Year of No Sugar (30 page)

Only time would tell. Gladfully.

_______

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

Answer: The week
after
a Year of No Sugar.

Oy vey. I wondered why on earth I had ever,
ever
looked forward to our release from the world of No Sugar. Our first
week out of the project was easily as hard as our very hardest No-Sugar week. Why? Because, while No Sugar may be hard in terms of willpower, once we learned all the synonyms and safe words, it was always extremely clear in terms of the rules: “No Sugar” means: No. Sugar.

No sugar in our mayonnaise. No sugar in our 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 .00001%!” 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 loved the straightforwardness of that. And I was hating the lack of it now.

For breakfast New Year's Day, we decided to visit one of our favorite local restaurants, Rathbun's Maple Sugar House. The last time we had been there had been a million, billion years ago:
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. (Once again, Eve being 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 just kept coming. I certainly couldn't blame the kids—they were simply trying to figure out what the new rules were. Trouble is, Steve and I didn't exactly know.
Moderation
is the most elusive term I know.

A morning not long after that, Steve made 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. To me, it felt like things were spiraling out of control. It was January, so of course it was Ilsa's birthday again, and then it was my mother's birthday, and then we had the kid party for Ilsa's birthday…It was starting to feel like sugar was creeping its way back like a virus—between the long-lost condiments, the “remember this's,” and the birthday treats. It suddenly seemed like sugar was absolutely freakin' everywhere. After all we had gone through over the course of the past year, I was struck now by the paralyzing thought:
Had it all been for
nothing
?

And then I took the girls to the supermarket. “
Mom!
Can we buy these crackers? And cereal? Actual
real
cereal?” “Ooo! What about
roast beef
?”
⁶⁶
It reminded me of that scene in
Moscow on the Hudson
in which Robin Williams plays a Russian defecting to the United States. He enters an American supermarket for the first time in search of a can of coffee and, confronted with an entire aisle, floor to ceiling, of different styles, brands, sizes, promptly faints. Choice is good but too much choice? It can be
bad
. 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 in the old days. 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
? We were unable to find a single package of gum in which sugar was the
only
toxin. So I did something I hate to do: I broke my promise.

I was astounded. After months of swerving to avoid processed foods, I was confronted once again with the ugly reality. Do we really give this little of a shit about what we're putting into our bodies, our kids' bodies? I thought back to the huge sacks of Halloween candy the kids had brought home in October—I mean, who
knows
what was in all that stuff. (Thank God it all still sits uneaten in the back of our pantry cupboard. My new plan is to throw it away after they've both gone to college.)

Aside from making us sound like we were from planet Pluto when we went shopping at the supermarket, another immediate and interesting by-product of our No-Sugar Year was that I now
really
noticed what sugar was doing in my body after I ate it. When I ate a cookie or had a piece of chocolate, here is what happened: I realized that after a moment my mouth felt…
funny
: cloying and overly sweet, like I just drank a whole glass of maple syrup. A few minutes would pass, and I'd feel a small headache-y feeling creeping around the base of my brain, followed by a weird energized feeling, a sugar “buzz” if you will. After a while, of course, it passed.

You'll recall that
Sweet Poison
author David Gillespie had written that after a while, you “just don't want” the taste of sugar anymore. During our entire Year of No Sugar, I found I never quite arrived at that train station. I kept
wanting
things. Sure, over time I wanted them
less
—the voice in my head wasn't so much a yell anymore as it was kind of whispery whine—but I never felt the wanting disappear
entirely
. On
Day 364, did I still
want
the croissants at our favorite bakery, an ice cream cone on a hot day, ketchup on our French fries? Yes. Yes, I did.

But now what struck me perhaps most of all was the fact that when I would give in and have a something that I wanted, or
thought
I wanted, or somebody else thought I should want, often it failed to be enjoyable at all. This was newly noticeable—a disconnect between what my brain thought I'd enjoy and what my body actually
did
enjoy.

For example, one day at a fundraising event, the girls came back from the refreshment table with—no, not the plates of grapes and cheese they were selling—a dense hunk of chocolate chip cookie dough covered in chocolate (Greta) and an iced cookie the size of a small salad plate (Ilsa). I thought,
Have they learned
nothing
this year!?!
But then again, who was I to blame them for wanting to partake, to enjoy, after an entire year of hanging back and repeatedly saying “no, thank you”? At this point, they knew more about sugar than most grown-ups we knew. Sooner or later, I'd have to take the gloves off and let them make some of these decisions on their own.

Interestingly, Greta absolutely
insisted
on giving me half of her “cookie dough truffle,” which, not so very long ago, she would've had to elbow me out of the way to get (cookie dough
anything
? I'm so there!). So I took a bite of it—and immediately I was confused. I knew I was
supposed
to like it. All my senses were telling me I
would
like it—the texture, the smell, the appearance—and yet…I didn't. I just didn't. It was sickly sweet and left a bad aftertaste lingering on my tongue. Once upon a time, I would've had a hard time not going back for two or ten more of these funky little concoctions. Now? I was pretending to enjoy it. I was relieved when it was gone.

