All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

Unknown's avatar

About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 79

A Year of No Sugar, , , , , , ,

“Crap!” I banged the steering wheel with my palm. “Rats!” I was driving back to Vermont after meeting, last week, with one of the sources of great inspiration for this project: David Gillespie.

In fact, everything had gone great. Despite my unpredictable health as of late, I’d managed to sufficiently finagle my schedule (and that of my family) soon after I found out the author of Sweet Poison was going to be in New York City for a few days and had offered to meet up with me.

Of course, getting anywhere from rural Vermont is a bit of a task, but since I wasn’t planning on being in his stomping grounds (Australia) anytime very soon, it seemed like a unique opportunity. So, dressed up and bleary-eyed, I left home at 6:45AM, drove to the suburb of White Plains, hopped on the commuter train and was dumped out in Grand Central in time to meet him for lunch at 1PM. Phew!

In fact, I was early. Really early. And nervous. I started to have “What if…?” thoughts. What if he thinks I’m a moron? What if this lunch will necessitate an involved conversation about GLUT proteins and the role of the hypothalmus? What if my writing is waaaay more interesting than I am in person?

I know, I know. But these are the things one worries about when you get to the restaurant where you’re supposed to be meeting one of your big inspirations and you have a full hour to get anxious. I was just deeply grateful that my car hadn’t failed me, the train hadn’t been late, I hadn’t gotten lost, I didn’t feel nauseous and it wasn’t a bad hair day.

And of course, I needn’t have worried. David Gillespie, I am happy to report, is about as easy-going a guy as you’re going to encounter. He’s reserved, witty, and quietly passionate about his work. Like me, he’s the kind of person who prefers to state his case in print, and let others make of it what they will, and who isn’t especially fond of having to “sell” people on his ideas in person.

In fact, he didn’t start out to make a No Sugar movement. Rather, he says, when folks were curious how he had managed to lose such a tremendous amount of weight, he would reply “I stopped eating sugar.”

“Well, of course, that wasn’t good enough!” Gillespie laughed over lunch. “So I decided to write the book. And then I could tell them to read that!”

It worked so well that Gillespie has sold over 200,000 copies of Sweet Poison in Australia, and many more of the follow-up companion book The Sweet Poison Quit Plan. Gillespie told me that was the motivation for his twenty-some-odd hour flight to America: to find a publisher to distribute these volumes in the U.S. (Currently, purchasing these books in the U.S. requires they be sent from Australia at a premium.)

And the book’s power to convince has worked well. I was amazed to hear that in Gillespie’s children’s school, in addition to making provisions for children with allergies and food sensitivities, they also make provisions for kids who aren’t eating sugar. Let me say that again: they make provisions for the children who aren’t eating sugar. As many as ten different children in a single grade level.

!!!!

Greta’s Testing Treats

By way of contrast, I related the story of my older daughter’s recent standardized testing, which went on for three days, the by-product of which was a tiny mountain of treat wrappers which she dutifully carried home for me to see. “And this doesn’t include the ice cream every day!” she added, helpfully. I know the teachers are simply rewarding the kids for their hard work and that their intentions are entirely well-meaning. I know not everyone sees candy as a bad thing, but rather a harmless, inexpensive way of bestowing a little innocent affection on children.

However. At what point will we begin to realize our goodwill has run amuck? Your honor, I present Exhibit B: yesterday, at the Farmer’s Market of all places- where we buy much of our organic produce and hormone-free meat- there was candy bloody everywhere in anticipation of impending Halloween festivities. At this point, despite telling myself everyone’s intentions were kind, I was starting to get a little peeved. “What, do they not think they’ll be getting enough candy tomorrow?” I muttered. “Is an entire pillow-case-full not enough??” After demurring the bowl of cheap treats that was proffered, at nearly every single table, one fellow held out to us a bowl of brightly colored hot peppers, causing us to double-take. He laughed and assured us that the next table had candy.

“Yes,” I said, grimly. “There’s always candy!”

Lucky for Gillespie (who is father to six children, all of whom are subsisting un-deprived on No Sugar) they don’t have Halloween in Australia. They also don’t have High Fructose Corn Syrup. But they do have all the same sugar-related health problems as Americans (diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc.), which surely negates the argument that HFCS is any worse than plain old familiar sugar.

Halloween Hot Peppers

I learned this, and so many other interesting things at our lunch. I learned that balsamic vinegar isn’t really vinegar and is fortified with sugar. I learned that Crisco was invented in 1911. I learned that Gillespie’s next two books will detail what he feels is the other great dietary scourge of our time: seed oils. (Canola, vegetable, corn, hydrogenated oils etc.) According to Gillespie, these are even harder to ferret out than sugar, and are the other piece of our health puzzle, namely: cancer. Whoa.

