Sugar's Sweetness
Author: Charles Eisenstein

Sugar offers a hollow sweetness that one can easily detect through careful, attentive eating. If you slowly chew and taste an oversweetened food, you'll probably find it phony and dishonest. Indeed, refined sugar cheats the body, promising a bonanza of nutrition that is not there.

Most people have at least a vague idea that sugar is unhealthy. Why, then, is our craving for this substance so compelling?

The root cause of sugar addiction is that we are out of touch with the sweetness of life itself. Our society, still cowering under the dour gaze of Puritanism, separates us from our essential core of sweetness and encourages constant self-criticism. The message behind every advertisement that shows us images of happy perfection is: "This is the way you should be. Are you not? Then buy our new car. Drink our soda." How often do I hear people say they want to be a better person? The person you are is just fine, if you would only let yourself be yourself.
Closed off from the experience of sweetness in life, yet hungering for it to the depths of our souls, we turn to the imitation of this sweetness in sugary foods. Sugar does nothing to allay the essential longing, though; at most it temporarily distracts our attention from the soul's craving for sweetness. But where is the soul's sweetness to be found?

Babies are sweet. Intimacy is sweet. Love is sweet. Your innermost self, is sweet. Think of the names we call our babies and our lovers, the people we know most intimately: honey, sugar, sweetie. True sweetness is found within. The experience of coming inward, coming back home, connecting with the divine, is one of ineffable sweetness. The term "sweet Jesus" is no accident!

The spiritual counterpart of physical sweetness is intimacy. Intimacy comes easily with babies, who are open and unthreatening, and with lovers (when there is genuine trust), and with close family. With all these people we can know sweetness. But we are meant for more than that. Outside the narrow realm of family (and with the decline of the extended family it has grown even narrower), we are closed off from one another, interacting on a very superficial level. How close do you feel to the people who make your clothes, your house, your possessions? How intimately do you know the people you buy things from? Intimacy comes from openness and long association. Today we rarely have either. In our tribal and village past, we knew each other intimately, having spent our lives together, and a stranger was a rare sight. Few people dare to be open and trusting of strangers or even casual acquaintances, and perhaps with good reason. Intimacy has hardly a chance to grow.

On a societal level, we may see sugary foods as solace in the face of the unremitting blandness and impersonal ugliness of the malls, freeways, parking lots, and windowless superstores that define modern life. We may see sugary foods as a primitive form of self-care under governments and corporations that seem not to care for us as individuals. We may see sugary foods as the last refuge of citizens-turned-consumers, stripped of their autonomy and stripped of the power to be good to themselves and each other in more meaningful ways. Tiny cogs, we seem, in a vast machine whose workings are beyond our control. In a disturbing world whose very infrastructure thwarts intimacy and has little time for beauty, who can blame us for turning to the nearest and most reliable substitute?

Yet, the powerlessness is an illusion. The truth is quite the opposite: You are powerful beyond imagining. Do you not feel powerful? Does your reason rebel at the very idea? That is because you have a mistaken idea of what "you" are. And because the self we operate from is self-limited, willful change (which comes from that self) is limited as well. It is like trying to lift weights while treading water.

Sugar consumption can destroy your health, but willpower alone cannot prevail against it unless you make an earnest decision to rediscover sweetness in your life. Rediscovering sweetness requires courage -— the courage to give up things we think we need—as well as mindfulness or self-remembering to empower courage with the knowledge that those things are not so valuable after all. When we clear aside the clutter, the baseline of life is revealed: an omnipresent sweetness, a poignancy of connection that underlies life's sorrows as well as life's joys.
I am speaking of an opening of the heart, an opening to incredible riches that were here all along. Often such an opening happens when a death or serious trauma clarifies what's really important. We are so grateful then, and life so sweet. This opening, this acceptance of life's richness, is quite the opposite of the kind of self-denial that we might otherwise resort to in fighting the sugar habit. In fact, the habit of self-denial makes us crave nurturance all the more. (That's one reason why people who give up meat often turn to sugar as their comfort food, even though sugar is particularly damaging to vegetarians.)

