Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub, first published 2014. 
Then somehow last week I ran across the book again and checked out the Kindle version. This time I enjoyed it thoroughly, laughing out loud several times a chapter. Eve Schaub is a very, very funny woman with a gift for ridiculous similes. I have no idea why I didn’t care for the book the first time around. Maybe I’m just more attuned now to this whole idea of severely limiting sugar in our diet than I was back then. Who knows?
So I’d highly recommend it now. It’s fairly short and punctuated with entries from the journal Schaub’s 11-12-year-old daughter kept about her feelings as the year progressed. The Schaub family is, on the whole, in with the program, going through their experimental year with humor and grace. Here are some points I gleaned from this second reading:
1. It really doesn’t make much sense to attempt a complete sugar fast to the point that every single restaurant meal involves cross-examining the poor wait staff about every single item on the menu, including salad dressing and sauces. Those items can be frighteningly high in sugar, true. I just about passed out when I looked up the sugar content in the dressing for Chick-fil-A’s now late-lamented Asian Chicken Salad. I always, always get double the dressing and double the toppings for their salads, and they cheerfully comply. But I had noticed that I would feel the all-too-familiar sugar rush after eating this item with its sweet dressing. As far as I can remember, just one packet of dressing was 17 grams of sugar. And I was pouring on two. I don’t see how it’s possible for there to be over 4 teaspoons of sugar in that one little packet and for it still to have room for all the other ingredients! But there it is. (Since that salad has been discontinued, I couldn’t find the nutrition info online, but I’m pretty sure I’m remembering correctly. Their Zesty Apple Cider Dressing has 14 grams of sugar, and–get this–the Fat-Free Honey Mustard Dressing has 19. NINETEEN. It has fewer calories than the low-sugar ones, and calories do count, but sugar calories are uniquely fattening even if you’re not hovering on the diabetes brink. More on that topic in a later post.) The thing of it is, you can find alternatives to the high-sugar items quite easily if you look. The new salad that I love at CFA, their Spicy Southwestern Salad, has only 1 gram of sugar in each packet of their Creamy Salsa Dressing. I realize that the Schaubs weren’t always eating in places where nutritional info was posted online, but perhaps some common-sense exceptions would have saved everyone some angst. (They even cut out store-bought mayonnaise because it has sugar, but I just looked up the nutrition label for Hellmann’s, and while the word “sugar” does appear on the ingredient list the actual number of sugar calories listed is 0, with a 0% content. If the amount of an ingredient is below .5%, the manufacturer doesn’t have to list it as above 0. Schaub’s husband really missed mayo, but there was no real reason why he couldn’t have had some, or he could have made his own without any sugar at all.)
2. Making your own meals is far more satisfying than going out or getting takeout. Eve describes a number of meals she makes from scratch, sometimes with the “help” of her two daughters. The most charming story is probably the one in which they make gnocchi. (I still don’t understand why they couldn’t have eaten the uncooked ones that fell on the floor. They were going to be boiled, for Heaven’s sake!) We try to keep our restaurant outings to one a week, and we don’t even always do that. And I’ve kind of gotten over the whole let’s-just-go-pick-up-something-on-the-weekend routine. One of our favorite takeout items is crispy Vietnamese rolls, or egg rolls. They go by several names. We want the ones with meat in them. But the thing is, by the time you get them home they’ve inevitably gotten a little cold and soggy. And the expense can add up quickly. Back when Gideon was still home we’d sometimes get 5 orders of them for the three of us, a not-unreasonable amount, and wind up paying over $25, since each two-piece order was over $5. That’s really ridiculous when you think about it. Inspired I guess by Eve I made eggrolls-from-scratch this weekend and oh my! Were they fabulous or what? The kitchen did end up getting splattered with oil from the frying. (I did shallow frying, not the deep stuff, but it still made a mess.) I did spend some time on them, but I listened to an audiobook while I was working and next time I’ll use the food processor for the chopping and do oven frying instead of griddle frying. That type of frying doesn’t save on calories, since properly-fried food doesn’t absorb much oil, but it will save greatly on the mess. (I’ve made empanadas that way before and they’ve turned out great.)
3. It really is true that after you’ve cut down drastically on sugar for awhile you stop craving sweets. The Schaubs make a once-a-month exception to sugary desserts, but after a few months they find (or at least Eve does) that the treats aren’t all that much of a treat. She describes the headache and fatigue she starts feeling after indulging in one of these desserts as she lies on the couch feeling horrible. By the end of the year she’s almost dreading each month’s sweet treat. They just aren’t all that great, she finds. Here they’re supposed to be this reward for sticking to their no-sugar rules and in the end they’re just disappointing. I had started feeling the same physical reactions to sugar myself and thought they were caused by my borderline diabetes, but such seems not to be the case. The habituation has simply worn off. I made some muffins last week and put in the full amount of sweetener called for, since they were made with maple syrup and not granulated sugar and I was unwilling to cut down too much on the liquid in the recipe. Jim and I agreed that they were too sweet. I made them again this morning and cut the maple syrup down from 2/3 to 1/2 cup. We agreed that they were better. (I put in a little extra fruit to make up for the lesser amount of liquid and that seemed to work fine.) One thing the Schaubs do that I referred to in my post on so-called “natural” sweeteners–they make some sort-of-sweet items using powdered glucose instead of regular sugar. I won’t re-say here what I said there–scroll down in the post to read it. I’ll just summarize by saying that it seems like a lot of effort to me to produce stuff that isn’t all that sweet, and that powdered glucose is just that–straight glucose, which is going to get dumped straight into the bloodstream. I’m going to guess that the physical reactions that both Eve and I feel from sugary things comes more from the fructose than the glucose, but that’s just a guess. Anyway, limiting regular sugar to around 25 grams a day is quite doable and doesn’t involve ordering exotic ingredients online, so I’d go with that.
Whoops! Word limit breach! May I just say, Read this book.
This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you click on the link (or on the sidebar Amazon badge) and purchase that item, or indeed any item during that session, I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.