Tag Archives: no sugar life

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 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.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 17

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This project certainly has its up and downs. Just a few days ago I was on the verge of despair: a good and trusted friend had offered the observation that our project was big on “deprivation,” and this sent me into a bit of a tailspin.

Why was I doing this exactly? Am I a masochist at heart? Worse, am I torturing my family in a misguided effort to further my own career as a writer? To give me fodder for a book? Wouldn’t that pretty much make me the culinary equivalent of Joan Crawford?

It didn’t help that I made the mistake of taking the girls with me to the supermarket, so we could drool over all the lovely products in shiny packages that we weren’t buying. Note to self: go to Price Chopper during school hours. At home- away from all the shiny bells, whistles and cartoon characters- is where the kids are at their most philosophical about the project, which is nice because it would seem to indicate they aren’t feeling, you know, deprived.

At school, I see them struggling- which is hard for me. Both of them have graduated from “Mommy I had a brownie at school today” to “Mommy, I had a brownie at school today- I’m sorry,” to “Mommy, everyone had a brownie at school today- but I couldn’t! It was terrible!”

Now, we’re keeping in mind my “outside the house you decide” policy, right? Whereas the menu with mom and dad is strictly no-added sugar, when at school or a friend’s house I have been emphatic that it is their own decision. No guilt. Definitely no apologies. Make this of this project what you want it to be. In fact, I might be blue in the face from repeating this.

I guess I just assumed they would choose to have the sugar items and not give it another thought- this unforeseen response is much more complicated. It doesn’t help either that everywhere we go my ten-year-old announces to anyone within hearing-range the specifics of our project, to which the usual response is a puzzled, piteous grown-up look that seems to say: “you poor thing, you have crazy, controlling hippy parents, don’t you? Do they make you eat tofu for breakfast?”

Thank goodness for the health food store. This is the one place so far that the complete-stranger response to project has been unequivocally positive. While I shopped for carob chips, dried mango slices and seaweed crisps (nope! Second ingredient: sugar) my ten-year-old was deep in conversation with the cashier, who seems very upbeat about the whole thing, and totally unfazed.

“Yes, but just think how healthy you’ll be,” she said to Greta, who was not getting the doe-eyed sympathy she had been hoping for. “You’re going to feel so good!” I drank her words in, simple platitudes though they were, drank in the lack of implied critique, the lack of hesitation in her voice. Maybe we weren’t insane! Then again, I thought, they’re probably used to getting all the nutritional kooks through their door; being v-e-r-y open-minded is part of the job description. But still.

The bill was, of course, enormous- one bag of no-sugar groceries? Ninety dollars. Lack of judgmentalism? Priceless.