Tag Archives: david gillespie

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 57

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As it turns out, there are several things that a strict diet of no added sugar cannot guarantee. It won’t guarantee you won’t get poison ivy on your neck. It won’t guarantee you won’t suffer a wracking coal miner’s cough so alarming that all activity in public places ceases until it subsides. And it won’t guarantee you won’t have to put down your nineteen year old kitty cat.

That’s been my week, how about you? As far as I can tell, we’ve had a good week and a half of summer vacation, and already it’s kicking our butts. My eleven year old has a bruise the size of a pear and the color of an eggplant on her upper thigh and a nasty looking puffy ankle from some Lord-of-the-Flies-style shenanigans at a friend’s potluck the other night, and my six year old came home from that same event with an inexplicably puffy eye and, of course, more bug bites to add to our rather sophisticated collection. After a nice long hike another night we returned home to find a tick firmly attached to Greta’s ear, as well as a generous sprinkling of the aforementioned poison ivy- or is it poison parsnip?- across my entire neck. I look so festive that the fellow who mows our lawn actually took a step back when he noticed it.

Plus it’s been raining like the dickens, and this morning I made the incredibly difficult decision to put down our kitty who’s been with me since my last year of college. Yes- basically half my life has been spent in the company of this furry, orange little guy. Right now I’m waiting for the rain to stop so I can resume digging the hole in the backyard for him. Yeah, it’s been way too eventful around here.

With so many things going on- trips to the vet, running out of band-aids and topical Benadryl- it’s hard to focus on something like a Year of No Sugar. Suddenly, it all seems so… random. Pointless. In my sadness and anxiety about our cat, I’ve had virtually no appetite and absolutely no urge to cook. This week has been the week of using up all our convenience meals- that one frozen bagged pasta we can have, Annie’s mac and cheese, bagels.

At least I can report that I didn’t turn up at that potluck empty handed: I brought my dextrose Coconut Cake, courtesy Sweet Poison author David Gillespie’s recipe, which he developed with his wife Lizzie, who I fervently hope is writing a cookbook as we speak. This is the second time I’ve made this cake and I must say it can complete with any other coconut cake… It’s delicious. The kids, who had banded together and were roaming the drippy lawn and crowded living room like packs of wild dingos, discovered the cake about twenty minutes after I set it on the buffet and I’m delighted to say it disappeared forthwith. I actually had to jump in and hurriedly snag some to make sure my kids got dessert- since of course they wouldn’t be having any other sweet that might make an appearance at the table.

It’s hard at a potluck to know what items will truly be sucrose-free, heck, usually I can’t even tell what half the dishes are. So we just go with our instincts: avoiding all dressings, pita and sandwich breads, any deli meats, meat cooked with barbecue sauce, and so on. We ended up getting by just fine, getting our fill with fruit salad, olives, french bread and a lovely pasta salad made with garlic scapes by our hostess Eva that I had no choice but to go back for seconds of.

So, life is good. Life goes on. Someday, this wretched cough will truly subside. Someday, I won’t be so sad about losing my kitty. The bug bites will heal and maybe we’ll even stop picking at the scabs (no promises, though.) The chickens will keep laying eggs and the tomato plants will get bigger. If you’ll pardon me though, it has stopped raining now, so I better go finish digging that hole.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 56

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I’ve been on pins and needles all this last week, worried about Thursday. Thursday Vermont Public Radio reporter Steve Zind came to interview me about the No Sugar project.

Ack!

See, here’s the thing. As I sit here writing my fifth sentence, (does “Ack!” Count as a sentence?) I realize I’ve already gone back and changed the first sentence at least three times. That’s what I love about writing- the process of going through and getting it to say exactly what you mean to say in exactly the way you mean to say it. This is the reason I’d be a truly terrible politician, for example, or trial lawyer, or radio interviewer for that matter: I don’t really do “off-the-cuff.” I live in perpetual awe of those who can.

Instead, I do the opposite. I love finally finding the right word that hits your meaning on the head like a soft, firm hammer. I love the fact that I can sit down and write for ten minutes and when I look up I realize it has actually been two hours. I love going back and reading something I thought maybe wasn’t all that great and totally surprising myself by being entertained or interested by it after all- as if it had been written by somebody entirely different from me.

But the interview went fine- I mean it probably went great. Steve Zind is an incredibly nice guy, and besides that he was honestly interested in our weird little project. He asked great, to-the-point questions and worked to steer me back on course whenever I got away from the original question too far or completely lost my train of thought. (Hello? Earth to Eve!) He even went with me to the supermarket for a bit of grocery shopping and it was fun sharing with him my nomadic life on the fringes of the supermarket. Like the old adage, we stuck to the store’s outer perimeter of produce, meat and dairy, steering clear of the darker inner sanctum of processed everything. Like we were on a recon mission, we ventured in on our rappel ropes only to quickly nab boxes of Shredded Wheat and Triscuits before zipping back out as if those scary florescent Cheetos might suddenly launch a surprise attack.

In addition to not being so terrific on the spot, another insecurity of mine is the whole not-being-a-doctor thing. I mean, I can read David Gillespie’s Sweet Poison and watch Dr. Robert Lustig’s “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” till I am blue in the face, (I am up to four times through The-90-minute-Bitter-Truth at this point) but I just can’t quite seem to keep all those metabolic transactions in my brain at one time. No- that’s not true. I can keep it in my brain, mostly, but not in the super thorough I-know-this-stuff-like-the-back-of-my-hand-way that is required when you are called upon to coherently explain the matter to someone else.

But I did my best anyway- and ever since I’ve been going it over in my head wondering how much of an idiot I really sounded like. Of course, another bad thing- but also a really good thing- about being interviewed is that sooner or later someone will ask you a question you haven’t heard yet, and haven’t prepared an answer for.

“What about joy?” he asked me as we drove toward the Price Chopper. “Isn’t some part of eating fundamentally about joy?” It’s a great question. Way better than “but you eat honey, right?” or “have you lost any weight?” or any of the other questions we regularly get asked.

I don’t remember my answer, but using my super-human powers of interview revisionism, I would like to re-answer that question now. What I should’ve said is this: A lot of people, my husband included, either take or used to take tremendous joy in smoking cigarettes. The question is, at what point does that joy get overridden by the realization that this thing is very probably addictive, and going to kill you? Because that’s what we’re talking about: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, liver disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer and… have I mentioned anything that scares you yet?

My Aunt Bonnie died of alcohol-induced diabetes. Although I didn’t know her very well, my understanding is that she didn’t have the money or the insurance to care for her illness, but she sure as heck wasn’t about to give up drinking. That wasn’t even on the table. The way my cousin tells it, Aunt Bonnie made her choice.

Bottom line: how much substance-related joy would you be willing to give up, if you knew it was going to kill you? Cigarette smokers, drug addicts and alcoholics the world over have been forced to answer that question time and again, and I suspect, eventually, all us sugar consumers will be too.

Can we have occasional sugar? Sure, if we think about the right way: like the occasional drink, or the occasional cigar or cigarette (if we’re one of those rare individuals who can smoke the occasional cigarette.) If we can restore sugar to its place in our culture as something truly special. I don’t know about you, but if I eat something at every meal including breakfast and snacks… I don’t consider that special.

That’s what I should’ve said.

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.