*stands up* Hello, my name is Haberley... and I am a sucrophile.


For most of my life, I have been addicted to sweets/sugary snacks/fizzy drinks and the like. This is the sort of behaviour that most people 'grow out of' by about 12, but the way I saw it was, it's not doing me (much) harm - why stop? My usual daily intake kept rising as I grew, until at my peak I'd be eating on average two chocolate bars, a pack of sweets, a litre of fizz, and a varying amount of biscuits. This isn't including nights out which, as I don't drink alcohol, would add another three or four pints of coke on top of that.

Well, no more. From Ash Wednesday onwards, I have massively limited the amount of sugar I have been eating, and I feel I have almost completely broken its hold over me. I first tried to break it off completely, cutting out everything apart from natural sugars - fruit juices, real fruit, bread, etc. After all, the addiction is only the unhealthy excess of it - your body does need some sugar! The cutoff came as a rather sudden shock to the system, after a typical sugar-scoffing day being aided by a surfeit of pancakes... then came the downer. I use the word downer quite effectively here, as the effect of a ten-year almost constant sugar rush suddenly disappearing is quite the hit. Lethargy came on thick and fast as I didn't have the amount of energy as I was used to, and I occasionally found myself shaking for no reason.

The deep-rooted need my body now has for sugar is quite a drawing factor - many is the time that I have found myself in the cupboards, rooting around for the pack of chocolate biscuits I got rid of... in fact, the first time I attempted to do this Task I lasted a grand 12 minutes before I picked up a bottle of ginger beer while preparing breakfast. After four days of absolutely no sugar intake other than whats in cereals, fruit, etc., I felt like this was going to kill me. I felt constantly hungry, my moods were rapidly flicking between each otherbefore settling on a near-constant melancholia, and I was sleeping about 12 hours a day without noticing. This was getting bad.


Therefore, I am now on a new track - rather than severing my dependancy in one fell swoop, I am gradually weaning myself off the dread substance. Instead of eating sweets constantly, I have a couple of healthier snacks on me at all time - a sandwich, a pack of crisps, an apple, that sort of thing. In fact, this Task has got me eating a lot healthier as well, which is always a plus.

I am quite proud with myself today, as I have been in three different shops with a veritable cornucopia of sweets, chocolate and cakes, and I still have yet to buy anything other than orange juice. I am allowing myself the occasional cake after dinner as a dessert, and when I go out with my mates after training or to a party I still have a fair few cokes, but it's still not a patch on what I used to eat. I'm still getting the hunger pangs every now and again, but I'm generally filling them with the healthier things... yes sir, I'd say that this addiction was pretty much licked!

Sorry for the reams of text, but there's not really any pictures that you can put in for this task... tell you what - here's some sugar for the praxis page!