Sugar is a shoddy counterfeit for the real sweetness of life. Often as children we were given "treats" as rewards, for being in some way "good." The word "dessert," in fact, means something that you deserve. When people try to limit sugar intake through willpower alone, they usually meet with some initial success. Feeling good about themselves, they are ready for their reward, for their dessert.

By the same token, sweets can be a way of telling yourself, "Yes, I am good, I do deserve!" Such a message is especially compelling to downtrodden people. Besides ignorance and poverty, perhaps this partly explains why poor people eat so much sweet junk food and suffer so much from obesity. People who affirm their deservingness of the good things in life through sweet foods are in fact using sugar as a kind of medicine. They are trying to make life hurt less. For a moment, at least, sweets make us feel less lonely. We are comforted. Do not condemn others for their dietary folly, when they, like us all, are merely seeking to avoid pain. Unfortunately, sugar is a palliative medicine only, as it does nothing to address the root causes of being downtrodden. No amount of sugar will fundamentally alter bitter circumstances or a sour attitude.

If sugar is a counterfeit for spiritual sweetness, then artificial sweeteners such as saccharin and aspartame are a counterfeit of a counterfeit. They represent a lie to the body, and reinforce an experience of the world in which appearance is bereft of substance.

Perhaps I am being unfair in calling sugar a counterfeit, because it can also be understood as merely the physical dimension of a cosmic principle or archetype: sweetness, comfort, pleasure. It is not through conditioning alone that sweet foods have become treats and desserts —- were this connection wholly accidental, then I doubt sweet food would really work as a substitute for spiritual sweetness. Perhaps sweet foods are here to remind us and reaffirm that yes, life is sweet. Complete abstinence from sweets comes too close to Puritanical abstinence from all of life's pleasures; it can be part of a pattern of withholding from oneself the goodness and pleasure of life. Instead, let being good to yourself come first, and as your understanding deepens of what exactly it is to be good to oneself, you will find the craving for sugar diminish. Part of this deepening understanding comes from the full and careful experiencing of sweet foods, both as they are eaten and afterward.

So many things in the world today have robbed us of life's sweetness. The busy pace and constant noise of modern life robs us of the sweetness of "self time" -— intimacy with self. Nor do we feel at liberty to really sit down and just be with friends or loved ones. The regime of self-criticism robs us again by making us not at ease with ourselves, and also, therefore, not at ease with others. When we are uneasy with ourselves, the fake fulfillment of consumerism and the ready escape of passive, asocial entertainment become irresistible. Ashamed of our own perceived ugliness, we wall ourselves off from others. The economic and social structures of modernity build these walls even higher, by reducing our interactions to anonymous, superficial, or "professional" exchanges. And all these things, physical, social, and psychological, tend to cut us off from nature and thereby rob us of our primal connections to life, sky, wind, soil.

To quit the sugar habit, then, you must reclaim sweetness. Reclaim time in your life by reexamining the priorities that make you busy. Stop judging, measuring, criticizing, and comparing yourself; stop castigating yourself and wishing you were someone better, someone different. Instead, accept yourself as you are. The same goes for others: accept them, too, by looking for the goodness within. In all your interactions, try to penetrate to the human being behind the professional, behind the anonymous functionary. And perhaps most importantly, find ways to reconnect to nature. Even if it is for only half a minute, look at the clouds as if you had nothing else in the world to do. Touch a plant and feel its struggle in the poisonous air and tainted dirt of the city. Even small moments of intimacy can have a miraculous effect.

The sweetness of intimacy —- with self, other, nature, or the divine —- is always there waiting for you. Sweetness can be yours without having to deserve it.







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Charles Eisenstein is the author of The Yoga of Eating, from which this article is excerpted. He teaches at Penn State University and lives part of the year in Taiwan.

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