Tag Archives: no sugar lifestyle

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 54

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Now that we are creeping up on- dare I say it?- halfway through our Year of No Sugar (!!!) there is a very pleasant law of dietary inertia setting in, that is: a person not eating sugar tends to stay not eating sugar. Compared to our shaky beginnings on January first, we’ve acclimated significantly to the challenges of shopping differently, eating differently, and talking to people about it. I still make mistakes, dumb ones, like just the other day when, for variety’s sake, I picked up a package of Applegate Farms organic ham slices at the health food store instead of the usual Applegate Farms organic roasted turkey, without double-checking the ingredients… um, Eve, hel-lo? Still, we’ve gotten to a point where we might be what you’d call… fairly well used to it.

To celebrate meeting the nebulous milestone of being “fairly well used to it,” Greta, my eleven year old daughter and I did a short presentation for her fifth grade class which we might’ve titled “Yeah, Like, What the Heck is Greta’s Family Doing, Again?” I was nervous. I realized that for all the talking and reading and thinking and agonizing I’ve done on this subject, I haven’t spoken before a group about it at all. Sure they’re fifth graders, not a congressional inquiry, but nonetheless I had visions of difficult biochemistry questions being lobbed at me by kids who aren’t about to give up their chocolate-covered Twinkies without a fight.

Worse, as I made up my notes for the talk, I was having trouble striking the right chord somewhere in between being the world’s most boring health teacher (“Can anyone tell me the incredibly fascinating difference between lactose and galactose? Hmmm?”) and scaring the pee out of them (“Well, according to what I’ve been reading, sugar causes obesity, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, prostate and breast cancer, not to mention elephantitis of the pores, rampant yellow toe fungus, the end of the world and not getting asked to the junior prom!!! AIIIGHHHH!”)

Most of all, I worried about the same thing all mothers of pre-teen girls worry about: budding eating disorders. The last, last, LAST thing I wanted to do in the course of discussing important topics like the national epidemic of obesity, was to inadvertently encourage some fifth grade girl not to eat. Have I put enough pressure on myself yet? Just wait till I have to talk to The New York Times– I’ll melt into a little savory puddle on the floor.

But I think it went okay, after all. I focused on some key terms and statistics I thought might perk their interest: how every man, woman and child consumes on average 2.7 pounds of sugar per week (I held up a five pound bag of sugar to demonstrate one person’s two week allotment. Interestingly, the kids seemed rather unfazed by this), what a “Western Disease” is (guesses included “pneumonia” and “malaria”- so good we talked about this one), and how doctors decide whether a person is a healthy weight, overweight, or obese. I mean, you hear about an “epidemic of obesity,” but what does that really mean?

I put the BMI (Body Mass Index) formula on the board: weight in pounds times 703, divided by the square of your height in inches. Amazingly, the kids really perked up at this. There were sudden shuffling noises as kids grabbed for pieces of paper and pencils, presumably so they could calculate their own BMI, although I have to admit that I wasn’t about to start figuring out what sixty-six squared is on paper. I demonstrated how I got my own BMI by plugging in my own height and weight… and whipping out my handy dandy calculator.

The other two most popular part of the hour was more predictable: when Greta distributed my most recent dextrose dessert effort: carob chip brownies. I was delighted to see that everyone ate their entire brownie- which to me equals success, not just for my changed palate, but to kids who may very well view sugar as one of the four food groups. That’s one of the things you can still say about kids at this age- they haven’t learned to varnish their opinions yet in the name of politeness. Most fifth graders aren’t going to eat a yucky brownie just to be polite to someone’s mom.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 47

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The other day as we were driving home from school we somehow got on the subject of why our daughter Greta hasn’t written in her “No Sugar Project” journal lately. After a spate of great interest and productivity in the beginning, her writing book has been all but abandoned of late on her nightstand. I asked her: how come?

“Well, there’s nothing to write about,” she explained. “It’s like, it’s just normal now.”

There you have it folks. An eleven-year-old says not eating added sugar AT ALL with the exception of a once-per-month treat, can be normal. Let the record show that it took in the neighborhood of four months.

I know what you’re thinking- sure, anything can be normal if you do it long enough. You could wear balloon animal hats every night to dinner and after four months you wouldn’t even be hungry until a latex poodle was firmly situated across your brow.

That is true. However, I can identify with what Greta describes; after lots of flailing, I feel we’ve finally entered a groove of sorts now. We now know which products to buy at the supermarket and we head straight for them, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars worth of sugar. We now know which special things we have to go further afield for and when we do, we stock up: Nature’s Market in Manchester is our connection for GoRaw ginger cookies and granola bars, and Applewood Farms organic sandwich meats. BJ’s Wholesale Club- which is a hike and a whole-morning venture- has freeze-dried fruit chips that are one of the few fruit snacks I have found not sweetened with fruit juice. These have been such a big hit with the kids that we dole them out like special treats. They also sell four pound boxes of a center-cut bacon that is the only commercial brand I’ve found without sweeteners. For something we use a lot of, such as tomato sauce or yellow mustard, after zeroing in brands that contain no sugar, we buy it in bulk and store excess on shelves in the pantry.

We’ve also been fortunate to be in a buying club of sorts- or rather to be buying buddies with- a nearby family who orders bulk organic produce every other week or so. Thus our refrigerator is regularly on the verge of exploding from the amount of broccoli heads and navel oranges I attempt to stuff into it. I can’t tell you how much of a difference this makes in my mind-set: knowing we have so much produce on-hand means I don’t think twice before popping a Fuji apple into everyone’s lunchbox or before carving up a few grapefruit for breakfast. I know it’ll be good, (reliably better than anything we can buy at the regular store) I know it’s organic, AND on top of everything else we’re paying bulk rates and saving money. If you see me and ask me about it- you won’t be able to shut me up about how awesome this is. You’ve been warned.

