Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 52

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I sat in my doctor’s white-box office in Rutland yesterday morning, ready to hear the diagnosis: I was anemic.

Or: I had thyroid disease.

Or: I had lyme disease.

I wasn’t entirely ready to hear a diagnosis of diabetes, another ailment which has been suggested to me, in large part because the sheer irony of that would’ve been unbearable. (Headline: “Woman Stops Eating Sugar: Instantly Becomes Diabetic!”) After more than two months, I felt it was at last time to discover the truth behind why I have been having recurring exhaustion attacks which shut me down for between one and three days at a time and render me so helpless that I lack the ability to do even the most basic, low energy activities: reading, knitting, smiling. Basically I stare vacantly into space, feeling like Oscar the Grouch on valium, and feeling annoyed at all that isn’t getting done. Wait- scratch that. I feel too crappy to care about all that isn’t getting done; I feel annoyed because sitting on the couch feeling crappy isn’t living.

But now was the moment of truth. Maybe I’d even find out the reason why virtually every time I’ve been to the doctor in the last fourteen or so years that we’ve lived here I’ve complained of “fatigue” of one sort or another, as he pointed out when I originally went in two weeks ago.

So I was prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for was for him to come in and tell me how ridiculously healthy I apparently am. He went through all the results with me line by line: white blood cells, urine sample, Lyme titer, the good cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, the ugly cholesterol… all the while using words like “excellent,” “exactly what we’d like to see,” and “very terrific.” (I swear, at one point he really did say: “Very terrific.” Mrs. Boersma, my twelfth-grade English teacher, clearly has never met my doctor.) He even said I drink enough water! I mean, who drinks enough water? Nobody!

I like my doctor, incidentally: he doesn’t rush me. He answers all my questions. He doesn’t tell me I’m crazy. And, every single visit he manages to refer to me as “young” at one point or another, a fact which endears him to me increasingly with each passing year.

But I don’t honestly know whether to be happy or sad at this news. I mean, where does it leave me? The last, most recent episode was so profound that I found myself morbidly depressed, thinking “I can’t go on like this.” Lying around and sleeping much of the day away on the living room couch might sound wonderful to many in our sleep-deprived, overworked society, but it’s not. Sleeping all the time, only to wake up wanting to sleep more isn’t luxurious or relaxing… it just feels like death.

So on that cheery and completely unmelodramatic note I will mention the fact that since last weekend I have fully recovered once again. With my regained energy I’ve been back to my old tricks, baking homemade hamburger rolls, making no-sugar waffles for breakfast and homemade mayo for the kid’s school-lunch tuna fish. I ‘m probably just a little too excited about opening the Andre-the-Giant-sized container of dextrose which arrived the other day, to use the sweetening ingredient in some of David Gillespie’s no-fructose dessert recipes. Strawberry Ricotta Cheesecake here we come! Ah, enthusiasm, how I missed you.

After my appointment and a few requisite Rutland-area errands I decided to celebrate my straight-A blood-work report-card by enjoying a very special treat: lunch at my favorite new restaurant, “Roots,” which specializes in local-fresh-organic food. (If you live around here, right about now you are saying “In Rutland?” Yes. You can have a lunch in Rutland that does not offer you “chips with that” or free refills.)

My beef, cabbage and rice dish arrived and was the perfect accompaniment to the blustery, brisk day outside, the kind of early June day before summer has completely made up its mind whether to come or not.

I sighed with contentment. I cracked open a new knitting magazine. I took a bite of cabbage and rice.

Oh my. That is so good.

Hmmm. So, there’s nothing “wrong” with me, I thought. Well, things could be worse.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 51

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Something is definitely wrong.

And I’m totally stunned by that fact. I think I was starting to feel so good, so healthy, that nothing could touch us- that our commitment to No Sugar was so profound that it would be the cure-all for all things. No more colds! No more hang nails! No more trouble finding a parking spot at the All-School Concert! Of course, this is silly, but the mind thinks silly things, makes deductions in the background when we aren’t looking that we realize later are deeply flawed, and, you know, dumb.

The problem is me: I’m sleeping all the time. I cannot get enough sleep. This isn’t your everyday, I’m-a-busy-tired-mom fatigue- which feels very normal to me- this is… strange. Like, I went to bed the other night at 9:30, slept until 6:30- a good nine hours- and then after the kids were off at school fell into a stupor for another two hours when my worried husband finally pried me off the couch with a crow-bar and made me eat something. I did not feel rested, or ready to get up. This morning after the kids got off to school I ate a piece of toast and then rendezvoused with the couch until nearly eleven AM. The morning gone, I woke up disoriented and kind of scared… what is happening to me?

My normal interest in our family meals, varying the kids lunches, making a good breakfast- all has gone out the window- I’m surviving at this point until the next time I can lie down and zonk out. Consequently, this week has been sketchy in the food department and I’m long overdue for visits to our supermarket, BJ’s Warehouse, stocking up on wholesale organic produce from our buying club, you name it. We’re out of everything: no fresh fruit in the house, no vegetables, no cream cheese, no milk, not even emergency Amy’s Bean Burritos in the freezer… my mental list of what we need is getting ever-longer and I haven’t even got the energy to get up off the couch and find a pencil.

