Tag Archives: no sugar family

A Year Of No Sugar: Postscript 8

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Here’s my situation: currently, I am somewhat frantically pulling together a book ( a fascinating book!! Soon-to-be described as “unputdownable!!” Coming to a New York Times Bestseller list near you!!) about last year, our family’s Year of No Sugar. In the book I am spending lots of time writing about spending more time cooking food at home from scratch, the direct result of which is that I have officially become busier and less available to cook food at home from scratch than ever before.

You have to love irony.

Dinner from the Food Fairy!

But the time has come, I suppose to put my money where my mouth is- or at least my cooking where my free moments are, which is to say, few and far between. I know that the conundrum of being torn between commitments to work and wanting to feed my family well is hardly unique, but if I thought last year was a challenge, this year is certainly proving to be even more so.

I’m not sure if it helps that I feel terrifically guilty about our new state of being, about the fact that we’re eating out on average two or sometimes three times a week compared to only once a week previously. It’s not even that we’re suddenly eating lots of sugar in doing so… we’re not. In fact, we’re still eating at the same we-really-do-make-it-ourselves establishments we found refuge in during all of our No Sugar escapades last year. We’re still being incredibly moderate when we do indulge in a dessert- rather than ordering three or four desserts, ordering one dessert and three or four spoons instead. We’re still avoiding soda and juice as if it were rat poison, still packing school lunches at home, still even making my own bread and tomato sauce from scratch.

So what’s my problem, exactly? For one thing, I’m too lucky. I know that there are lots of people who couldn’t afford to eat out this much, and certainly not at the nicer kinds of places that are likely to have cooked their meals from scratch. I’m also incredibly fortunate to have discovered Kate- the talented caterer who lives a mile from my house and who offers wonderful home-cooked soups, quiches and biscuits once per week for pick-up straight out of her kitchen. Out here in the country- where we like to brag that you have to drive half an hour to buy a carton of milk- her appearance on the scene with fresh, homemade, convenient take-out made with local ingredients is nothing short of a Food Miracle… if I have a Food Fairy Godmother I think it might be Kate.

Is it okay that I’m this lucky? Somehow it makes me feel like I’m cheating. Other times it’s still hard to get the dishes done, the piano practicing complete, the homework read, the activities attended and the children showered and in bed before we have to get up and do it all over again- even with those crutches. There’s some weird, control-freaky part of me that is reluctant to give myself a break and remember that we’re all human and to -as they say- take it one day at a time. Reminding me of those things is one of the things my husband is here for, apparently- because he’s awfully good at it, even if he does have to repeat himself a bit. As he points out, I can’t spend all morning making a homemade lasagna and then beat myself up for not accomplishing any writing, and neither can I write all afternoon and then be annoyed at myself that I didn’t make every item on our dinner table from scratch.

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We can’t have our cake and eat it too (if you’ll excuse the sugar-based proverb.) When I was pre-teenager my mom began law school: I remember it well- it was the same year she started buying Swanson Hungry Man dinners. There it is, right? The modern day trade-off- the liberated woman bargain, if you like- in a nutshell.

We can’t eat like crap because it’s convenient and then be surprised when our health suffers. Neither can we spend our lives grinding our wheat berries by hand and churning our own butter, and ever expect to accomplish anything but the relatively thankless and quickly forgotten job of getting ourselves fed for one more day. Somehow we have to prioritize the things we care about. How do you choose between your ambition and your food? Your life’s work and your family’s health? You don’t, of course, but maintaining that balance is excruciatingly hard; a highwire act on rollerskates. In a rainstorm. I’m trying my hardest, but still, like any mom- I question myself. I wonder… could it be better?

A Year Of No Sugar: Postscript 3

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I feel like somebody chewed me up and spit me out. I sound like somebody who should consider giving up my three pack-a-day habit, at least while working at the coal mine. I am alternately forlorn and annoyed and impatient to be well again. I feel like I’m out of practice: I haven’t been sick in a while… at least not garden-variety-sick. Not regular, ordinary, I-just-have-a-nasty-headcold-and-deserve-to-be-grouchy sick.

Of course, I did have that mysterious, debilitating something in the fall time, (which to this day remains a mystery, albeit nearly a forgotten one as all symptoms have thankfully subsided, never to return, knock wood.) But honestly, I can’t quite recall the last time I was just plain sick. Sore-throat, chesty-cough, feel-like-a-piece-of-poo sick.

A few of the recent Steve Treats

Although everyone will say I’m crazy, I can’t help but consequently think my immunity has lowered since we went back “on” sugar. Insanity? Maybe. And for all that we’ve really only indulged this month in a fraction of what the average American family would actually consume, fructose-wise. For instance, we went out and bought ketchup and mayo. We’ve eaten at restaurants without putting the menu through the Spanish Inquisition. We’ve gotten take-out pizza and eaten at our local pancake house.

Interestingly, one thing I’ve found is that I really can’t take much sugar anymore. As I alluded to in an earlier post, it doesn’t taste right to me- it goes all funny and saccharine-tasting in my mouth. I can have the pancakes which have a small amount of sugar in the recipe itself, but maple syrup? In all but the most minute, eyedropper-dispensed quantities maple syrup no longer strikes me as palatable. I can order pizza with a tomato sauce that in all likelihood has some amount of sugar in it, but I no longer feel compelled to visit the platter of baklava strategically placed next to the cash register afterwards.

As if to compensate for this fact, my husband Steve has taken to regularly bringing me little treats- candy bars, hot chocolate cubes, bags of tiny cookies- to the degree that I have begun to wonder if he isn’t something of a pusher in this regard. I know, he wants me to relax, to enjoy myself. Especially when I don’t feel good, a little pick-me-up in the form of a Kit-Kat would once have vaporized in about a minute and a half.

