I sat across from my two 17-year old boys at the table we were sharing for our Mother's Day brunch earlier today. They have grown to be 6'3" and are bright and kind and handsome and funny and driven.

These two are juniors in high school and starting to talk seriously about college. My 19-year old daughter just finished her freshman year of college and as I write this is exploring Thailand with a professor and a group of young adults I've never even met. 

As I sat there, watching my boys eat plates full of the delicious food from the buffet at The Laundry, one of my very favorite farm-to-table restaurants, I listened to the Mama across the aisle repeatedly telling her little guy who looked to be about 3-years old to 'please come out from under the table'. She finally lured him out using a sing-songy voice.  I smiled at the familiarity of it as I was jokingly trying to get my guys to stop arguing about whose elbow was crossing the 'middle line' of the table and taking up too much of the other's space. 

I loved sugar and it seemed to love me. I could eat as much of it as I wanted and I didn’t gain weight. It was a beautiful mutually satisfying relationship.

At least that’s what I thought. Until I realized I was just using sugar and sugar was, well, creating all kinds of havoc in my body.

Those Reese’s Cups and Oreo cookies and the bowls of Peanut Butter Cap’n’Crunch, not to mention the endless stream of Mountain Dew, were not treating me quite as well as I thought after all.

It wasn’t weight gain that led me to reevaluate my relationship with sugar, instead it was what I now call Hormonal Havoc that led to us eventually breaking up.

When I was just barely 29, right in the midst of chronic fatigue and not long before an intense episode of depression that landed me in the hospital for a week, I remember going to a doctor. She was a lovely woman and she was leading the way in integrative medicine, helping people get at the root cause of their illness.

At one point, I told her my husband and I wanted to start a family within the next year. I will always remember the expression on her face in that second. It embodied worry. That sad smile and look in her eyes about whether I could get pregnant and sustain a pregnancy and be healthy and happy felt like a big huge sack of sand had been dropped in my lap.

Between my teen years and about age 30, I pretty much ate some versions of the same foods every day all year long: bread, pasta, cereal and anything with sugar in it. Usually washed down with Mountain Dew or Pepsi.

And, if I'm being completely honest, I had no interest in changing what I was doing. It was working for me, or so I thought.

I was thin and active...and isn't that what life's all about?! While my more experienced 'wise self' knows that life is about way more than my pant size, that younger self had no idea that what I was eating every day, all year long, was not working for me at all.