Authors: Eve O. Schaub
Year of No Sugar
Copyright © 2014 by Eve O. Schaub
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To Steve, Greta, and Ilsa,
without whom nothing is sweet
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.”
âHenry David Thoreau,
Walden
5:
Everything Tastes Like Bananas and Dates
16:
You're Ruining My Lifeâ¦Merry Christmas!
Epilogue:
The Moral of Our Story
Recipes from a Year of No Sugar
Ten years ago my wife, Lizzie, did a very annoying thing. Without any consultation and without seeking any of the proper approvals from management, she decided to turn our fifth child into twins. One day, she was pregnant with baby #5, and the next, our world was turned upside down. We were about to add twin babies to our other four children (all under the age of nine at the time).
I was ninety pounds overweight and barely coping with the four we had, let alone chucking twins in. I was apathetic, moody (or so people tell me), and had just enough energy to stay at work until after the kids were in bed. Twin babies were not going to be fun. Unfortunately, pregnancy is one of those nonnegotiable forces of nature. There would be no extensions; come September 2003, we would be the parents of six children. I decided I needed to do something about my health, and in particular, I needed to stop being so fat.
I hadn't woken up one morning and discovered ninety extra pounds hanging off my waist. It had been a slow and inevitable accumulation. I had been working on that spare tire for the better part of three decades. Every now and then I
would decide that enough was enough. I'd see a cabbage soup diet on TV or read about [insert name of very famous and inspiring person here] going on this or that diet. So I'd break out the cabbage or the bananas or delete the carbs or
But this time I was determined. I decided I needed to understand how my body worked. I needed to understand why humans (and the animals they feed) were the only species on the planet that required willpower to control their weight. I needed to know why there were no tigers joining Weight Watchers and why there were no gyms for monkeys.
I was (and am) a lawyer, so I assumed it was just my lack of acquaintance with biochemistry that was ensuring I misapplied my various weight-loss techniques. I decided I needed to read deeply on the subject and not stop until I had the answer. Fortunately, I am related to approximately half the medical profession, so I had plenty of people telling me where to start (and stop) reading.
Once I got my head around the mind-bendingly arcane language, I discovered that scientists knew an awful lot about why I was fat. They knew that sugar was the cause. They knew that fat was the least worrying aspect of consuming sugar. They knew it caused type II diabetes and fatty liver disease and hypertension and chronic kidney disease and even Alzheimer's. And worst of all, they knew it was highly addictive and (because of this) being added liberally to the food supply. It didn't matter whether the sugar was made
from corn (HFCS) or grass (cane sugar) or beets (the sugar they sell in Europe); it all contained the molecule responsible for the damageâfructose.
I didn't know any of this because it seemed that, rather like the tobacco companies, the folks making money out of pumping our food full of fructose were working very hard to ensure we looked at everything other than sugar. They told us it was our fault we were fat. We were lard buckets because we couldn't exercise self-control or because we didn't have the willpower to go to the gym every day. We had a character defect, and under no circumstances was it anything to do with the sugar.
I decided all I needed to do, if the science was right, was stop eating sugar. So I did. And magic happened. After a few weeks of ugliness involving intense cravings, some headaches, and staying well away from the soda fridge at the supermarket, I was suddenly not drawn to sugar. People would offer me chocolate, and I would say no without a cringe of regret. Willpower no longer seemed necessary. I was applying just one rule: if it's sweet, don't eat. But other than that, I ate whatever I wanted. And the truly miraculous thing was that I was losing weight. Every week the scales would drop another couple of pounds, but I was doing all the wrong things. I wasn't exercising, I was eating as much fatty food as I wanted, and I was even eating cheese! Magic.
A year or so later, I was ninety pounds lighter. I can't tell you exactly how long it took or exactly what the process was. I can't tell you precisely when Lizzie decided to join in my little sugar-free party or when she decided to bring the kids along. I can't tell you any of these things because I wasn't writing it down. I wasn't a blogger (was anyone in 2003?)
and I wasn't a writer. I was a lawyer with a day job who was obsessing about medical studies at night, and I certainly didn't have time to record what I was doing (as if anyone would be interested anyway).
Five years later, I did write a book about the science that had spurred me to action (
Sweet Poison
, Penguin Australia 2008), but I did that simply because it was clear that the science that I had read was not making it past the food industry PR filters, and something needed to be done about it. A book was the only medium I could think of that could not be influenced by the needs of advertisers or sponsors. But
Sweet Poison
is not a diary. It is a translation of the science. It doesn't have the detail which every prospective sugar quitter craves. It can't tell you if it's normal for your kids to despair at their parents' insane obsession with food. It can't tell you how to deal with a school system pumping your neighbors' kids full of sugar as a reward. It can't tell you how to be sugar free in a society obsessed with sugar. But this book canâand does.
I first discovered Eve's online diary of her sugar-free adventures about a month into her journey. By then, I was terribly famous in Australia (no, really, I was), and the sugar quitting concept was becoming quite mainstream there. So I was used to discovering blogs written by people who were quitting sugar. But Eve's blog was different. The detail was exquisite, and I loved her down-to-earth, we-are-just-plain-doing-this approach. I loved reading about the adventures of her family, the roadblocks they encountered, and the sheer daily difficulty of overcoming a national obsession. It reminded me of so many of the situations Lizzie and I had lived through but that I had never written down. It was the diary I wish I had kept.
Now, that blog has become this superb book. Background details have been filled in. Even more color and nuance has worked its way into the story, and Eve has shown herself to be a spectacularly good writer when she takes off the shackles of fitting it all into a weekly blog post. I am certain you will enjoy Eve's story but, even more importantly, I am certain it will provide all the motivation you need to take you and your family down the sugar-free road to a better (and longer) life. Enjoy!
âDavid Gillespie, author of
Sweet Poison
,
The Sweet Poison Quit Plan
,
Big Fat Lies
,
and the website
howmuchsugar.com
I LOVE SUGAR
Sugar and me? We go way back.
I love sugar. LOOOOVVVVVE it. I love everything about it: how it makes little occasions special and special occasions fabulous. How it performs hot, bubbling magic on sour fruits, like rhubarb and gooseberries, to make the most succulent, mind-blowing pies and jams. How it crunches with perfect granulation in the best cookies and how a single cube of it adds fairy-tale perfection to a real Italian cappuccino.
And don't even get me
started
on chocolate.
I've known about the power of sugar for a long time. When I was in seventh grade, we were given an English-class assignment: create a “how-to” presentation on a subject of our choosing. Although I was awkward, painfully shy, and
terrified
to stand before the class, I still knew exactly what I wanted to do: a demonstration of different methods of cake decorating using a standard two-layer I had baked as a prop. Easy peasy.
The day of our presentations arrived, and I was petrified but excitedâafter all, I thought, how could I go wrong with a topic like
cake
? Then it came to be my turn and I, decked out
in my best Esprit sweatshirt and ribbon barrettes, proceeded to inform the class how they could make their cakes more beautiful and interesting, which I'm sure had my preadolescent classmates simply
riveted
. This was
1982
, mind you, before Martha Stewart did for homemaking what Edward Cullen did for being alarmingly pale. Making cakes and cookies wasn't even remotely cool; it was what grannies did when they weren't crocheting throw blankets in shades of mustard and avocado.
