increased. Two years later, when I found a new job in a different part of the state, I started to run less and snack more. That trend continued for the next few years until I fell hopelessly out of shape, and put on so much weight that I stopped looking at the scale. One of my memories from that time period was my penchant for keeping a box of Cap’n Crunch by my bedside.

The Covid quarantine period was actually a period of rejuvenation for me. Because classes were online, and didn’t start until 9am, I could go for a walk in the park every day for those last months of school in 2020, and into the summer. Yes, I was reduced to just walking because I was too out of shape to run. I dabbled with cutting out the sugar snacks during that period, but never enough to make real progress in my conditioning.

Last year, the 2022-23 school year, was a year when I essentially gave up. On the outside, everything was great. I was an extremely popular teacher among my students, I became famous when two of my students raised money via a GoFundMe campaign that sent me to the Super Bowl, and I had a lot of success coaching both with the school team and with the athletes I coached privately. But I was so busy with teaching, coaching, and being everything for everybody that I just stopped walking altogether and returned to my sugar addiction full-on, with my go-to’s now being chocolate chip muffins.

By the end of the school year last year, I decided I was going to walk every day during the summer, no matter what. And I did so. And I did regain some of the conditioning I had lost. But I didn’t change my eating habits until the end of the summer, about a month ago, and that’s when I felt the weight coming off again. Dress shirts that had become too small for me by the end of last year now fit again. Instead of my belt being on the fourth loop, it’s back down to the third loop. It was on the second loop when I first moved here, so my goal is to get back to the second loop. When it comes to snacking, I’m back to fruit again — bananas and oranges. In only four or five weeks without my usual sugar snacks, I’m already seeing significant improvement in my conditioning. 

During the summer I was up to about five miles a day on my walks. Toward the end of the summer I started mixing in some jogging in my walks. Last Sunday I went to a track to measure my progress with a 2-mile time trial, with the goal being to jog at least half of it. I was able to jog the first three laps without walking; and, the rest of the way, I jogged half a lap, walked half a lap. My goal is to get to a point where I can jog a mile without stopping to walk, to eventually build up to two miles, and from there, who knows? Just keep progressing. The first time I tried a time trial, about a month earlier, before I had cut out the sugar snacks, I could only go one lap without stopping to walk. I can look back now and realize that the death of my former athlete and the loss of my job led to a sort of slow depression that led me to lose my motivation to stay active, and led me to rely on the muffins, donuts, etc. as comfort food.

So yes, diet does matter. Eating too much sugar does slow you down. And yes, absolutely yes, sugar is addictive, so it’s important to be disciplined. I’ve found that out the hard way.