Year of No Sugar (9 page)

No. I was determined. I was
not
going to be the Sugar Nazi; I was not—probably—going to instill neurosis in my children that would haunt them for decades to come. I believed, with perhaps Pollyanna-ish determination, that we should be able to eat
without
sugar
without
being miserable.

Which is
not
to say without pissing anybody off.

 

²²
Get it? “With great power comes great responsibility”? Spiderman's Uncle Ben? Oh, never mind.

It didn't take long for me to become familiar with “The Look.” “The Look” is that mixture of dismay and confusion which appears on the waiter, cashier, or cafeteria line lady's face when asked if the penne with red peppers and broccoli has sugar in it.

“
Sugar
in it?” they always said, as if they perhaps didn't hear me correctly.

Sigh.

The thing is, I'm really not cut out for this sort of thing at all. If I were, I would be reveling in the chance to tell our story to each and every new waitress, enlightening her with The Truth About Fructose as if I had discovered it hovering above a burning bush. I would keenly expound on a handful of salient facts and shocking statistics, captivating her for just enough time to pique her interest and handing her my card at just the right moment, along with another one for the chef in the back.

The only problem being, I suck at this. If eloquent, persuasive speech were like dancing, I'd be Jerry Lewis on stage during
Swan Lake
.

My husband, on the other hand, is amazing at this sort of thing. You've heard of the guy who can sell snow to Eskimos? Water to fish? Redneck jokes to Jeff Foxworthy? That's my husband. Everywhere we go
he's
the one who's telling people just the right amount of information about our Year of No Sugar. And complete strangers lean over and listen, captivated.

But me? Nope. And it's not just with waitstaff and counter people, but friends, relatives, acquaintances; I can pinpoint almost the exact moment when the other person's face changes. If there were words running across their forehead like a stock ticker they would read: “
Uh
-oh. Here it comes.” It's that moment when I start telling them about the No-Sugar Project.

So when I'm at a bonfire party, say, and my daughter runs up to me, complaining about the fact that there isn't anything to drink but apple cider and what should she
do
, then, turning back to the curious person I was talking to, I go into Explaining Mode. Half apologetic, I relate the
Reader's Digest
version of our Family Project, carefully monitoring the listener's face for the telltale switch from curiosity to boredom, repulsion, defensiveness.

Of course, most friends and acquaintances are way too gracious to express these negative reactions outright, so instead I get the forehead ticker. Something ever-so-subtle shifts in their posture toward me, and they assume the expression of someone who is politely interested yet has no intention of changing any aspect of their current life, thank you very much. They are ever so subtly on their guard, as if I had casually turned the conversation toward the fact that aliens talk to me through my toaster oven.

In such a conversation, I can't help but feel anxious that
the other person will feel put-upon, like I'm trying to tell them
What To Do
—like I'm sooooooo smart that I have all the answers. I never feel that way. I never have all the answers. A motivational speaker I will never be.

Which is probably why I'm a writer and not on TV selling Sham Wows. It's also probably why I spent the year being pretty sure waitresses hated us. It was not unusual, for example, for our questions about the
this
, the
that
, and the
the other
to send the waitress scurrying back to the kitchen three or four times before we could arrive at an actual meal order. If you were a waitress, wouldn't
you
hate us?

Yet I can honestly report with amazement that we never encountered actual, definable rudeness regarding our project from any source. No one ever told us it was stupid, for example, or encouraged us to flake off. Rather, it was more on the order of piling inconvenience on top of inconvenience. For example, when we ate at the new Thai restaurant on a busy evening, the response to whether the pad thai contained any sugar or not was followed by our waiter abandoning us for twenty minutes. By the time he returned, we were all hungry enough to eat our laminated menus. When the answer turned out to be yes, the pad thai contains sugar, we asked about another dish and he disappeared again. Meanwhile, other tables were having drinks, receiving plates of food, even people who had come in long after we had arrived were
eating actual food
while we had yet to decide on an order. When he finally returned again, Steve gave me a grim look that wordlessly said “DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, ASK ANY MORE QUESTIONS.” In desperation, I guessed at an innocuous-sounding noodle dish that I later concluded most assuredly had honey in it. Sigh.

On the other hand, some places were astoundingly accommodating, which is still not to say easy. For example, in March for two weeks, I accompanied my father to the Mayo Clinic—a world-renowned medical facility in Rochester, Minnesota. We were investigating some longstanding and worsening medical problems that had been confounding his doctors back home, and it was time for the experts to be superseded by
the experts
.

The Mayo Clinic, by definition, is an extremely humbling place. Although certainly this is not true of everyone, many of the people who are there are there as an extreme, if not last, medical resort. Of course, you never know
why
someone is at Mayo, or even which person in a 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.

Occasionally I would notice someone red-eyed and sniffling into a Kleenex as we 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
children
with parents heading to an appointment and you just pray they are here for something ridiculously benign, like an inverted hangnail.

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, by the way, her nephew had been diagnosed with cancer.

Suffice it to say, it's a heck of a perspective check, on top
of which was the fact that I was pretty darned worried about my dad. In the face of obvious suffering and illness of every variety, it was certainly tempting to feel like our family's little project was so…so…self-centered. Irrelevant. Egotistical even.
Why
was I torturing our family again, anyway?
Who
cared what we had to eat every day?

