How sugar became sexual and 'sinful' − and why you shouldn't skip dessert

I love the bright pink box that encases a dozen donuts. Even in a break room, half-picked over with only the jelly-filled ones left – there’s something about it that signals joy, confection, sin.

Some say sugar is a cheap high, but for me, it’s a life force − and a mechanism for rebellion. We’ve shared a long and fraught love affair, splintering and finding our way back to each other a million times.

In early adolescence, I developed an eating disorder that stayed with me in some form for about a decade. On days when I’m not kidding myself, I'll admit that its remnants are likely still lodged stubbornly in the folds of my brain. The language of it certainly is.

In the war against well-fed women, rhetoric is a particularly lethal weapon. It breeds a culture of guilt− ordering a basket of fries becomes "Should we be bad?" and a rich chocolate cake becomes "sinfully sweet." Building a lexicon around shame creates an easy dichotomy − one that separates foods, and our desire for them, into good and bad, sinful and pure, moral and amoral.

Anorexia, which disproportionately affects women, is often associated with a certain vapidness. But the disease is pure brass knuckles. It wracks the body, halts the menstrual cycle, makes you shiver, and chews you up from the inside before spitting you out without ceremony. Propelled by an impossible math, every morsel that goes into your mouth becomes a tally mark on an invisible scorecard.

In clawing apart that eternal tie between dieting and virtuousness, I found a simple dogma that added sweetness (literally) back into my life: You should always eat dessert.

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The dieting dichotomy

If anorexia and bulimia are about punishment, dessert − the spirit of dessert, not just the item on the plate − is the opposite. It's about enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake; a quality I learned in my recovery the world doesn’t like to see in women.

“What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?” journalist Roxane Gay writes in "Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body."

That fact becomes unsurprising when you consider the norm for fashion models remains below a U.S. size 2. While the average American woman's size cannot be pinned down, the CDC reports an average waist size of just over 38 inches − certainly not a size 2.

“This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small," Gay writes, "We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society."

That calculus can easily condemn healthy women of any size to an eternal state of starvation.

But dieting is as dieting talks. It's not just that we go hungry, it's that our hunger is bestowed great honor: It is gifted the language of correctness − "I've been so good this week," or "I'm eating clean." As opposed to what, eating dirty?

Easy bedfellows: Sugar and sex

Dessert specifically adopts a sexual language − indulgence and abstinence. That's no mistake.

Women are given two competing ideas about sugar, Dr. Sera Lavelle, a clinical psychologist who focuses on eating disorders says. One portrays an all-in approach; a pint of ice cream after a break-up, for example. The message is that this will make you feel better. And there's often a sexual connotation. The intimacy of romance is superimposed onto a sugary indulgence.

Lavelle references an ad for a food delivery service she once saw on the subway that depicted a giant ice cream sundae with the subtitle "Why don’t I come over and make you forget all about him." It's so clearly marketed to women and gay people, she laments. Scratch harder at it and you discover something more sinister. A tacit implication that without the male figure, you're empty, hungry for something more.

The other idea Lavelle says women are given is that sugar consumption will render you unattractive to men, or unlovable.

Ads for chocolate, burgers and other "indulgent" foods are often heavily sexualized. But the women that star in them are usually thin-bodied. It's another message meant to be internalized: participate in indulgence − both sexually and nutritionally − only in ways that are pleasing to those around you, or do not make people uncomfortable. Which, in a society that fears both fatness and uninhibited female pleasure, is a near-impossible balancing act.

The fear of indulgence thus becomes the woman's problem. It is viewed as a personal moral failing to be unable to perform enjoyment while also squeezing into the ever-shrinking confines of the beauty norm.

Why you should always have dessert

And so we return to the pink box. In the throes of my disorder, I would survey the donuts − just as sure that I wanted one as I was that I didn’t. Saliva waited anxiously at the corners of my mouth when I saw them, but I couldn’t, could I? Only the lowly crave sugar. Only the weak of resolution give in. 

“The thinnest is the best" Lavelle describes the thinking pattern, "we’ve been able to control ourselves the best.”

God forbid I "indulge" fully, it might make me crude, too closely resembling my honest form. Women can be hedonists too, after all, and can delight in things that may shorten our lifespan.

I like the maple bar or chocolate donut with sprinkles. At least I think I do. How alienating to not even know the way around your own palate − each of your urges stuffed through the cogs of diet culture and mutated beyond recognition.

After years of feeling blindly around my own subconscious, trying to resurrect those original urges I've learned a few things.

My advice − to be taken with a grain of salt (or a spoonful of sugar) − is this: Turn in your aching body and let it feast. Maybe for the flavor or the presentation or even the ritual. But mostly for rebellion. 

Always eat dessert.