In 2016, I set out to quit sugar for a year—not just as a dietary challenge, but as a profound exploration of my emotional well-being. What began as an experiment in self-control evolved into a deep dive into the roots of my body image issues, addictive behaviors, and the lingering effects of childhood emotional neglect. Through therapy, self-reflection, and the painful yet enlightening process of confronting past traumas, I discovered that my relationship with food was intricately tied to my inner emotional landscape. This blog chronicles my journey from self-loathing to self-love, highlighting the unexpected ways in which eliminating sugar became a catalyst for holistic healing and personal growth.

When I set the ambitious goal to quit sugar on January 1st, 2016, for 1 year, I had spent 2015 letting it all go. Tired of constant dieting and hating my body, I finally decided to eat whatever I wanted and develop body love no matter what.

For the previous several years, I had tried every possible way of diet-hacking: paleo, keto, fasting. I even had pee sticks to test when I was in ketosis, peeing out ketones when my body was in fat-burning mode. I was working out like crazy—lifting weights, working with trainers, attending CrossFit, and training for the Philadelphia Marathon (2013) and NYC Marathon (2014). I was exhausted. And nothing seemed to stick. As soon as I quit a diet or an intensive training program, my weight would balloon out again.

In 2014, I graduated from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s health coaching program. In the program, I watched a lecture by Geneen Roth, a writer and teacher specializing in healing from eating disorders. I read her book Women, Food, and God, in which she highlighted stories of women who got the liposuction they always dreamed of, fixing the particular body part they so hated, with the end result of realizing that no one cared! The procedures changed nothing, not even their self-hatred! “Oh wow,” I thought, “I obsess over body parts too, and it’s crazy-making! No one is noticing my body like that!” I particularly hated the little chunk of fat poking out at my armpit, the bulb at the end of my nose, my narrow boyish hips, and my knock-knees. I have probably accomplished Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of expertise in silently hating these specific parts of my body.

I started to practice self-love by looking at myself in the mirror and lovingly touching each body part and saying, “Thank you hands for helping me write, thank you nose for helping me smell, thank you legs for taking me places." And saying “I love you” to each part.

I did this over and over each day. My thoughts toward my body softened, and so did my waist. I put on 10 lbs, then 20, then 30. My rigorous marathon training schedule, which had always come with a solid helping of self-shaming talk for not being disciplined or fit enough, stopped. I dropped out of the Fall 2015 Chicago Marathon for which I’d won a lottery spot.

I started eating more slowly and really chewing and tasting my food. I’d let myself eat ice cream any time, but also I’d let myself throw it away if I stopped enjoying it after 2 bites.

It was a year of shedding as much of what I’d learned about habits as I could and re-evaluating everything. I worked with several great life coaches that year who assisted my progress in understanding which beliefs, habits, and mindsets I’d inherited that were leading to self-sabotage, destruction, and all the self-hate.

Through all of this introspection and belief-shedding, I realized that eating sugar had an addictive quality to it that I was curious about. In 2012 I did a 6-month “kindness challenge” to see if I could stop saying unkind words. I stopped drinking alcohol midway through 2015 with a goal of 1 year of sobriety. Quitting sugar actually seemed waaaaaay harder than quitting alcohol! So I knew I had to try it.

As I started my project of curiosity—could I just QUIT sugar…I weighed 174 lbs, which was just on the verge of being an “overweight” BMI for my tall height of 5’10”. I felt sluggish and weighed down, but my mind felt lighter as a result of becoming more self-aware about the harsh and shaming thoughts in my head.

2016 would be the most transformatively healing year of my life, but in the most surprising ways.

I started the year off strong, posting my sugar-free progress to Facebook each day, saying things like, “Day 17 out of 365: I avoided the office donuts today and ate an apple as my afternoon snack, then went for a walk.” I found healthy substitutions for my favorite snacks. I was devouring wild amounts of a stevia-sweetened chocolate coconut cream pudding every day (this recipe is easy: just combine cocoa powder, stevia, and coconut cream), so the addictive part of me was still going strong, just finding slightly better alternatives.

This experiment came with a lot of self-love and gentle curiosity. I had gone to rehab in 2005 for my brief and destructive exploration with methamphetamine and cocaine at age 19. Even though I’d “graduated” from that program and hadn’t been addicted to hard drugs since, I had this sneaking suspicion that addiction was still lurking in me.