And yet, one day, as I sat idly waiting for my dad in the clinic coffee shop, I was bemused and then, gradually, alarmed to observe how many people came in to grab a soda. Pepsi. Pepsi. Diet Coke. Sprite. Coke. Hardly a minute went by without a hand opening the soda cooler across from me—and
no one
, I realized, was taking water. Once again, I had that weird sensation of being the only person in the room who could see a possible connection between rampant sugar and rampant suffering.

Then later, I passed by the Mayo “Center for Tobacco-Free Living” and I wondered: would there ever be a Mayo “Center for Sugar-Free Living”? Who knows how many people at Mayo at that very moment suffered from metabolic syndrome? Who knows how many might have been helped by the knowledge contained in that YouTube video I had watched what now seemed like so long ago?
I
wasn't going to provide any answers—not honest-to-goodness, double-blind, proven medical ones—but I really did believe it was time to at least
begin this conversation
. Which was, in fact, what I was trying to do, in my own weird little way.

Lucky for me, I probably couldn't have found any place on earth as willing to accommodate my ingredient queries as they were there. Because of the clinic—which in employing some 33,000 people, coupled with accommodating some 350,000 patients every year essentially
is
the town of
Rochester—they are used to fielding just about every kind of question you can ask about food.
So
many folks there have restrictions, special diets, or upcoming test requirements that the waitstaff are experts on things most restaurant staff haven't the vaguest idea about. But even the diabetics weren't asking
quite
the same question that I was asking. Usually, I would preface it by saying, “I have a little bit of a weird question…”

Also very helpful was the box of Kashi cereal I had packed in my suitcase. One of the surprising things I learned during our Year of No Sugar is the fact that the hardest meal of the day is
breakfast
…hands down. Just take a look at it and you'll see what I mean: there's cereal (added sugar), toast or bagels (added sugar), juice (
is
sugar), waffles (added sugar, and that's even before the syrup), muffins and Danishes (oh, come
on
!)…Pretty much black coffee and eggs
without
toast and
without
bacon are what you are left with. Ew.

_______

_______

I stealthily smuggled my cereal into the complimentary hotel breakfast bar each morning, brazenly making use of their Styrofoam bowls, plastic spoons, and paper napkins, as well as a heap of raisins, which had been originally betrothed to some instant, sugar-containing oatmeal, before being abducted and eloping with my 7 Whole Grain Nuggets at the last minute. It seemed a pretty good solution until we had been there for over a week, and I began to feel that if I ate any more whole grain nuggets I would jump off the nearest whole grain ledge.

Harder still were the weekends. Why? Because on Saturdays and Sundays, the Mayo Clinic is closed and, consequently, so are a
whole
lot of the restaurants. What stays open is just the kind of food I totally couldn't eat: sub chains and coffee shops. In the sub shop, the meats are usually cooked with glazes and other additives that are likely to include sugar, and the bread usually has it too; coffee shops are basically one big dessert.

So, having little other choice, on Saturday night, I took my dad to the sub chain inside our hotel. While he ordered his sandwich I noticed that they had a “no carb” option of wrapping your ingredients inside a large lettuce leaf rather
than their bread (which—I checked—had sugar). Rather than enter into a ten-hour discussion of the ingredients of the various cold cuts, I ordered the veggie sub
with
the no-carb option—basically a vegetable bonanza, with a slice of cheese thrown in there for good measure. I couldn't very well add mayonnaise because
that
has sugar (oh yes!) so I slathered on some mustard and dug into a
very
crunchy meal. Food? Yes. Satisfying? Decidedly not.

The next day was equally tricky. After a good breakfast of plain oatmeal and berries at a nearby hotel, I thought I was probably full enough to get through till an early dinner. Not so much. I really should realize this about my metabolism by now, but somehow I still regularly manage to convince myself that maybe I don't
really
need to eat all three meals if it isn't entirely convenient. In fact, I am like a wind-up toy that stops working when its short little energy supply runs out.

So there I was, sitting in my beige hotel room, midafternoon, dinner still
hours
away, and not a thing in sight to eat. As usual when I miss a meal, I began to feel slightly ill—and then desperate. The Larabar from my suitcase (ingredients: nuts, whole dried fruit) had helped, but not enough. I couldn't face another vegetable sandwich wrapped in lettuce…but then I had an idea. I went to the counter at the sub shop and asked if I could just order some cheese.

“Just
cheese
?” the scruffy, twentysomething man behind the counter asked, blinking. He checked with the sandwich makers behind him. “We can do
just
cheese, right?”

No one could think of any reason not to sell me some cheese. “Hey, there's no reason why we can't!” he said brightly, and he rang it up. The cheese came to seventy-five cents.
After checking the ingredients, I also added a bag of potato chips and received my tiny little package of cheese from the pick-up counter.

Back in my room, I was sorry to see they had only given me two small pieces. I should've asked for two or three servings' worth. Oh well—paired with the banana I had stolen from the largely inedible (for me) breakfast bar and the chips, it still made a serviceable lunch.

It was all there: I had some carbohydrates, some salt, some fat, and some fructose wrapped—as it should be—in its corresponding fiber and micronutrients. I was happy with my little improvised meal and even happier that it put a stop to the gnawing in my belly.