So, was this weird yet? I realized it wasn't just for my family's benefit that I was pretending to enjoy things that I once would have loved. It was also me trying to fool myself into thinking I was no different than I once was. But I
was
different. I wondered how long this would last—would I
ever
enjoy sugar again? Or had I inadvertently removed all the joy of sweet from my life? Given myself a taste bud-ectomy? For all my thousands of hours writing and researching about the evils of added sugar, I couldn't help but admit that in the end, I felt quite ambivalent about that. Did this mean no more homemade rhubarb pie? No more afternoons canning sour cherry jam? No more (and I hesitate even to type these words)
chocolate peanut butter ice cream
? Picking cherries, making pie from rhubarb just picked in our yard, all these things are rituals which have come to define, in some ways, who I am. Heck, I ate a chocolate peanut butter ice cream cone the night before
each
of my two girls were born. (Now there's a selling point for Ben & Jerry's: It's cool! It's delicious! And it may induce labor!)

So, for those of you keeping score at home, the aftermath of our Year of No Sugar consisted of me being plagued by fears that:

Notice anything a little funny about that? Apparently, I was simultaneously worried that we'd be eating both too much sugar
and
not enough. I wish I had saved myself the angst, but I suppose that me being a neurotic mess at first was
kind of inevitable. After all, I had been possessed, obsessed by the idea of A Year of No Sugar, but I hadn't had any epiphanies on what to do
after
the Year of No Sugar. So instead, I fell apart.

Steve, who deserves the Golden Husband Award for going along with No Sugar in the first place, was more ready than I was for life to go back to normal. As in: We did it! It's over. This difference in our attitudes about moving forward was brought into sharp focus one day at lunch.

It all started when I, deep in the throes of sugar paranoia, asked Steve
not
to buy a new container of maple syrup. This segued into whether I'd continue to bake with dextrose and touched on things like whether banana bread and apple muffins count as dessert and whether snacking between meals is okay. I imagine some people would think we were giving what we eat and how we eat it entirely too much thought, bordering on obsessive, and maybe we were. I really didn't know anymore. It was exhausting. Personally, right then, I was feeling like moderation kind of sucked—it took entirely too much thought and energy, not to mention fighting. I was pretty sure it would be preferable to go live under a tree stump and only eat pinecones from now on.

Of course, we can't do that. And I honestly had no desire to be the dietary freaks of our community who carry their own marinated sawdust or whatever in a pouch with them so they 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 unique ways of life—they are fascinating to me. But their sacrifices were huge: these are folks who had to remove themselves from society to follow their ideals—which, above all, sounds pretty lonely.

Not long after that discussion, we had a babysitter night, so Steve and I went out to try a new restaurant. At the end of a nice meal, Steve became convinced I wanted dessert. A year ago, I wouldn't have even considered it a proper meal out without that final sweet component, but this time I demurred. I was full. I didn't want any. Still, he kept encouraging me to pick something from the menu. There was no convincing him that I didn't, in my heart of hearts,
want
the chocolate chip cookie sundae but—much to my astonishment—I didn't. I mean, I
really
didn't!

All that month, I'd been playing guilty catch-up from a year of denial, with my kids, with my husband, with myself. It was pretty hard to say no now, after my family had given sugar up for a year, on my say-so. Because I thought it was a good idea. Because I thought it would make us healthier. Because I wanted to write about it.

So I didn't say no as much as I wanted to right then. Selfishly, I didn't want my kids to think I'd become the Scrooge of the food universe, or my husband to think he's lost his fun wife who used to get all giddy at the thought of combining chocolate and peanut butter. I still do, after all. I'm still fun. Right?

Right?

So did we order the ridiculously sinful chocolate chip cookie in a cast-iron pan with ice cream and whipped cream on top? Sure we did, because I'm still fun, damn it. I was almost embarrassed by the conspicuous decadence of the thing when it arrived; I felt as if we had a circus elephant sitting on our table. I had a few bites and of course it was very good—in the way that only a warm cookie with cold ice cream on it can be. Very good. But then I put my fork
down. I was happy to see that really,
really
, I could take it or leave it.

_______

The reactions to the end of our project from friends, acquaintances, and readers were fascinating to me. Many people said “Congratulations!” which is lovely, and many more seemed simply relieved that we aren't doing “that sugar thing” anymore, just in case it might rub off on them or something. Half the people I encountered seemed to expect us to now be on a permanent sugar binge in order to make up for lost time, while the other half seem to think we're terrible hypocrites if we so much as glance at the bowl of mints by the restaurant door.

The fact is, for us, it was ever so much more complicated than “All Sugar All the Time!” or “No Sugar Never Ever!” My kids still wanted to get a dish of ice cream after dinner the way they always did. And me—selfish, guilty parent that I am—I often really wanted to give them that dish of ice cream as if it were a nice, compact serving of normality I could hand them with a pretty cherry on top. “See!? We're not so weird after all!”

But, the thing is, we
are
weird. We were weird
before
—not eating at McDonald's and avoiding soda. And we're weird
now
—avoiding juice and crap sugar food (doughnuts, cookies, free lollipops), as well as anything that's sweetened when we know it needn't be: dried fruit, chips, crackers, tomato sauces. We had become much,
much
more selective about the sugar we do consume, and in a culture like ours—which is utterly saturated with sugar, convenience food, and fast food—that's
weird
.