Sugar High

Could rehab be the path to a healthy weight? Katherine Laidlaw reports on new programs that treat sugar as an addictive substance

- Katherine Laidlaw

The night before Sarah L. made her third trip to a treatment center for help managing her weight, she and a friend went out for a last supper. First, they had all-you can-eat ribs and corn bread; then they sat in the car scooping fudge sundaes from plastic McDonald’s cups. From there, they filled bags with Reese’s Pieces at Bulk Barn and took them home, stuffing them into their mouths by the handful. “I was still bingeing on the candy on my way to the facility the next morning,” she says.

Sarah, 35, a palliative-care nurse from North Delta, British Columbia, has always had a complicated relationship with food. When she was 5, she’d sneak banana chocolate muffins from the Tupperware container her mom kept in the freezer. By 11, she was stealing money from her parents to fund her candy habit. At 13, she began to purge. “I just loved food and wanted to eat a lot, and then I’d feel guilty, so I’d throw up,” she says. “I overate and couldn’t stop.” As a teen, she’d steal candy and chocolate from her jobs at a local gas station and grocery store. Playing softball and swimming kept her fit, but she still carried extra weight on her 5'8" frame and tried every strategy available—Jenny Craig, Atkins, Herbalife, laxatives, diuretics, diet pills, stimulants—to get rid of it.

At her peak weight, Sarah was 33 years old and 192 pounds, which wasn’t heavy enough to label her a binge eater and qualify her for an eating-disorder program paid for by Canada’s universal health-care system. But maybe that’s a good thing, because binge eating is only part of her problem. Sarah is an addict, and at Renascent, the Toronto facility she checked into that morning, she was treated right alongside women hooked on cocaine, heroin, meth, and opioids.