(Of course, I’ve had to learn our family’s own pace when it comes to produce consumption. Exhibit A: the fifty-pound box of potatoes that seemed like such a good idea until they started aggressively trying to plant themselves in the linoleum of my kitchen floor.)

I’ve also learned to become a bread-hoarder of epic proportions. Bread is an especially tough one: even organic, health food store brands like Vermont Bread Company usually have cane sugar or honey in them. We’re lucky to have a wonderful baker in our community- hello Jed!- who produces fresh baguettes and Pain au Levain under the name “Rupert Rising Bread,” all with fewer ingredients than you can count on your hand- and no sugar. Problem solved, right?

The thing is, everyone knows Jed’s bread is that good, and consequently it sells out from the general store practically before he shows up with it a few times per week. Now, I know I should figure out which days those are, put it in my calendar, and show up mere moments after delivery time in order to secure my continued supply of fresh, local, staff-of-life. Unfortunately, I have about 247 other things to do first, including mailing my mother’s hand-knit Mother’s Day socks a week late (hi Mom!) and writing my blog in which I can complain about how I have no time to go buy bread. So instead, I buy it when I see it, which isn’t nearly often enough.

So, I buy bread and freeze it, I make bread when I can get to it, and sometimes we just have to get along with Triscuits and that’s all there is to it.

Then again, rather than toast for breakfast we could have some nice steamed broccoli heads garnished with navel oranges instead- after all, we certainly have enough of them, and it would give Greta something new to write about. As long as everyone has their poodle-hats handy, I think it should be just fine.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 32

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One day last week when I was still at the Mayo Clinic with my Dad, we were eating lunch in the cafeteria when a rather heavyset couple sat down at the other end of our table. Of course, you never know why someone is a Mayo, or even which person in a couple or group of people might be the “patient,” but wandering around you do tend to look at folks and wonder… why is she here? Is it him? All these people are suffering in some way, some more obviously than others. One day I met a woman at the hotel’s laundry machines who explained without prompting that her husband was so ill- with pancreatitis I think it was- that she couldn’t leave him in the room alone very long. As we were talking she got a cell phone call to tell her that her nephew had cancer.

Occasionally you would notice someone red-eyed and sniffling into a Kleenex as you sat down in one of the many waiting rooms… what could anyone really say? Or do? Who knows what news they may have just received? And then you see the children with parents heading to an appointment and you just pray they are here for something ridiculously benign, like an inverted hangnail.

But back to the large couple in the cafeteria. They had clearly gotten the “I’m trying to be good, or mostly good” meal: they each had purchased a large chef’s salad with a breadstick, she had added a banana and a skim milk, while he had a large diet soda and a piece of pie for dessert. I couldn’t help but wonder to myself if they wouldn’t have been better off enjoying a meal with much more fat but much less sugar/fake sugar. I mean, sugar (or the chemically fake stuff) was in the salad dressing, in the breadstick, in the diet soda and in the pie… it was freakin’ everywhere on their tray and it was as if I, through some mutant power which might qualify me to be a comic book superhero, was the only one who could see it. I idly wondered if perhaps one of them suffered from one of the many variants of metabolic syndrome, and if so, if anyone would ever offer the suggestion that they might be healthier forgoing the salad in favor of the pot roast and mashed potatoes…

Now, clearly, I’m no doctor, no nurse, and no dietitian. But it just seems to make a lot of sense to me when Dr. Robert Lustig says that we’re effectively missing the technicolor elephant in the living room when we caution people to watch their salt, watch their fat, watch their alcohol, but rarely if ever do we mention the deleterious effects of sugar, and it’s omnipresence in our contemporary diet.

But maybe, if enough of us pester our poor waitresses for ingredients and start reading the depressing labels on the foods in our supermarket, just maybe that dialogue will change. Recently my mother sent me a short article that appeared in the February 11 issue of the New Orleans Times-Picayune by dietitian Molly Kimball, entitled, “Secret Sweets: You my be surprised how many ‘healthy’ foods contain added sugar.”

In the article, Kimball notes that the “just-released 2010 Dietary Guidelines say that we should ‘significantly reduce’ our intake of added sugars… That’s because diets high in added sugar are linked not only to obesity, but also to an increased risk of high blood pressure, triglycerides, inflammation, and low levels of good HDL cholesterol.”

Yes! Thank you! Of course, the article is minuscule, basically a list of how much sugar you find in products you’d never suspect such as salad dressing, ketchup, bagels, pasta sauce and bread. Sound familiar? If she wanted to she could’ve added to her list: chicken broth, mayonnaise, breakfast cereal, dried fruit, english muffins, pita bread, coleslaw, virtually every sauce known to man…

You and I know the list goes on and on. In fact it’s long enough to make one suspect Dr. Robert Lustig may be onto something when he observes that as fat consumption has gone down, obesity, type two diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke have- nonetheless- gone up. In his YouTube lecture that I’m going to keep referencing until you break down and finally go watch it, “Sugar the Bitter Truth” he states it as plain as can be: “It’s not the fat, people. It’s not the fat.”

I wished, somehow, I could have communicated that to our table mates that day, and saved them from who knows how many bad salads, not to mention a lifetime of trying to be “good” and wondering why it still isn’t working.