- Pour Some Sugar On Me
- Talking About ADHD
- Little Game Player
- ADHD Children and Rules
- Adult ADHD Relationships
You gotta squeeze a little, squeeze a little
Tease a little more
Easy operator come a knockin’ on my door
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah
I couldn’t resist. Sorry. I am, of course, a child of the 80s after all. LOL!
Most people know that both Jinx and I are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Not really a big secret if you’ve ever been around either of us for longer than 30 seconds[1].
I’m working on reworking our diet to help out since many of the neurological issues are very much triggered by the foods we eat. I have a friend who got both her kids completely off medication by following this one doctor’s plan which is more individual-type geared rather than just some generic one-size-fits-all plan. So I started working on determining which subtype of ADHD Jinx and I were. His mother helped out by providing an external perspective as well.
But—and this was part of the point about the Alcoholics Anonymous quip in my last post—sugar is one of the main villains in the fight against ADHD. I’ve eliminated much of the obvious sugar from our diet already. And it shows. However, think about this a minute:
A therapist came up to [Dr Amen] during the break with this story. He said, “I’m so glad you mentioned the sugar. I used to be a very angry person; sometimes I would even scare my family. It made me feel terrible. I even took anger management classes, but they didn’t seem to help. When I eliminated sugar in my diet, I noticed almost an immediate reduction in outburst, plus I felt more energetic, lost weight, and was much more focused.” His personal experience was the same as [Dr Amen's] clinical experience.
Even though we didn’t actually eliminate sugar but merely reduced it by a great amount, I can still say that the amount of outbursts from Jinx has been reduced a great deal and my own focus and anger issues have begun to decrease as well. Neither of us are “there” yet, but I can certainly see progress that makes me take this whole thing very seriously.
So what’s this thing with Alcoholics Anonymous? They serve coffee and donuts. So? Right? What do you put into coffee? What is a donut but little more than sugar in the round? This is why we don’t give ADHD children donuts for breakfast. Not only do they bounce off the walls, but they have no focus, gain weight, and end up with a crash when it’s done. Same with an alcoholic except even more dangerous. Alcohol metabolizes into sugar. In fact, one of the major weight gain villains is alcohol. The calorie intake alone from alcohol is whacked when it comes to proportion with other beverages because of the way that the alcohol is broken down by the body. But, the bottom line is that alcohol is converted to sugar (basically). So when an alcoholic decides to stop drinking and then goes to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with coffee and donuts, they aren’t “getting cured.” They are merely substituting one sugar addiction for another. So instead of removing what the body does with alcohol, they continue it. Which means, it’s just that much easier to do a reverse substitution of alcohol instead of coffee and donuts. Catching on now?
What makes alcoholics so amazingly hostile both before they sober up and after they start to sober up but collecting their karma points in the form of little plastic chips? Sugar feeds anger and hostility. What is alcohol? What is coffee and donuts? Why are Sunday morning Christians trying to cleanse the world by the sword?[2] Why is it so hard for a recently sober person to focus on more than one thing at a time? Why do family members often complain that their newly sober loved one hasn’t actually changed at all in their personality? The sugar intake has not changed and the feedback loop from sugar to brain says, “fuck you!”
It’s not like this is new information, mind you. When I sobered up through that little mandated program the State of Texas so conveniently provided to me, the first two “sessions” were about diet. The first thing they did was explain proper breakfast foods. Oh. And they didn’t have a single coffee pot in the whole place and the “snacks” were hard boiled eggs and small tuna/wheat toast munchies. And water. Lots and lots of water. Not only have I remained sober since that point but my ability to return to a moderate alcohol intake[3] is not feeding the body’s addiction to the sugar[4]. I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back—though I won’t deny a sense of pride for having kicked yet another horrible habit in my life—but merely to suggest that I think diet had a huge impact on my success back then.
So, this isn’t really going anywhere. It’s merely my acknowledgement that sugar is a major, major culprit in my home and I know it and I’m working to reduce it as much as 90-95% as I am able. And, of course, it is my explanation as to my Alcoholics Anonymous snark earlier.
innervox
- … which is about the length of time it takes for one of us to bounce across a wall or chase a tangent. [↩]
- Oops. Sorry. Crossed wires. [↩]
- … which really means that I could do one or two drinks a year a couple years back, but now just don’t care to drink at all. [↩]
- … and, in fact, most drinking now makes me slightly ill-feeling which is why I just don’t go out of my way to drink at all. [↩]
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