Prednisone Made Me Do It: My Sweet Affair with Sugar and the Search for a Safer Fix

Back in 2006, I rolled into the operating room a lean 145 pounds on a 5’7” frame. My go to daily wear was crisp jeans ironed to military standards and shirts neatly tucked like I had a stylist on retainer. By the time the lung biopsy scars healed, I was down to 135—basically a walking anatomy chart. Fast-forward to 2009, and I’d somehow ballooned to 189 pounds, courtesy of one tiny yet terrifying word: prednisone.

If you’ve never met prednisone, let me introduce you. Imagine a drug that keeps you alive but makes you want to eat your own shoes. The hunger is so primal that skipping a snack feels like inviting chaos. On this stuff, I could demolish a box of cookies and still feel like a bear waking up from hibernation. My doctors assured me that a 30-pound gain wasn’t bad for someone on long-term steroids. Apparently, some folks pack on over a hundred. Comforting, right?

The cruel joke is that prednisone doesn’t just feed your hunger—it fuels it with a taste for sugar. Suddenly, every food group is a dessert category. My doctor, ever the realist, told me, “A pill weighs nothing.” It hit hard. Prednisone might make me crave sweets, but it wasn’t forcing my hand into the cookie jar. So, I did what any rational, sugar-fueled human would do—I started researching sweeteners like a mad scientist trying to outwit my own biology.

Enter the parade of artificial sweetness: Sweet & Low, Equal, NutraSweet, Splenda—the usual suspects. Sweet & Low tasted like licking a chemistry set. Equal wasn’t much better, and both carried that charming rumor of “causes cancer in rats.” Not exactly a glowing endorsement. Splenda seemed like the least offensive, and since it was “made from sugar,” I figured I’d found the holy grail of guilt-free sweetness. Except, of course, it wasn’t that simple.

Turns out, Splenda’s magic trick involves swapping out parts of sugar molecules for chlorine. Yes, chlorine. As in “the stuff that keeps pool water blue.” It passes through the body mostly undigested, which is how it dodges calories—but not necessarily consequences. The company’s own studies showed some worrisome effects in test animals: shrunken thymus glands, enlarged livers, and kidneys that probably wanted a word with management. And because there weren’t long-term studies, we—the living, breathing public—became the ongoing experiment.

So there I was, side-eyeing my Splenda packets like they might sprout fangs, wondering if anything was safe anymore. I turned back to nature like a repentant sinner—honey, the original sweetener. Problem is, honey’s natural doesn’t mean low-calorie. A tablespoon clocks in at 64 calories and 16 grams of sugar. That’s more sugar than regular sugar. It’s sweeter, sure, but also sneakier. My dreams of buzzing around guilt-free like a honeybee evaporated fast.

Then came Stevia, the darling of the “natural” crowd. A plant-based sweetener used for centuries in South America, championed in Japan, and suspiciously banned by the FDA for years. That alone made me curious—nothing screams “forbidden fruit” like government disapproval. Eventually, Stevia made its way into U.S. shelves labeled as a “dietary supplement,” not a sweetener. Bureaucratic semantics at its finest.

Of course, the story didn’t end with “and everyone lived happily ever after.” Some scientists decided to crash the Stevia party, raising alarms about possible effects on energy metabolism and fertility—at least in rats. Apparently, male rats on high doses had fewer swimmers, and female hamsters had smaller litters. Lovely. Nothing like knowing your zero-calorie sweetener might double as birth control. But again, these effects weren’t proven in humans, which leaves us right back in that comfortable gray zone of modern nutrition: “Probably fine.”

At some point, I realized that if I listened to every warning label, I’d starve to death. Everything seems to cause cancer, weight gain, or existential dread. So, I went with the only rule that’s ever really worked—moderation. I try to eat clean, favor natural foods, avoid processed sugar, and steer clear of anything that requires a periodic table to explain. I have lost most of that excess weight now.

Prednisone might have wrecked my appetite control, but it also taught me something valuable: you can’t fight your body, but you can work with it. What matters is learning to coexist with the chaos, one less spoonful of sugar at a time.

If you’ve found your own ways to balance sweet cravings, medication side effects, or just the daily circus that is chronic illness, I’d love to hear them. Drop a comment below or subscribe to keep following my misadventures in staying alive and (mostly) sane.