I learned that Gillespie and I read all the same books and that his first book was tentatively titled “Raisin Hell” because somebody, somewhere, got confused and thought the book was about the dangers of “Fruit Toast.” (Get it? Fructose? Ha ha!!)

And I thoroughly enjoyed having lunch with perhaps one of the only people on the planet who would nod knowingly when I blurt out “And what’s the deal with agave!?!”

So why was I so annoyed on the drive home? I realized, way-belatedly, that I had completely forgotten the bloggers code: Always. Take. Pictures. Did I take a picture of me and him? Did I take a picture of what we ate? The restaurant? The bum outside? Anything??? Nope. You know, sometimes it’s a wonder I manage to leave the house with my head still attached. Oh well.

But I know what you’re wondering: where do two No Sugar proponents eat for lunch in New York City? We ate at Les Halles (fittingly, the restaurant of another of my favorite writers, Anthony Bourdain.) We had some very nice steaks and french fries. And a side salad… with no dressing.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 78

A Year of No Sugar, , , ,

Recently I was talking to my mom on the phone and she said “How much time do you have left on this thing anyway? Two months?”

And it hit me- she’s right. We’ve been on No Sugar for ten months now… which means we’re, uh… we’re… five-sixths of the way done!

Sesame Cookies- The First Attempt

It does make me glad to know we’ve made it this far, and that, despite several dreams I’ve had to the contrary, I haven’t suddenly forgotten the project and ordered a hot fudge sundae, only to suddenly, panic-stricken, remember- gasp! The Project!- half-way through eating it. (Yes, I’ve really had those dreams. Sometimes they’re petit fours. I don’t know why. I’m like, “Petit fours? Really?”) I’m also glad, of course, because some days No Sugar can be a certified pain in the tookas.

Looking back lo those many months ago when we first started out though, I can discern in myself a bit of the wide-eyed zealot, which I think you kind of have to be in order to attempt a project of this magnitude, and truthfully, obnoxiousness. I had some weird degree of fun in finding the sugar where we least expected it… as if to say: look! See? I’m not crazy! They’re the ones that are crazy!?! See! Ha ha! Why are you all looking at me funny?

Nowadays, I know the drill. I know it so well it can be maddening. I could play parlor tricks with my wealth of fructose knowledge. (“Go ahead, check the ingredient list. It’s there. Yeah, I’ll wait.”) We rarely make rookie mistakes anymore, no longer bring home things we haven’t read the teeny-tiny ingredient-print of closely enough. We know which items on the restaurant menus are safe and which are verboten before we even ask. Our lapses aren’t the exciting “Whoops, I had a chocolate eclair!” variety, but rather the mundane items we know better about: my husband Steve looks the other way while I eat a sandwich roll which undoubtedly was made with some minuscule amount of sugar… and I try not to look askance at him while he leaves the bacon pieces on his restaurant salad. Bless me father for I have sinned… I had impure thoughts about my neighbor’s shrimp cocktail sauce.

Nonetheless, it’s been a year since I’ve had a glass of juice. Or a candy bar. We’ve been to cotton-candy-less circuses and cider-doughnut-less days at the apple orchard. Do I still crave these things? Yeah, but it’s different. The loudspeaker demand in my head has shrunken to a wistful sigh. When we visited the orchard and smelled the cider donuts in the air I deeply inhaled the smell, appreciating the sweet, sad, fall-ness of it. It was lovely. Then Steve said, “Let’s get out of here- that’s torture!”

I can still get excited about the project though, just in different ways. Right now I’m trying to replicate the lemon-sesame seed cookies we get at the health food store from GoRaw, (inspired, in part, by the “What-are-these-covered-in-gold-leaf?” price tag.) I love how excited everyone gets in our house when I make No Sugar desserts: the kids jump up and down and yell “cookies!! cookies!! C-O-O-K-I-E-S!”

When the very first batch came out of the oven my six-year-old Ilsa came to grab not one but two, and I asked her “It’s a new recipe- How do you know you’re going to like them?”

She gave me a look that said she’s pretty sure I couldn’t possibly be that stupid.

“They’re cookies, Mom!” she patiently explained.

I felt bad, then, when she had to come back and spit the cookie into the sink.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 77

A Year of No Sugar, , , , , ,

I can pinpoint almost the exact moment when the other person’s face changes. If there were words running across their forehead like a stock ticker they would read: “Uh-oh. Here it comes.” It’s that moment when I start telling them about the No Sugar Project.