Now? Not so much.

But the funny thing is, he won’t have those treats either, for a different reason: in the last two weeks he’s been on a super-strict Paleolithic-inspired diet in an attempt to shed some nagging pounds. In Steve’s deductions, not eating sugar wasn’t enough to compensate for other calorie-grabbing habits such as the nightly drink-or-three, or snacking before bed. On top of this he’s wondering if recent rumors are true that diet soda- which you’ll recall, was his one and only “exception” during our Year of No Sugar- actually can contribute to weight gain every bit as much as sugar can.

Breakfast of Champions Steve Style

So out has gone the soda, ditto the nightly drink. Out has gone the wheat and dairy. Out remains (once again) the sugar. So far he’s lost seven pounds, but it all looks torturous to me: most meals for him consist of eggs, steak or chicken, and water. I know, I know, look who’s talking, right? As a friend of ours recently put it, perhaps our family would do well to try A Year of Abstaining from Abstaining. I’m not sure we’re “meta” enough for that though.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if we could abstain from having the Mucus Truck parked on my chest. Could we do that? Just a thought.

A Year of No Sugar: Postscript 1

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Pop quiz: What’s harder than a Year of No Sugar?

Answer: The week after a Year of No Sugar.

Oy! I’m not sure why I was ever, ever looking forward to our release from the world of No Sugar… this week has easily been as hard as the very hardest No Sugar week. Why? Because, while No Sugar may be hard in terms of will power, it was always extremely easy in terms of the rules: “No Sugar” means: No. Sugar.

No, not in mayonaisse. Not in bacon. Not in buns or salad dressing or juice. I will not eat it in the house, I will not eat it with a mouse. Everywhere we went well-meaning waitresses and relatives and friends would politely try to argue “but there’s only a little… look! It says .000001%!…” But the rules as we had made them were simple. “Is it in the ingredients?” I would ask. And of course, it always was.

I love the straightforwardness of that. And I am hating the lack of it now. Sure, on midnight, at 12:01 as we watched Lady Gaga blather on about how magical New Year’s is in New York City, we each ate our treat for the evening (Ilsa: a cookie, Steve and Greta: a Lebanese pastry, me: a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup.) But the next morning was when it got complicated.

New Year's Day Breakfast

For breakfast we decided to visit one of our favorite local restaurants, Rathbun’s Maple Sugar House. The last time we had been there was last New Year’s Day, the very first day of our No Sugar family experiment, and before I was fully understanding that a pancake house would be entirely off the table in such a project. (Sometimes, admitedly, I can be a little slow on the uptake.)

Immediately, the questions started coming. “Can we get a hot chocolate?” “Can we have maple syrup?” “Can we have juice?” No hot chocolate. Yes maple syrup- but not a lot. No juice.

And the questions have just kept coming. I certainly can’t blame the kids- they’re simply trying to figure our what the new “rules” are. Trouble is, Steve and I don’t exactly know. “Moderation” is the most elusive term I know.

Monday morning, for example, Steve celebrated our last day of Christmas vacation by making another favorite and long-forbidden treat: crepes, with sugar and butter. Oh, how we had missed those. Sure, it was a lot less sugar than he would’ve ever used before, but I was starting to feel anxious… were things spiraling out of control? It was starting to feel like sugar was creeping in- making an appearance at almost every meal…

And then yesterday I took the girls to the supermarket. “Mom! Can we buy these crackers? And cereal? Actual real cereal?” “Ooo! What about roast beef?” We must’ve sounded like Amish on an annual trip to town. Gritting my teeth I capitulated on the crackers, but demurred on the cereal and roast beef. One thing at a time, I said.

I had even promised them- in a fit of guilt for all my family had put up with in the last year- to get them each a small check-out counter treat on the way out, as we had used to do quite often. This simple task, it turns out, was a fiasco. Did you know that ALL gum these days has not just sugar in it, but also sugar alcohols (maltitol, sorbitol, xylitol) or aspartame… and that most of them have both? Not to mention the phenol tocpherols or whtever toxic waste it is they put in gum these days that actually requires a warning label on the package. We were unable to find a single package of gum in which sugar was the only toxin.

I was astounded. Do we really give this little of a shit about what we’re putting into our bodies, our kids bodies? I wondered. I thought back to the huge sacks of Halloween candy the kids brought home in October- I mean, who knows what was in all that stuff. (Thank God it all sits uneaten in the back of our pantry cupboard. Maybe the kids will forget about it and I can throw it away after they’ve both gone to college.)

Another missed treat: Real BLTs!

And then there was the argument/discussion Steve and I had yesterday at lunch. It all started with me asking Steve not to buy maple syrup, segwayed into whether or not I’ll continue baking with dextrose, and touched on things like whether banana bread and apple muffins count as dessert and whether snacking between meals is okay or not. I imagine some people would think we are giving this whole what-we-eat and how-we-eat-it entirely too much thought, bordering on obsessive, and maybe we are. I really don’t know anymore. It’s exhausting. Personally, right now I’m feeling like moderation kind of sucks- it takes entirely too much thought and energy. I think we may have to go live under a rock and only eat pine cones from now on.

Of course, we can’t do that. And I honestly have no desire to be the dietary freaks of our community who carry their own marinated sawdust or whatever in a pouch with them so them can eat separately-but-equally everywhere they go- no. Yes, I admire folks like Scott and Helen Nearing or Tasha Tudor for being so passionate about their ways of life- they are fascinating to me. But their sacrifice was huge: they had to remove themselves from society in order follow those ideals- which above all sounds pretty lonely. So I guess we’ll have to muddle through and figure this out, tocpherols and all.

It’s almost too bad- there’s a lovely rock on our hill that doesn’t have anyone living under it yet.