For as long as I can remember, I have loved sugar.  I'm sure there were times when my parents used it as a reward although I can't pinpoint any particular time.  They did however take it away as a punishment a couple of times.  I don't think that is why I am a sugar addict.  At one point, my dad banned chocolate from the house.  Not sugar, but chocolate.  And with no explanation.  I remember my teenager sister, who didn't really ever spend time in the kitchen, going in one day to make one of her few specialties - no bake cookies.  Boy did that cause a ruckus. 

I asked my dad once why he banned chocolate.  He said he just couldn't control himself if chocolate was around, he always just ate too much.  While that made sense to me as to why he didn't want it around, it didn't make sense to make all the rest of us suffer.  Now that I am a mother myself, I'm sure he was just hoping to give us a more positive relationship with chocolate than he had himself.  But did that approach work?  In the end, no.

My father was also very strict with TV time.  We lived in a small community where even rabbit ears didn't work.  If you put a large antenna on your roof, you could get a few fuzzy channels.  So if we wanted network TV, that meant only one option, a satellite.  Not the Dish Network kind that attaches to your roof but a big 20 ft disc that sits in your yard that you have to crank by hand to change to a different set of channels.   We had that for a while but ultimately it was donated to a church.  That left us with only VHS tapes.  And that was limited to 2 movies a week - 2 movies that the 4 of us still at home had to agree upon because we had only one TV.  We didn't have a computer, let alone a smart phone, tablet or any other sort of electronic device.  We weren't even allowed an Atari. 

I often wonder if this restrictive environment is what led to my addictive personality.  The idea that if you can't have something, it becomes so much more appealing.  But really who knows?  If I had grown up in an entirely different household, I would probably still have a sugar addiction.  Sometimes I think we are hardwired for certain things and no amount of environmental influence can change it.  Maybe stave it off for a bit, maybe lesson it, but not change it.  It is just in our genetic makeup.  Which then means that instead of certain things just not being an issue like they are for some people, they are an issue for us an we have to find ways to deal with them.  That is sugar for me.  I know I have an unhealthy relationship with sugar and I know we need to break up.  I'm terrified to do it though.