I noticed the way I would drive to the Whole Foods after an uncomfortable work meeting, buy a box of cookies, and just sit in the parking lot eating the whole box without stopping to breathe or think. Geneen Roth advised not to eat alone or in secret. I realized I was doing this a lot. I just wanted to get away from everyone and eat sweets in private.

I’m sure that quitting sugar and alcohol led me spiritually to a place where I could have profound internal insights about the nature of my addiction but nothing prepared me for the series of events that led me to check myself into a psychiatric hospital on June 13th, 2016.

Images from 2015:

The Breakdown/Breakthrough

That May, I traveled to Barcelona and Paris to teach workshops on interpersonal trust and communication. Then, in the most ironic moment of my life, on a stopover in Iceland on my way back to Austin, TX, my Airbnb host violated our interpersonal trust by assaulting me. As I tried to make sense of it back in the US, it struck me that I’d been assaulted before in ways large and small, my whole life. I was waking up to the reality of normalized male violence against women at the same time the world was: the Me Too movement would go big in October of 2017. Collectively, we awakened: we couldn’t take the constant sexualization and assault, the catcalls, the planting of unwanted kisses, the constant fear of an attack…we had normalized so much, and we were done! It was a beautiful awakening, and I started mine following that attack in Iceland in May of 2016, unaware that a global transformation was brewing.

Suddenly, the body-hatred took on a new timbre. It sounded, felt, smelled, looked, and weighed a completely different way—through the lens of misogyny and patriarchy. I hadn’t seen how sexualized I’d always been. It was the water I was swimming in, and I just wasn’t aware. In my senior year of high school, some of us who were “hippier” than the others would go to our local nude beach, Pirates Cove. It was pretty much all teenage girls and older, creepy men. But I was oblivious. In my early 20s, I became a nude model for fine art painters (who were wonderful and not creepy) and barely thought about how it was young women they seemed to want to paint and not old women or men. Memories came flooding back such as the one in early High School of a creepy older boy on the schoolbus asking me, “what does your pussy look like?” and old drunk men on bicycles whistling and cat-calling me as I walked to my elementary school, when I was at-most 12 years old.

It wasn’t just “diet culture” that was crushing my spirit and making me hate my body…it was the rampant cultural hatred of women and viewing of women solely as sex objects for men.

I stayed just 1 night at the psychiatric hospital, realizing, very sadly, that these are not places that help people get well. It was a bit traumatizing in there for a variety of reasons, but the good thing that came out of it was a referral to a really good psychiatrist in Austin and the understanding that I was not mentally well.

I started on Wellbutrin for my diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, a mental illness characterized by depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, significant weight/appetite change, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation or retardation, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or excessive guilt, diminished ability to think or concentrate, and recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.

I found a great therapist and attended sessions every week. The thing that reduced me to a crying puddle on the floor for 4 months was the discovery of a concept called childhood emotional neglect.

Now that I’ve been through a decade of healing, I do think that the term “neglect” is unnecessarily weighty—it implies some judgement against parents. I don’t think my parents were particularly neglectful—they were normal 80s and 90s parents who both worked (a lot) and tended to dig even more into work when stresses heightened. They didn’t have the emotional skills or vocabulary to affirm me or all of the tough moments of childhood and the teen years and as a result, I entered adulthood with a gaping void where warm words and self-worth should have been.

I think they wanted to be warm and loving, but they just often didn’t know how. The American legacy is one of families leaving their home country, communities, and extended families behind to see about making it on their own, on a harsh frontier filled with violence and often poverty. My parents both grew up in Montana, where harsh winters meant only the toughest settlers served. That grit was passed down several generations to me. It instilled values of a work ethic, but not exactly how to comfort myself when I had a hard day (except to maybe encourage myself to work even harder).

Images from 2016-2017.

Emotional Health

I started devouring any healing book that I could find, many of which are listed here on my Healing Resources page. Listening to Dr. Gabor Maté’s book When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress Disease Connection, I learned that avoiding our emotions and needs has real bodily consequences—emotional neglect is linked to autoimmune disorders, addictions, and mental health concerns.

Reading his In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts about the child trauma-addiction link, I realized that childhood wounds underlie the moments where we reach for a box of cookies to escape.

