Debi Simons 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?
Ah, the wonderful world of so-called “healthy” or “alternative” sweeteners! A food blog that I follow faithfully, Pinch of Yum, has just finished up its “sugar-free January” stretch for at least the second year, with the idea that for one month you’ll stay off “refined” sugar. So what does that term mean for this website? Anything that can be called a “natural” sugar, as opposed to a refined one, including maple syrup and honey, is allowed in small amounts.
Folks, I hate to break it to you, but:
Maple syrup and honey are just sugar.
In the first of my four posts on problems with the keto diet I made the point that it’s probably a mistake to label our desire for sugar as an “addiction.” Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist whom I’ve quoted and posted from, does posit that sugar is addictive in his video #4 which I post below and have also posted on my author’s Facebook page. I’ve been doing some further reading and thinking, and, with all due respect to Dr. Lustig, I still think he’s wrong. (Notice—patting myself on the back here—that while I’ve gained excellent information and insight from Lustig, I don’t just take what he says at face value. He’s not my guru.)
Here’s the central objection that I have to saying that sugar is innately addictive:
It’s food.
This is the final post for now about the problems with following the so-called “ketogenic” diet. Today I’m addressing some issues I’ve discovered with one of the leading keto gurus, Eric Berg DC. Note that I don’t call him “Dr.” Berg, even though that’s what his YouTube channel, his books, his website and his ads call him. HE IS NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR. HE’S A CHIROPRACTOR. Sorry. I try to steer clear of all-caps ranting, but sometimes it’s just necessary.
Just a reminder: the “case study” I’m using is that of the blogger who runs the Addicted2Decoraing website. She says in a post titled “The Personal Stuff: A New Furry Family Member, More Keto Info, and What I’m Listening To” that one of her five ways to get started on the ketogenic diet is:
Find one keto expert you like and trust, and stick with him or her.
And the “expert” she’s decided to follow is Eric Berg DC. Now why on earth would you want to “stick with” just one source? That makes no sense. The best way to get a balanced view of any topic is to consult multiple sources, checking out the discrepancies that you find. Then you make your own well-informed decisions. Otherwise you’re just outsourcing your choices. (And, as I’ve said before, I love this blog, follow it faithfully, and totally respect its author. She’s so independent in her decorating choices that I find it very puzzling that she’s willing to blindly follow anyone about her health choices.)
A reminder if you’re just coming across this series of posts: I am taking some material from the website Addicted2Decorating which I follow faithfully and enjoy tremendously. Ordinarily it’s a DIY home improvement site, but the author sometimes includes a personal post—what music she’s listening to, how the new dog is doing, and, for my purposes, what new diet plan she and her husband are following. I want to emphasize again that I am in no way trying to badmouth Kristi, the website author. I am simply using what she says herself as a means of examining the mistakes people make when they adopt some type of extreme fad diet, in this case the so-called “ketogenic” diet. I’m putting the name of the diet in quotation marks because it’s actually very difficult to get your body into the state of ketosis, a condition in which your body has switched from burning glucose, its preferred fuel, to “ketone bodies,” which is fuel made from fat. This switch in fuels is supposed to “trick” your body into dipping into its fat stores, thus helping you lose weight. I’d encourage you to go back and read parts one and two of this series if you haven’t already done so. You’ll note below that I’m still mining the ideas contained in the original quotations I used, as there’s so much to say about just this short section.
I left off the last post with a description of how habits work. As we keep repeating an action we wear a neurological groove, making the action easier and more automatic every time we perform it. If you read Charles Duhigg’s book that I referenced yesterday you’ll learn about one way to disrupt a habit: basically, you have to figure out what the reward is and then substitute a new routine that will give you the same result without the negative consequences. For instance, and this is quite relevant here because it’s about eating, Duhigg analyzes the habit he’d formed of going down to the cafeteria every workday afternoon and getting a cookie. He gained five pounds, his wife let him know that she disapproved, and he set himself the task of changing the habit. What did he really want as his reward? he asked himself. Was it satisfaction of true hunger? Then he could eat an apple. Was it a shot of energy? Then he could get a cup of coffee. Or, perhaps less intuitively, did he just need a break, a chance to interact with people after sitting in front of his computer for several hours? He decided that last one was it. So he started getting up from his desk and looking for a chance to chat with people when the mid-afternoon munchies hit. (I haven’t gone back and re-read the relevant section, but I don’t believe he just started interrupting his co-workers as they were trying to concentrate.) He successfully changed his cookie habit. You can also simply remove the cue, if that’s possible. So that bag of cookies in your pantry that tempts you every time you open the door should just go. If the cookies aren’t there, you can’t eat them.
What I’m going to do in this post and at least a second one is what is called a “case study.” I’ll divide up the material because I want my readers to be willing to consume all of it. Sometimes I read others’ posts that are pages long, and if it’s a subject in which I’m interested I’ll probably at least skim it all. But I think it’s far better to write material that can be read in 5-10 minutes and then follow up with later posts. You don’t read blog posts the way you read a book, coming back to the place you left off. Instead, you usually just go on to the next post when it comes up. I want you to get the whole enchilada here and so always try to limit my individual posts to 1,000 words or less.
This is the first in a series of posts in which I present some common-sense rebuttals to the various fad diets out there; I picked the “keto” diet to begin with because it’s pretty hot right now. Something else is probably coming or has come down the pike already and I just haven’t gotten clued in yet. In reality, though, it doesn’t matter too much what the diet of the moment is, because all of these fad diets fall into some basic, broad categories: you can restrict fat, or carbs, or a specific food category (such as meat or gluten). Or you can just restrict calories in general. (Note that people with specific medical issues such as celiac disease or allergies, or people who eat a certain way as a matter of conscience, such as those who abhor the killing of animals, are not included in the fad diet category.)
A short post today in which I publicize my other blogs and platforms and encourage you to subscribe. Here goes:
1. Are you subscribed to this blog? You may have stumbled upon it in a Google search. If so, and you’d like to get e-mailed updates, be sure to use the signup form on the sidebar. Whenever I post something new you’ll get a brief e-mail with a link to the actual post. This happens 3-4 times a week at most, and the posts themselves are fairly brief. I try to keep things no longer than about 1,000 words. You’ll get the title and the first line or so. If that doesn’t grab you, just delete that e-mail, and another one will show up in a few days that you may like better.