As more of us question how much sugar we eat because of possible connections to health problems such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, we started wondering: What would it be like to give up sugar? Eve O. Schaub, a writer in Vermont, decided to find out. For 365 days, Schaub and her husband and two daughters cut out all added sugars. She documented the experience in Year of No Sugar (out in April), Below is an excerpt, plus her best advice for following in her footsteps.
Originally, when I first contemplated the idea of a Year of No Sugar, images of cravings, temptation, and deprivation came to mind. My personal mental picture involved me in an Old West-style showdown with one of those wonderful square Ritter chocolate bars: "Let's go, chocolate," I'd sneer, perhaps from under a sombrero. "You and me. Mano a mano." You know, if chocolate had hands.
But in truth what I was finding was that the hardest moments weren't solitary, quite the opposite. In fact, if I could just home-school the kids and avoid all restaurants and social events for the year—in other words if we could just move to a new address under a convenient rock—the project would be a comparative snap. Turns out, at least for me, the social isolation of being on a different wavelength from the rest of the world around you was one of the most difficult parts of all.
For example, one day in April we attended the biggest local event I'd seen in my 14 years in our town: a fundraiser to benefit the owners of a general store that had burned to the ground in the middle of the night two weeks prior. The event was so sudden, so shocking, so deeply upsetting to the community, that within hours plans were being fomented on Facebook for what would eventually blossom into a huge community expression of support and love. The resulting blow-out event featured a pig roast and chicken barbecue, a silent auction of more than a hundred items, a bake sale of gargantuan proportions, live music by a local honky-tonk band, a swing set raffle, tractor rides, and face painting. Phew! We showed up to find hundreds and hundreds of people already in line for all of the above. But most of all they were in line for the food.
RELATED: Everything You Need to Know About Sugar
Now, we'd been doing no sugar for months now, so you might think by this point I'd have figured this food thing out, right? But then there's that annoying fact that I can be—only sometimes, mind you—a little slow on the uptake. Honestly, amazingly, it really didn't occur to me that we wouldn't be able to eat the majority of food on the menu for this event until we were already there. Meat and pasta salad? Fine, right? Wait, no—pasta salad would have mayonnaise, the pork and chicken had barbecue sauce, so, um, what else? Baked beans, coleslaw…sugar was certainly in most of the menu items, if not all of them. And you can't very well go to an event like this, with hundreds in line behind you waiting their turn, and start asking volunteers nit-picky questions about the pasta salad. You just can't.
Fortunately, we had been assuming we'd eat there later in the afternoon as an early dinner, and we had eaten lunch, so we weren't starving. Instead, we focused on everything else: We bought event t-shirts, we bid on items at the silent auction, the kids swung (swang?) on the raffle swing set and got their faces painted. Practically everyone in town made an appearance that afternoon, and in a town of just over 1,000 people that amounts to a great big party where you know virtually all of the guests. Now, in our neighborhood, a fundraiser is considered a walloping success if it raises anywhere near the thousand dollar mark. At the end of this particular event an unheard-of $30,000 was raised to help storeowners Will and Eric, who wandered around the event looking dazed by the outpouring of support.
I came home with an empty feeling in me that only partly had to do with the fact that it was getting to be dinnertime. Everyone in the community had come together to help our neighbors Will and Eric, and we were a part of that, certainly. But we all know food is symbolic, food is important. When people break bread together it means something. At least for the time being, our family was, in some small way, existing apart.
RELATED: 7 Ingredients That Are Robbing You of Nutrients
The day before the event, like everybody else, we had gone to drop off our family's auction donation at the firehouse. It was very social, everyone standing around and marveling at the variety and quality of different auction items, ("Have you seen this one?") But what I really reeled at was the bake-sale table. Goodies of every conceivable shape and size were crowded across two nine-foot tables, jostling for space, in the process of being neatly cataloged and labeled by my friend Rhonda. Rhonda was one of the event's organizers, and also a reader of my blog who regularly posted comments and links to interesting sugar-related articles she came across.
Staring wide-eyed at the spread of frostings, sprinkles, chips, jellies, and coconut cream, I joked with Rhonda that I should take a photo of the awe-inspiring spread to post on my blog. "Oh no!" she said, genuinely taken aback, "but…this is good!"
Her reaction stuck with me, because I think it has everything to do with how inextricably emotion and food are intertwined in our culture. I mean, of course it's good, right? The outpouring of emotion was physically visible in response to what was a shocking and violent event. People wanted to express love and comfort in the name of Will and Eric, to literally wrap them up in all that is warm and good and predictable, in an effort to make up for the scary thing that had changed their lives forever. What better way to do this than with a nice coffeecake or tray of raspberry thumbprints? We all understand, implicitly, when dessert is intended this way, as a concrete manifestation of love.
What Rhonda's comment made me realize is that it's all well and good to demonize sugar when you're talking about the Big Bad Corporations, sneaking high fructose corn syrup into our ketchup and mayonnaise; it's another thing entirely to go after grandma's lovingly baked molasses cookies. The problem is, nutritionally your body can't tell the difference between the "bad" sugar (from Big Food Inc.) and "good" sugar (from Grandma). Fructose is fructose. And an excess of fructose consumption, now at its highest levels ever and still climbing, is making our society sick.
I imagine that one day, when the data has become so abundant as to be incontrovertible having a buffet of sugar that rivals the actual food will be considered as socially unacceptable as smoking on airplanes or littering out your car window—things which we as a society once accepted as completely normal yet now we have come to realize the destructiveness of. Nobody's trying to say we can't smoke or drink or throw things away; they're just saying we have to be careful—much more careful—about how we go about it. Same with sugar.