Something the nurse said to me when she checked me into the psychiatric hospital, in her strong Caribbean accent, was, “Everybody hava’ find a way to cope.” In the midst of my mental breakdown, I was in no mood for spiritual platitudes. But now looking bac,k I see that people check themselves into mental hospitals when they’ve run out of coping mechanisms—when they’ve tried everything and they’re still crazy.

I’d given up alcohol and sugar—two of humans’ favorite ways to cope. If I had an awkward meeting at work and felt bad, I could eat a box of cookies in the parking lot and come back in and finish my day. Or I could meet friends after work for a beer and “unwind.” Taking those things out without having a solid coping strategy: catastrophic.

I attended therapy week after week and learned that the only sustainable way to cope was to develop a mature emotional self. I had to start noticing and labeling my emotions. I had to start linking them to past stressors and wounds. I had to self-soothe through positive self-talk. I had to journal about how I was feeling. I had to take deep calming breaths. I had to say gentle words to myself like, “It’s okay to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable in a work meeting. You’re okay.”

Little by little I came back into my body and it could be a safe home. I think I had been running the most from my own brutal mind and self-shaming. I just had to escape and get away because it hurt to bad to be with myself.

After my breakdown I started going to yoga as many days a week as possible. I found a studio that had a dimly lit room and soothing music playing. I would cry and cry in the class—sometimes saving it for corpse pose at the end but sometimes letting the water flow mid-class. No one could see me and it was a heated room so the tears blended in with the beads of sweat.

The weight started to come off, the 10 lbs, the 20, the 30. I was back in my old body, but this time in a way that was gentle. I wasn’t beating myself into submission: I was showing up for me with love.

Learning about and healing emotional neglect gave me all of the insights I needed to understand my addictive eating. Essentially, the pattern goes like this:

Something happened that triggered me to feel uncomfortable
I wouldn’t be able to understand why I felt uncomfortable but I wanted the sensation to go away
I would go seek out a food or beverage to sooth me, give me a dopamine high, and feel instantly better
Over time, if I continually chose sugar or other junk-foods, this would mean I would feel terrible and gain weight. I’d either have to work out a ton or gain weight.
Over time, the pent up emotions and stress will get stuck in the body manifesting as chronic pain or an autoimmune disorder.

With emotional skills there’s a new patter:

Something happens that triggers me to feel uncomfortable
I slow down and ask myself why that is. I use feelingswheel.com to label emotions, writing them down and identifying where in the body I feel them.
I practice loving and soothing gentle self-talk: “It’s okay to feel embarrassed sometimes. That’s part of the human experience. Feeling means you’re alive and that’s beautiful.”
I identify if there’s a wound underneath that’s causing toxic shame to come up. Maybe I was in a very embarrassing situation that was similar at a specific point in childhood and my inner child needs me to gentle-parent them too.
I choose another healthy self-soothing coping strategy if I need one: call a friend, go for a walk, drink a glass of water, pet a cat or dog, or go outside and get some sunlight (touching grass optional).
I continue my day with minimal disruptions. There are no long-term negative health consequences.

Images from 2018-2020.

Ready to reset your relationship with sugar and learn some of my best body-love practices?

Join my 8-week No Sugar program—a gentle, supportive journey to break free from sugar cravings, boost your energy, and reconnect with your body’s natural rhythms. You’ll get all the best tools that helped me, weekly encouragement, and a whole lot of compassion along the way. Learn more and sign up:

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New Motivation for Running

Now that I didn’t hate myself, I found it difficult to feel motivated to go for a run. I didn’t know what to say in my head anymore. As luck would have it, though, I started dating a fast runner at the end of 2016 and he became my de facto coach. I asked him for all his best mental tips. He’d learned so many good ones, having grown up attending Nike running summer camps in the great running state of Oregon. He taught me how to breathe, how to push, and how to imagine I was being pulled along by a great rubber band around my waist, propelling me forward. He taught me how to set short running goals within longer runs. I got faster and faster.

By 2019, I was making the top 10 finishers’ lists in small races.

My focus got better, too. Now that I wasn’t trying to escape or cope all of the time, I set my sights on bigger long-term goals, applying for and getting accepted to graduate school to study Public Health.

In February of 2020, I set a personal record for my half-marathon time, running faster than ever and feeling like I could conquer the world. I was so happy, healthy, and strong.

