Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year of No Sugar: Post 31

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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.”

A Year of No Sugar: Post 30

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The Mayo Clinic is a humbling place.Whenever I think I’m having a tough time here because I’m having trouble finding something to eat- I can’t eat the dinner rolls, or the bacon, or the tortillas, or the entire bloody complimentary breakfast bar- I remind myself of this very important fact: here at Mayo I am surrounded by folks who have troubles worlds away from mine.

Not to mention that my No Sugar regime is self-imposed. Nonetheless, I take it pretty seriously- ask any waitress who’s had to run to the kitchen three times to ask about ingredients for me. In fact, I’ve gotten to the point where I dread the asking, because I fear I’m going to get “The Look.” “The Look” is that mixture of dismay and confusion which regularly appears on the waitress, cashier, or cafeteria line lady’s face when I ask if the penne with red peppers and broccoli has sugar in it.

“Sugar in it?” they always say, as if they perhaps didn’t hear me correctly.

That being said, I probably couldn’t have found a place on earth as willing to accommodate my ingredient queries as they are here. Because of the clinic, they are used to fielding just about every question you can ask about their foods… so many folks here have restrictions, special diets or upcoming test requirements. But even the diabetics aren’t asking quite the same question that I’m asking. Sometimes I preface it by saying “I have a little bit of a weird question…”

Now, on Saturdays and Sundays Mayo Clinic is closed, and so are, consequently, a whole lot of the restaurants. What stays open is just the kind of food I totally can’t eat… sub chains and coffee shops. In the sub shop the meats are probably cooked with glazes and other additives which are likely to include sugar, and the bread usually has it too; coffee shops are basically one big dessert.

On Saturday night I took my Dad to the sub chain inside our hotel. While he ordered his sandwich I noticed that they had a “no carb” option of wrapping your ingredients inside a large lettuce leaf rather than their bread (which- I checked- had sugar.) Rather than enter into a ten-hour discussion of the ingredients of the various cold cuts, I ordered the veggie sub with the no carb option… basically a vegetable bonanza, with a slice of cheese thrown in there for good measure. I couldn’t very well add mayonnaise because that has sugar (oh yes!) so I slathered on some mustard and dug into a very crunchy meal.

The next day was equally tricky. After a good breakfast of plain oatmeal and berries at a nearby hotel I thought I was full enough to get through till an early dinner. Not so much. I really should realize this about my metabolism by now, but somehow I still manage to convince myself that maybe I don’t really need to eat all three meals if it isn’t entirely convenient. Instead, I am like a wind-up toy that stops working when its short little energy source runs out.

So there I was, mid-afternoon, dinner still hours away, and not a thing in sight to eat. As usual when I miss a meal, I began to feel slightly ill, and then desperate. The Larabar from my suitcase had helped, but not enough. I couldn’t face another vegetable sandwich wrapped in lettuce, but I had an idea. I went to the counter at the sub shop and asked if I could just order some cheese.

“Just cheese?” the twenty-something man behind the counter asked. He checked with the sandwich makers behind him, “We can do just cheese, right?”

No one could think of any reason not to sell me some cheese. “Hey- there’s no reason why we can’t!” he said brightly, and he rang it up. The cheese came to 75 cents. After checking the ingredients I also added a bag of potato chips and received my tiny little package of cheese from the pick-up counter.

Back in my room I was sorry to see they had only given me two small pieces- should’ve asked for two or three servings worth. Oh well- paired with the banana I had stolen from the largely inedible (for me) breakfast bar, and the chips it still made a very serviceable lunch.

It was all there: I had some carbohydrates, some salt, some fat and some fructose wrapped in fiber and sprinkled with micronutrients. I was happy with my little improvised meal and even happier that it put a stop to the gnawing in my belly.

And honestly, it was waaaaay better than a lettuce and mustard sandwich.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 29

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Here’s what I really want right now: a cookie. Here is what I am having instead: leftover fettuccine alfredo. This could explain- possibly- why after more than two months without added sugar in my diet, I have yet to lose a single pound.

