Life Without Sugar

Away with ye, temptresses!

It's now midway through June, the halfway mark in my month without sugar (part of Discipline Year, if you're not a regular). Here are my findings thus far:

1. I've lost five pounds.
2. It wasn't really that hard.
3. It's easy to make your own faux masala sauce.
4. Cupcakes have taken on a mythical quality.

So, for me anyhow, giving up sugar hasn't been too hard. (If you're wondering what I mean by "sugar", i.e. do fruit and wine and such count? you can check out the month's parameters here.) I didn't have too many regular treats to lament—a couple squares of dark chocolate after dinner, and a few sauces I relied on for my dinner repertoire. But aside from the occasional pang of wistful longing as I gaze upon the chocolate in my husband's hand, I've been fine. I think the standard-issue holier-than-thou diet attitude got me through the first week, and by the time the self-satisfaction wore off, so had my body's cravings…for the most part.

So the first week, I couldn't care less about sugar. By week two, I did catch myself ogling the carrot cake in the café's dessert case as though it were an oiled up David Gandy. But not once have I been actually tempted, nor have I cheated. I consider myself pretty lucky to be more of a salt-craver than a sugar-craver. Let's just hope my blood pressure stays low so I never have to test my resolve in the sodium department. I used to have a diet soda habit, but thankfully I gave it up a few years ago. Even fake sweeteners can affect your insulin levels and desire for real sugar.

The five pounds I lost since June began are most definitely from a variety of changes. Ditching the sugar certainly helps, but more than that, I simply haven't been snacking. Couldn't tell you if that's some blood sugar craving chemical-whatnot being subdued, or purely incidental, or something else entirely. Perhaps there's just nothing tasty to snack on that doesn't have sugar in it. I've also been very diligent about my nightly yoga and calisthenics regimen since mid-May, totally unrelated to this expriment…though my weight didn't change until the sugar got 86ed. I've also just generally felt less…puffy. No clue if that has anything to do with some blood sugar / water retention link or what, but I'm not complaining.

I'm donating platelets this afternoon, and I'm praying the Red Cross's snack basket has pretzels stocked this week. If not, my remaining choices are all off-limits, and the RC techs can be quite forceful when it comes to making sure their donors eat something. Note to self: buy a banana at the grocery store this morning.

Unrelated—I'm excited to donate today, as I'm downloading Tina Fey's Bossypants audiobook right now!

That's it. Anyone else in the midst of a nutritional experiment? I know my friend Shoshanna's eating like a caveman at the moment…or that's what I gathered. What I hunter-gathered? Ba dum-bum! Well, whatever that's about, it's got to be way more interesting than kicking cupcakes!

Jujube-Free June

Well, as Discipline Year was originally designed, this was supposed to be No Java June, but as I said yesterday, I'm hopeful I may be on deadline before long, and that's no time to invite caffeine withdrawal. Thus, I'm swapping June and July's challenges [read: delaying the inevitable torture of giving up coffee].

So June is the month of no sugar. That is to say, no significant added sugar. Obviously, fruit is full of sugar and I'm not giving up fruit. I mean sweets—candy, pastries, drinks with sugar added—as well as packaged foods with sugar (or sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, etc.) listed as one of the first five ingredients OR with more than five grams of sugar per serving listed on the nutrition facts.

I just inventoried my kitchen, and was sad to discover these parameters rule out my favorite soup (six grams of sugar per serving, meaning the meals I make it into have twelve grams!) our usual barbecue sauce (eleven grams of sugar in two tablespoons!) and the not-as-lovely-as-I'd-thought Yellow Thai Curry Sauce from Trader Joe's (a relatively low six grams, but sugar is listed third, after water and canola oil—ewww). There are other places you wouldn't expect to find added sugar either, such as in crackers and pre-made pasta sauce. I'm a little worried about the latter, as it's a staple in our house. I've got a lot of label-reading to do this month.

We'll be getting farm share veggie boxes starting next week, and I'll be royally bummed if the Indian simmer sauces I rely on to dress up surfeits of less thrilling vegetables are packed with sugar…I don't have any jars of the stuff in the house at the moment, so I'm not sure. But I suppose I could make facsimiles with tomato paste and curry and cumin and onions and salt and cream and so forth. I suspect I may be in for a few disappointments when I go to the grocery store tomorrow.

I'd like to make a goal for how much sugar I'll aim to take in each day, but I'm not entirely sure where to set the bar. I think I'll keep an eye on it for the first few days, and go from there. Today I've only had breakfast so far and I'm up to four grams—two grams from a slice of spelt toast, and two grams from a couple of tablespoons almond butter (where is the almond butter getting its sugar? the only ingredients are roasted almonds and sea salt!) Thank goodness half and half is sugar-free, as is my taste in coffee. So perhaps twenty-five grams of sugar per day? That seems ambitious yet reasonable. I'll workshop it, though I don't want to make myself crazy keeping track of the math, either. Most of what I cook for dinner is from scratch, and the individual vegetables don't come with nutrition labels. Thank goodness brown rice has zero grams of sugar or we'd be screwed—we eat that with half our dinners.

Want to hear something terrifying? A tall (that means small) Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino contains thirty-four grams of sugar. That's without whipped cream. Even more horrific, a CAN of Mountain Dew has FORTY-SIX grams of sugar! All of it added, of course, as there's no fruit in there, just some citrus flavor chemicals they probably engineer in a bunker in Newark. That's nearly two days' worth of sugar, by my experiment's standards, in a twelve-ounce can. And in a Super Big Gulp of the stuff? About 150 grams (if you add ice—otherwise closer to 170). Shudder. Get your shit together, America.

Now those two examples aren't a temptation for me, but alcohol had been a worry. I assumed wine was packed with natural sugars, and though no sugar is added, a serving would still have exceeded my five-gram-per-serving limit. But no! A glass of merlot, for example, has only about one gram of sugar. Score! A sweeter wine, like riesling, has closer to five or six grams per glass. Beer is trickier. I found it very difficult to sniff out specific sugar content for various brews, but it looks like although beer is high in carbohydrates (often twenty or more grams per bottle) sugar makes up a relatively small portion of those carbs (between two and four grams, in the handful of examples I found). So beer isn't especially safe, if only because it's so hard to know what you're consuming, but it's not as decadent as I'd feared. And generally the maltier the beer, the more sugar it contains, and I prefer crisp, dry beers. But I think we're good—let summer commence!