As more of us question how much sugar we eat because of possible connections to health problems such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, we started wondering: What would it be like to give up sugar? Eve O. Schaub, a writer in Vermont, decided to find out. For 365 days, Schaub and her husband and two daughters cut out all added sugars. She documented the experience in Year of No Sugar (out in April), Below is an excerpt, plus her best advice for following in her footsteps.
Originally, when I first contemplated the idea of a Year of No Sugar, images of cravings, temptation, and deprivation came to mind. My personal mental picture involved me in an Old West-style showdown with one of those wonderful square Ritter chocolate bars: "Let's go, chocolate," I'd sneer, perhaps from under a sombrero. "You and me. Mano a mano." You know, if chocolate had hands.
But in truth what I was finding was that the hardest moments weren't solitary, quite the opposite. In fact, if I could just home-school the kids and avoid all restaurants and social events for the year—in other words if we could just move to a new address under a convenient rock—the project would be a comparative snap. Turns out, at least for me, the social isolation of being on a different wavelength from the rest of the world around you was one of the most difficult parts of all.
For example, one day in April we attended the biggest local event I'd seen in my 14 years in our town: a fundraiser to benefit the owners of a general store that had burned to the ground in the middle of the night two weeks prior. The event was so sudden, so shocking, so deeply upsetting to the community, that within hours plans were being fomented on Facebook for what would eventually blossom into a huge community expression of support and love. The resulting blow-out event featured a pig roast and chicken barbecue, a silent auction of more than a hundred items, a bake sale of gargantuan proportions, live music by a local honky-tonk band, a swing set raffle, tractor rides, and face painting. Phew! We showed up to find hundreds and hundreds of people already in line for all of the above. But most of all they were in line for the food.
RELATED: Everything You Need to Know About Sugar
Now, we'd been doing no sugar for months now, so you might think by this point I'd have figured this food thing out, right? But then there's that annoying fact that I can be—only sometimes, mind you—a little slow on the uptake. Honestly, amazingly, it really didn't occur to me that we wouldn't be able to eat the majority of food on the menu for this event until we were already there. Meat and pasta salad? Fine, right? Wait, no—pasta salad would have mayonnaise, the pork and chicken had barbecue sauce, so, um, what else? Baked beans, coleslaw…sugar was certainly in most of the menu items, if not all of them. And you can't very well go to an event like this, with hundreds in line behind you waiting their turn, and start asking volunteers nit-picky questions about the pasta salad. You just can't.
Fortunately, we had been assuming we'd eat there later in the afternoon as an early dinner, and we had eaten lunch, so we weren't starving. Instead, we focused on everything else: We bought event t-shirts, we bid on items at the silent auction, the kids swung (swang?) on the raffle swing set and got their faces painted. Practically everyone in town made an appearance that afternoon, and in a town of just over 1,000 people that amounts to a great big party where you know virtually all of the guests. Now, in our neighborhood, a fundraiser is considered a walloping success if it raises anywhere near the thousand dollar mark. At the end of this particular event an unheard-of $30,000 was raised to help storeowners Will and Eric, who wandered around the event looking dazed by the outpouring of support.
I came home with an empty feeling in me that only partly had to do with the fact that it was getting to be dinnertime. Everyone in the community had come together to help our neighbors Will and Eric, and we were a part of that, certainly. But we all know food is symbolic, food is important. When people break bread together it means something. At least for the time being, our family was, in some small way, existing apart.
RELATED: 7 Ingredients That Are Robbing You of Nutrients
The day before the event, like everybody else, we had gone to drop off our family's auction donation at the firehouse. It was very social, everyone standing around and marveling at the variety and quality of different auction items, ("Have you seen this one?") But what I really reeled at was the bake-sale table. Goodies of every conceivable shape and size were crowded across two nine-foot tables, jostling for space, in the process of being neatly cataloged and labeled by my friend Rhonda. Rhonda was one of the event's organizers, and also a reader of my blog who regularly posted comments and links to interesting sugar-related articles she came across.
Staring wide-eyed at the spread of frostings, sprinkles, chips, jellies, and coconut cream, I joked with Rhonda that I should take a photo of the awe-inspiring spread to post on my blog. "Oh no!" she said, genuinely taken aback, "but…this is good!"
Her reaction stuck with me, because I think it has everything to do with how inextricably emotion and food are intertwined in our culture. I mean, of course it's good, right? The outpouring of emotion was physically visible in response to what was a shocking and violent event. People wanted to express love and comfort in the name of Will and Eric, to literally wrap them up in all that is warm and good and predictable, in an effort to make up for the scary thing that had changed their lives forever. What better way to do this than with a nice coffeecake or tray of raspberry thumbprints? We all understand, implicitly, when dessert is intended this way, as a concrete manifestation of love.
What Rhonda's comment made me realize is that it's all well and good to demonize sugar when you're talking about the Big Bad Corporations, sneaking high fructose corn syrup into our ketchup and mayonnaise; it's another thing entirely to go after grandma's lovingly baked molasses cookies. The problem is, nutritionally your body can't tell the difference between the "bad" sugar (from Big Food Inc.) and "good" sugar (from Grandma). Fructose is fructose. And an excess of fructose consumption, now at its highest levels ever and still climbing, is making our society sick.
I imagine that one day, when the data has become so abundant as to be incontrovertible having a buffet of sugar that rivals the actual food will be considered as socially unacceptable as smoking on airplanes or littering out your car window—things which we as a society once accepted as completely normal yet now we have come to realize the destructiveness of. Nobody's trying to say we can't smoke or drink or throw things away; they're just saying we have to be careful—much more careful—about how we go about it. Same with sugar.
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