The Sweet Truth About Sugar

For the dad bod I call dibs on.

I take my sugar with everything. I take it in my cup of teh tarik at least thrice a day in the form of sweetened milk; I take it with my prata; I take it with my compliments. And according to my dietician, that's also the respective order for an escalating threat. First, you get greedy, and then addicted; finally, to keep up with the habit, you cheat yourself to obesity.

Sugar has been in my blood since I was born. Look to my baby photos and you wonder what was in the formula. From a healthy, cherubic toddler who had just learned how to crawl, I was making a calculated effort to run by the time it dawned on me in school that it wasn't baby fat that weighed me down. Rather, the gravity of the situation was the crime that if a child wasn't chubby enough, he's not cute. It was a stigma against skinny babies and healthily slim prepubescent children alike. In fact, I was so fat, singling me out for every TAF club exercise (the now defunct pejorative Trim And Fit club for fatties) in school felt natural, almost deserved.

For a tie, I wore it like a noose.

At fifteen, somewhere between a concern and a call-to-action, my parents suddenly decided that I was not a baby anymore. Their primary mission to get me out of the house, to choose between a toy and a golden glow that radiated within the foil wrapped chocolate snack, Crunchies, was also a struggle for my love for both. That I only exercised in later stages of my youth, and never quite did enough crunches to make up for the tummy fat amassed at the waist was a giveaway to the poor choices I have made in life. (So far.)

Today, as a healthier self who does not look quite as oblong as he used to, my consumption of sugar-laden products has not waned either. Once, for the sake of it, I made the mental note of counting every cup of milk tea I took in a school day. The breaking record came at five cups by the evening, which wasn't as bad as the alcoholics who smuggled gin to class. But that did worry me.

While I don't plan to give up on sugar, or cut back, I am disconcerted. As with alcohol, sugar has the effects of a drug. And to avoid the unsettling withdrawal effects (evident in my morning mood swings), I return to my habit, and if unwary, increase its dosage. I don't wake up to smell the coffee, I wake up to get fixed.

Sugar, an early signal of death in my family, was criminal to my grandmother's health. She had a bad diet. She passed when I was fourteen due to failing stages of her organs caused by deficiencies her younger self would warn her against of. She loved life- God bless, but she loved soda more. So much that if she did not indulge a can at every meal, there wouldn't be any food on the table to begin with.

According to experts, you can abuse sugar like how you would abuse alcohol and drugs. (Most of the time, you abuse them separately but severe cases have witnessed all three coming into play.) The hard part is: how do you quit sugar?

Have it with anything you like, sugar is an additive that will not stop us from loving our foods. Sugar, though indiscriminately gave my grandmother diabetes, also tastes delicious as a sweeter: from the sweetened dark sauce you dip your crisp slices of roasted pork into, to the cup of milk tea you decide its level of sweetness with. If I were to make a conscious effort to eat clean every time an article warning against the globesity epidemic surfaces like a tirade, I would be living a life not lived. Life, in every sense of the word, would just be bitter.