Can we cope with being fit but sugar addicted?

One reporter wrestles with her sweet demons during period before ‘eating season’

If Aaron Sorkin needed a few hits of cocaine to tap in to his creative nerve to write A Few Good Men, Moneyball and Steve Jobs, I need at least 50 grams of the other white stuff — sugar — to bang out readable sports copy.

It took a Cherry Coke, doughnuts and a candy bar to crank out a Nyjer Morgan profile back in 2011 and more cinnamon rolls than I will ever admit at a local coffee shop to pound out a Brett Favre project in 2008.

I had no Dove Dark Chocolate & Mint Swirls to write this column. (Which means I don’t like it.)

I hate this about myself but here’s the deal.

But I’ve been trying to at least reduce it. My sugar demons have affected not just my health but my fitness goals all year. My blood pressure is up and my race finish times are slow and it bothers me as much as the weight I’ve gained.

I’m not talking about having that cookie once in a while. I’m talking about sugar accounting for a third of my daily calories in MyFitnessPal. I use it to power through work, to be “up” for social requirements, to celebrate and to comfort. Some people have their coffee, some people have their wine and beer, some people have their cigarettes. I have sugar.

So, two weeks before Halloween, which kicks off “the eating season,” I tried my best to give it up. How’d it go?

Day 1: MyFitnessPal, the food journal, wants me under 50 grams of sugar a day. A medium banana is about 21 grams. (Sigh.)

Day 2: I’m cold and tired. I’m not hungry at all, but there are cravings and then a crash in the afternoon that’s brutal. I eat everything else in the house that isn’t sugar, including a packet of hot cocoa mix.

Day 3: Sure, I can stand here all day and hold this door open for you without needing the courtesy of you saying thanks. No, you go ahead and cut in front of me while you’re texting and driving, I hope she dumps you with a text message. Four-inch heels or cardboard flats — those are my boot choices — for $180? Day 3 evening: I might be a little crabby.

Day 4: Here’s irony for you: the harder I work, at work, the more I sit on my butt and stare at this computer like a lump of human mashed potatoes.

Day 5: Forgot to pack a snack in my gym bag and had no time after the workout for lunch. I raced to my assignment, interviewed elite athletes for a story and had three cookies for “linner” in my car.

I suck at life.

Day 6: This is ridiculous. There are parents escaping war-torn countries with their children in rickety rafts. There’s a second civil rights movement in my own country. I need to get over myself. It’s just sugar.

Day 7: I have a dream where I walk into a doughnut store with every kind of doughnut imaginable and I can have whatever I want and I’m so happy, only I’m so overwhelmed by the choices I just stand there and don’t even take one.

Day 8: I’ve eaten 6,000 calories. I mean, probably. I stopped tracking at lunch.

I don’t know if you can convert ground turkey and quinoa into high fructose corn syrup but my brain sure is trying. Day 9: No I don’t want ONE Dove mint dark chocolate square. Would you bring a spray bottle to a fouralarm fire?

Day 10: My son reads a blurb from his textbook that some Holocaust survivors died within a week after their rescue because soldiers gave them bites of chocolates and sugar. Isn’t that about the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in your life?

Day 11: Not one pound lost. My bosses will not let me publish the words that go here now.

Day 12: I unfriend the people on Facebook who keep posting quick and easy recipes for peanut butter chocolate graham cracker things. Day 13: Caved. Cake.

Day14: Doorbell. Little cuties at my door in costumes for trick-or-treat.

I can’t do this.