Lately, I’ve been feeling like the anti-Charlie Sheen… no tiger’s blood, no rock stars from Mars, and I am definitely not winning. After getting back bleary-eyed from my marathon odyssey to Minnesota, I crashed at home surprisingly hard: I slept for most of the first day home, unable to move off the couch for more than a shower. And because I recently wrote about not getting sick yet this year since beginning the No Sugar Project, it was kind of inevitable that I came down with a nasty head cold on the plane ride home.

Meanwhile my husband has valiantly been keeping the home No Sugar fires lit while trying to juggle kids, school, work, after-school activities, meals and pets. He made a few very helpful discoveries in my absence such as the fact that we can eat a great deal of the food at Al Ducci’s italian foods shop in Manchester Vermont, including most of their homemade prepared salads and breads. Also, he discovered the first real, honest-to-goodness, no sugar cookies we’ve found- adorable tiny Ginger Snaps by ”goRAW”- as well as some delicious granola bars by a company called “Two Moms in the Raw.”

Unfortunately there is one catch… the granola bars are amazing, but they do have organic agave nectar in them… technically a no-no. But we’ve getting desperate around here. So far we’ve been adhering to a “one exception” per person, (inspired by Barbara Kingsolver doing the same in her family’s “eat local for a year” project documented in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) as follows: the kids’ exception has been Polaner All-Fruit Jam (which contains fruit juice as a sweetener), Steve’s and my exception has been wine. So maybe we can have that one granola bar on days when we aren’t having jam/wine? Oh, I’m just not sure about this…

And then I found something out that blew my mind. Mayonnaise. Yup. Check. Go check now- I’ll wait.

See? You see what I’m up against here? How, I ask you, how am I supposed to make it through the year without mayonnaise? Tuna fish? Egg salad? Chicken sandwiches? Have you ever tried to make homemade mayonnaise? I did once- I have a distant memory of a glop in a blender that ended not so much in a tasty condiment as disaster.

It is moments like this that make me seriously question what the heck we’re trying to do here. Are we just torturing ourselves, I wonder? Splitting hairs and starving ourselves and antagonizing waitstaff throughout Southern Vermont? Only to find at the end of the day sugar is hiding under our pillow, laughing at us all along?

Yes, folks. Only eight weeks into our fifty-two week project and I’ve become a raving, paranoid lunatic with a head cold and an obsessive ingredient-reading disorder. As my Dad used to say when he was trying not to swear in front of us kids: “Ohhhhhhh… SH–ugar.”