Not that I was trying to lose weight; I’m not. But I notice it in particular because whenever I describe the No Sugar Project to people the first thing they ask is about things I have noticed that are different. “Have you lost any weight?” “Are the kids better behaved?” “Do you feel any better?”

I hate to disappoint them, but the answers aren’t very satisfyingly definitive. No, I haven’t lost weight, but I do find that I seem to be hungrier and eat more. No, I don’t think the kids are noticeably calmer, but then again hyperactivity wasn’t a problem to begin with. In fact, soon after viewing the No Sugar Project’s inspiration (Dr. Robert Lustig’s YouTube lecture “The Bitter Truth”) we stopped buying juice altogether and began a family drink policy of milk or water only, and that was many months ago, pre-project. Consequently the before/after isn’t going to be as dramatic as it might be if up until December 31 we all regularly drank soda/juice/Gatorade, or those whipped cream-and-sprinkles concoctions that now that pass for “coffee.”

But I do feel better, healthier. I think. Sure, it could just be the placebo effect- I think I’m healthier, therefore I feel healthier. But then again, and I’m going to knock on wood very loudly before, during, and after typing this- neither my husband nor I has been sick since we began the no sugar project, and the girls have only suffered sniffles & a mild sore throat for about three days. For my husband, this is not so unusual: he is a health freight train. Germs mostly just seem to bounce off of him. As for me, however, my failure to celebrate February with an unpleasant illness- or series of illnesses- is notable. Again, coincidence? Placebo effect? Who knows.

Meanwhile, I’m still at the Mayo Clinic with my Dad and helping him navigate the maze of tunnels, hallways, doctor’s appointments and tests. I had heard it was an incredible place, and about that there is no doubt. My Dad and I have had about a dozen conversations about how in-a-good-way different Mayo is from the rest of the American health-care world.

In addition to a scheduling system that allows patients to efficiently zip through tests and consultations at an almost alarming rate, how ridiculously friendly and helpful every person one encounters here is, and the fact that the doctors routine consult one another about even the simplest test, prescription or diagnosis… in addition to all that they have Really Cool Stuff sprinkled about such as a multi-million dollar art collection, a lovely grand piano which fills the atrium with live music throughout the day, and a free patient education center where one can go to learn more about a diagnosis.

I was particularly struck by the existence of this though: on the Pulmonary (lung) floor, by no coincidence you will happen upon the Center for Tobacco Free Living. It’s something which I imagine wouldn’t have been remotely possible only a few scant decades ago, back when four out of five doctors smoked Camels. If you didn’t live through it, a good way to get a feel for that era’s attitude towards smoking it is to watch “Mad Men,” the wildly popular TV drama about ad executives set in the fifties. After about the first ten minutes and you’ll have seen every character smoking with such enthusiasm that you half expect them to pass the pack to both the children and the pets.

I wonder if one day we’ll look back and have a similar “what were we thinking?” attitude towards today’s orgy of sugar consumption. Do we think it’s a coincidence that there are now so many diabetics in our culture that they can support their own mainstream magazine? Are we wearing blinders because it’s so much fun to eat sugar, just like it was so much fun to smoke? Or because the sugar industry is so powerful and influential it can quash any attempts at regulation (such as a soda tax, for example?) just as Big Tobacco was once powerful enough to silence obvious medical concerns? Today’s Americans can hardly seem to pass up dessert after any lunch or dinner, just as yesterday’s Americans felt an after-dinner smoke was both a patriotic right and a well-deserved perk of belonging to modern civilization.

When I venture into the Mayo cafeteria I do manage to find a few things to eat- so far salad with cottage cheese has been my mainstay. Virtually everything else on the long cafeteria line- from the hot entrees and sandwiches to the puddings and sodas- has sugar in it… even here, at the medical equivalent of the Super Friends Hall of Justice. Nearby, at the coffee shop, as I sit and drink my tea I watch person after person after person pull Coke after Coke after Coke out of the drink cooler. It does make me wonder how many people are here at Mayo for some type of Metabolic Syndrome. And it makes me wonder if there will ever be a Mayo Center for Low Fructose Living.