"Hi, Mir!!"

My name is Mir, and I'm a sugarholic. Today marks the first day of the rest of my life (at least until the Christmas season is fully upon us and it becomes my civic duty to eat a lot of sweets again). I plan to take it one day at a time, working my way through all twelve steps of recovery. But I'm really gifted, you know, so I've made it most of the way through the program already.

Step 1: I admit that I am powerless over sugar, and my life has become unmanageable. Today I marched my fanny down to the grocery store determined to pick up the fixings for a healthful, protein-rich dinner. Pork chops were on sale for about $.12/pound as long as you bought the gargantuan family pack, so I brought home about twenty pounds of pork chops and after I divided and repackaged and froze most of them, I prepared a lovely dinner. Yay me. My children performing delicate surgery on the sugar-snap pea pods to extract the peas and then decorate the table with empty pods didn't faze me in the slightest, so grounded was I with my large glass of water and delightfully lean, rosemary-crusted pork.

Step 2: I have come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. Well, duh. Obviously it's gonna take a whole lotta power to restore me to sanity. It's been years since I believed I could do it myself, candy or no. I hope God is up to the task.

Step 3: I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand Him. This was another no-brainer. My understanding of God is that He'll help me with this if I ask, but He's just gonna shake his head and laugh if I continue to leave the Halloween candy on the counter. That seems fair. So here's the deal: I vanished the rest of the candy, and He has to keep me from baking cookies. I think that's reasonable.

Step 4: I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. I can't seem to find a job, or a life, but I'm quite able to find anything high in calories. What does this say about me? It says I'm lazy. Maybe if I focused more of my time and energy on some other stuff, I'd be less compelled to stuff my face.

Step 5: I admitted to God, to myself, and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs. God and I had a long talk. He was very understanding. Much moreso than I was, with myself. And when I confessed to Chickadee that I sneaked some Milk Duds out of her bucket, well, let's just say it wasn't pretty.

Step 6: I am entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. But damn if He isn't slow. Sheesh.

Step 7: I humbly asked Him to remove my shortcomings. Well, I'm not so great at humble. And it may have been less a request and more of a business proposition... something about how if I stop eating candy, maybe he could drop a job in my lap, or, you know, whatever He saw fit. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, because somewhere in the middle I was struck by lightning.

Step 8: I made a list of all persons I had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. I'm still working on this one, because if my ex is to be believed, the affected number somewhere in the thousands. But if I limit the list to people directly affected by my sugar-mania, it's just the kids. (Phew.)

Step 9: I made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Giving the children--who are in sugar comas, themselves--more candy at this point would be wrong on many levels. So I 'fessed up to all my pilfering, and bought them some celery and granola bars. They're still not speaking to me, but I think they may come around when they figure out how much college tuition costs.

Step 10: I have continued to take personal inventory and when I was wrong promptly admitted it. Well, sure, the first part is working out great. Fortunately, I am never wrong, so I haven't had to do that whole admitting thing. (Who said this was hard?)

Step 11: I have sought through prayer and meditations to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that out. We're in total agreement on the candy thing. He's quite silent on most other matters in my life right now, but I have a feeling that we'll be speaking often once I find out more about that high F.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I am trying to carry this message to other sugar addicts, and to practice these principles in all my affairs. This is really the greatest step of all. So empowering. Hey, I'm here to tell you that consuming your body weight in candy corn will not improve your job situation. Steam some vegetables! You'll thank me later.

Who wants a rice cake?