By virtue of the project I’ve initiated here, you might be tempted to think I’d be a pretty good in-person advocate of No Sugar: proselytizing at every conceivable opportunity, keenly expounding on a handful of key salient facts and shocking statistics, handing out my little business cards printed with my name and website address like they were, well… candy.

But I’m so not like that it’s kind of ridiculous. So when I’m at a bonfire party, say, like we were last Saturday night, and my daughter runs up to me complaining about the fact that there isn’t anything to drink but apple cider and what should she do… then, to the curious person I was talking to, I go into Explaining Mode. Half apologetic, I relate the Reader’s Digest version of our “Family Project,” carefully monitoring the listener’s face for the tell-tale switch from curiosity to boredom, repulsion, defensiveness.

Of course, most friends and acquaintances are way too gracious to express these reactions outright, instead I get the forehead ticker. Something every-so-subtle shifts in their posture towards me and they assume the expression of someone who is politely interested, yet has no intention of changing any aspect of their current life, thank you very much. They are ever-so-subtly on their guard, as if I had casually turned the conversation towards the fact that aliens talk to me through my toaster oven.

At the bonfire I got several different variants of this reaction throughout the course of the evening. It’s hard. Even though I am a “True Believer” to the Sugar-is-a-Toxin cause: I am a writer to the core, and extemporizing is not my strong suit, to put it kindly. Instead, I much prefer to sit and put words together, reviewing them until it all comes out right- waaaaay better, more convincing and interesting than I ever could have described in person.

Plus, I’m just really, really bad at being persuasive. I would have been the worst debate team member ever. Whereas my husband is frequently described as the kind of guy who could sell snow to eskimos, I on the other hand, would have a hard time selling lemonade in the desert. In such a conversation, I can’t help but feel anxious that the other person will feel put-upon, like I’m trying to tell them What To Do– like I’m sooooooo smart that I have all the answers.

Not everyone reacts this way, of course. Every so often I’ll end up talking to someone who is genuinely intrigued by No Sugar, doesn’t feel threatened, and asks questions that are clearly motivated by actual interest. Then it gets kind of fun.

Anyway, like all parties in Vermont this was a potluck, so I decided to let dessert do some of the talking for me. I brought my Famous-In-Our-Family No-Sugar Coconut Cake, which you may recall is a recipe from David Gillespie’s terrific “how much sugar” website. Even though I’m painfully awkward about it, I tried to encourage everyone I spoke with to try the cake. In some cases, for all their enthusiasm I might as well have been offering them Castor Oil Pudding.

But after the first bite a new look came over their faces, and the stock ticker changed. “Oh!” It now read. “This not only tastes like dessert, but- actually- a really good dessert!”

My favorite part was watching people come over and take a piece who had no idea that it was any different from any other on the buffet table. “Oh!” one woman exclaimed, “It’s still warm!”

“Really?” her companion asked. “Get me a piece too, will you?” Before long, the entire cake was gone.

And, I am happy to say, sitting among a host of pies and cookies, it was the first dessert to go. It probably helped that most other desserts seemed to be supermarket purchases- cookies in plastic boxes, pies in aluminum tins with stickers on the cellophane. Delight in my culinary success, however, turned to dismay when my children came to me complaining bitterly that the only dessert they were allowed to have on the table was gone and they hadn’t even gotten a piece. Whoops.

I promised up and down that I would make another one, just for us. Tomorrow. I promise. Satisfied by my assurances, they went back to whooping with their glow sticks in the dark.

Beyond promising another Coconut Cake, I don’t have all the answers, of course, any more than anyone else. We’re all just fumbling about trying to do the best we can in a world that moves faster and faster every day. We want to protect our families and ourselves but feel frustrated by the lack of answers and the potential for disrupting our life, our routine, what we have come to understand as “normal.” Don’t mess with my world,” those forehead-tickers seem to read silently, “I have a hard enough time as it is without you telling me I can’t use convenience foods or have a soda when I want to.”

I know. It’s a message that’s hard to hear. And there aren’t lots of clear answers… yet. But I firmly believe there will be, and when they start to come we will look back and be amazed all at once that we didn’t see it before… just like with cigarettes, or lead paint, or DDT or BPA. Toxins that were really fun or convenient until we realized- they were killing us.

I don’t want to make people’s lives any harder than they already are. I don’t want to take away joy. But after all I’ve read and experienced, I can’t help but wonder what causes all these modern maladies? Why are so many people so sick? What’s up with skyrocketing diabetes/obesity/cancer/autism/heart disease/weird new allergies? No Sugar isn’t the answer to all these things- but given it’s overwhelming prevalence in our society, it’s pretty likely to be the answer to some of them. And maybe a lot of them.

Couldn’t we turn our stock tickers off long enough to begin to find out?