Fortunately I don’t feel this way all the time- this is the third episode in the last perhaps two months. I hate it, but then after a few days it subsides and I figure it was a virus or something. But last week I decided the third time was the charm and I went to my general practitioner who ordered blood-work. According to him, by the way, five months of No Sugar shouldn’t show up in any significant way- except in our blood sugar count, which of course varies constantly.

So some of the suspects are: anemia, lyme disease, and thyroid disease. Fun stuff. And I know what you’re thinking, but no, definitely not pregnancy (phew!) since my dear “aunt” just visited last week…

Meanwhile, I’m trying very hard not to go back to sleep right now. It’s a very weird feeling to sleep and sleep and sleep and finally wake up ready to do… nothing. No energy, no strength, no va-va-voom. I’m getting a lot of reading done, since that’s one of the few things I have enough stamina for. I’m about to start “Suicide by Sugar” by Nancy Appleton, and I’m curious what she can tell me at this point that we have not already learned in our No Sugar journey thus far- so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Wish me luck. Better than that: wish me energy.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 50

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I find myself writing things like “once again, we realize that sugar is in absolutely everything including your sneakers,” and “as I mentioned before, my kids are happily eating their carob chip cookies, and plotting their eventual revenge.”

I feel like I am, how shall I say this? Repeating myself. There are two reasons for this: one, because of the blog format, I can never be sure what the reader reading this sentence right now already knows, so I reiterate a bit to make sure they’re with me to a reasonable extent. The second reason is due to the very nature of eating. I mean, what else do we do as often as eating? Three times per day plus snacks… It’s really a wonder we get anything else done. When traveling it often seems to me as if, for the Europeans, work is just a brief respite between the real business of the day- coffee, lunch, and dinner.

I think often too, about the Little-House-on-the-Prairie days, when it was a full-time job just to get those three meals on the table, day after day after day… The stomach does not take a day off- and neither did Ma.

Which brings up the notion of monotony. In a diet which has added sugar entirely absent from it, variety equals morale; and we need morale or we risk mutiny on the bounty. Whereas in the past I’d relied upon the health food section of the cereal aisle to provide me with variety, nowadays I work a whole lot harder than that. Breakfast is the hardest meal in the no-sugar day as David Gillespie concurs in Sweet Poison. In fact, one of Gillespie’s five “rules” for living fructose-free is: “Be careful at breakfast.” Oooooo! Sounds like a good title for a new diabetic horror movie. SOOOO many breakfast foods are laden with an obscene amount of sugar that it’s no wonder we sometimes get confused: “Hey Mom, is this blueberry buckle for breakfast, or dessert?”

As if this weren’t bad enough, people delight in celebrating with “Sadie Hawkins”-style sugar too- sugar when you weren’t expecting it, such as having “breakfast for dinner”- pancakes with maple syrup- or “pie for breakfast”- which they do as an annual fundraiser in a nearby town. I’m all for fun and variety, but even before our Year of No Sugar began, the thought of having a nice piece of lemon meringue pie for breakfast makes me a little queasy.

But somehow, all this breakfast sugar isn’t supposed to count. No one thinks of having chocolate cake with ice cream for breakfast- ew!- but what is the difference between that and french toast with syrup or- if you’re at IHOP- chocolate chips and whipped cream?

So I work hard at breakfast. In the case of my youngest daughter- who is six and has been clinically diagnosed as “always hungry”- I’m actively competing with the school breakfast which features nifty things like Frosted Flakes and Goldfish Grahams with crystalline fructose (Better than just fructose! It’s like sugar heroin!) If I’m going to get her at least reasonably full before she encounters that sugar buffet, I’m going to have to be creative.

Therefore, whereas I used to sleepily throw three or four boxes on the table with some bowls, now I actively plan a loose breakfast rotation: soft boiled eggs and toast, yogurt with strawberries, oatmeal with bananas, toast with cheese and cantaloupe, bagels and cream cheese with slices of orange… occasionally I brew some peppermint tea, or my husband makes a frothy milk drink we call a “steamer,” (which we grew to love back when we used to make it with maple syrup.) This morning I sprang European “Ovaltine” on them (American Ovaltine has sugar in it) and the results were mixed: they loved it, but … the drink was so good it got them reminiscing about other delicious drinks they only distantly recall at this point: hot chocolate, hot apple cider, juice.

“I really miss having sugar,” Greta, our oldest, said with feeling, “It’s so hard.”

“Me too.” Ilsa agreed, lightly.

Then Greta had a thought which she hadn’t before.

“Hey- what will we do about Halloween? And Thanksgiving? And Christmas?” she was wide-eyed, preparing to panic.

Oh boy. “Well, we’ll have to be creative,” I began, “we’ll…”

“I love Halloween,” Ilsa broke in. Oh boy. Here we go, I thought, melt-down time. Where’s the Kleenex…?

“But,” Ilsa added, “what should I be? Should I be a monkey?”

And just like that, the conversation shifted and panic was averted. For now. I was amazed at Ilsa’s simple, unconscious reminder to me: sure, food is really, really important. But it isn’t everything.