Then the pandemic hit…

Old Coping Habits

As we were all forced inside and suddenly living in fear of breathing or being breathed on, some old coping strategies came back. I drank a lot of alcohol during the pandemic, as did we all. I added a little sugar back into the mix. I consumed a lot of weed gummies and sat around watching a lot of Netflix. I must say that I had a lot of fun for most of this. I loved snuggling with my then-boyfriend on the couch watching feel-good shows like Ted Lasso, The Mandalorian, and Abbott Elementary.

But it’s easy to forget just how stressful and uncertain those times were. I found myself working in trauma-support during a global trauma event. I was producing a sort-of-talk-show-sort-of-support-group for my job in trauma-informed care 3x a week. It was a lot of work and I was hearing about trauma issues and holding space for a lot of people’s anxieties every day. It took it’s toll!

Soon, I found that my body felt terrible.

Bouncing Back

In 2022 I moved back to Boston and lived solo. I started working out 1-2x a day: weight lifting at PlanetFitness, cycling to Corepower Yoga, and 7-14 mile runs. I was getting in excellent shape! Then I got into a cycling accident that broke 2 ribs and I had to slow down again.

I’ve learned that it just be like this: periods of intensity followed by lulls or recovery. What’s great is how gentle I can be with myself and this process. I’ve learned to show up consistently, even if there are a few blips here and there. If I fall off the wagon, I can get back on, no shaming required.

I’ve learned to keep two sizes of clothing around: 4 and 6. 4s when I’m in mega-good shape and 6s for lulls. It works well for me.

Begin again, begin again, begin again.

Now with emotional resilience skills, I don’t have dramatic weight swings. My weight stays somewhere between 145 and 155, and I’m either a 4 or a 6 in clothing, which is so healthy.

These days, I’m running 10 to 30 miles a week, running races (somewhat slowly), lifting weights a couple of times a week, and attending yoga here and there. I try to talk kindly to my body, which is doing pretty well. Due to my continuous commitment to trail running, my legs are rock solid with muscle. I weigh a little more than I did in 2019, but since I wear the same-sized clothing, I can assume that my body is now dense with muscles (also, I can feel that my legs are the most rock-solid with muscles they’ve ever been). I feel strong!

I know now that practicing emotional resilience is an everyday practice. I label and journal my feelings every day. I have to consciously say, “It’s okay to feel frustrated” to myself and my inner child every day.

By making my mental and physical health an everyday practice, little by little, I’ve created a body and mind that are both stronger and softer. They say “resilience” is the ability to bend in the wind. When stressful things come up, we can weather them, bending then bouncing back.

I’m 40 now, and I have big health goals. I want to prevent osteoporosis and other health challenges that come with aging, so I’d like to commit to heavier weight lifting now. Trail running is the thing that makes me happiest, so I’d like to keep at it.

I want to keep treating myself with kindness.

Clean eating, low-to-no-sugar, limited processed foods, eating meals socially with conversation and laughter, and just a few drinks of alcohol per month are what make me feel best in my body.

I’m still learning to just let myself have a couple of fat rolls on my belly without shaming myself (i can’t let the patriarchy win!). It’s a process.

The more I stick with my daily mental and physical health habits, the more I grow to love myself.

I still have some lingering negative thoughts around the little globs of fat that protrude from where my arm meets my chest, but I don’t get stuck there. I get out of wallow-ing spirals quicker these days.

More often my inner thoughts sound like this:

Wow, my legs are buff! I have put in the work and it paid off.
I’m so grateful for my health.
My lungs are working great on this run.
I’m feeling the most beautiful I’ve ever felt in my life!
Women in our 40s are so gorgeous (see how self love just naturally radiates out to loving others?)
I’m so proud of myself for working out this week.

I’m more focused on what I can create, especially in artistic ways, and taking time for community, friends and family. The more time I spend laughing with friends, the less time I’m ruminating about my perceived deficits.

Images from 2020-2024:

Ready to reset your relationship with sugar and learn some of my best body-love practices?

Join my 8-week No Sugar program—a gentle, supportive journey to break free from sugar cravings, boost your energy, and reconnect with your body’s natural rhythms. You’ll get all the best tools that helped me, weekly encouragement, and a whole lot of compassion along the way. Learn more and sign up:

No Sugar Challenge