Don’t Lose Hope if You Fall Off the Sugar-Free Wagon

It was After Eight chocolate dinner mint candies that did me in the first time.

That’s how it worked. I realized I had a problem with sugar. I started to watch myself around sugary junk food and saw something that wasn’t pretty. I began to avoid the stuff and made it a while without sweets. I can’t recall how long but it seemed like a lifetime, long enough for me to think that I had cured myself.

It was 2002. I was leading a workshop at a company in New York. They catered lunch in the conference room. The food was delicious. For dessert there was one small box of After Eight dinner mints. I looked at the little brown sleeves holding the chocolate goodness and thought, “Just one mint is okay. It’s been long enough.”

I ate it. The world didn’t stop. No thunder or lightening. Nobody even blinked. It tasted just as I remembered. One was enough. I was in control. No problem.

The following day I craved just one chocolate mint. It’s hard to purchase just one chocolate mint so I probably got a box of them. You know how that goes. The more I satisfied my chocolate cravings the larger they grew. Within two weeks I was back to my sugar crazy self. It happened just that fast and I really felt bad. I thought that I had failed.

What I didn’t realize at the time, and what you may not realize if you ate sweets after having quit for a long time, is that it’s all part of the process. You haven’t failed. You have instead passed a milestone and you are ready for the next phase of your unsweet practice. No matter how long you’ve been off the sweets—if you slip up—you simply need to keep going.

There’s a pitfall. The longer you keep eating sugar after falling off the sugar-free wagon, the harder it is to keep your practice alive. Being unsweet is a lot like speaking a second language. If you don’t use it you will lose it. Putting off your practice means you’ll have a harder time getting back to where you once were.

If you slip up, get up and keep going. Set a date and do it. Good luck!

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