The Sweet Spot, part two

I’m getting some questions about the specifics of the low- to no-sugar gig, so here’s the scoop for my curious friends.

It turns out, there are two kinds of sugar in our diets: naturally occurring, like what’s in an apple, and added, like what’s in a Coke. The naturally occurring stuff is fine, even good. Eat what you like, the nutritionists say. Enjoy the sweetness of grapes and bananas to your heart’s content. The added stuff, evidently, has no nutritional value at all, not even a bit, and aiming towards very low (or even no) consumption of this stuff is wise.

Just how wise, I wanted to know. Well, it turns out that kinda well-known organizations, like the American Heart Association, say very wise. As in, eating and drinking added sugar can lead to diabetes and heart disease. And evidence is mounting that sugar makes a nice little breeding ground for certain cancers, too.

Got it. Wise.

Next I wanted to know how to find it in my food. The line on a nutrition label that says Sugars (the one under Carbohydrates) lumps the naturally occurring sugar and the added sugar together in one number, measured in grams.

Huh. Who knew?

To find out if there’s any of the added stuff going on in, say, a Thomas Lite English muffin, I have to read the ingredients list. Sugar shows up in bunch of different ways: fructose, dextrose, corn syrup, honey, sucralose, molasses, cane juice. It's complicated, for sure, and takes time to ferret out.

Let me pause right here and say I’m not reading every label on every item in my grocery cart. I don’t have time, and you don’t, either. What I am doing is looking for culprit foods, the things that taste sweet or sweet-er than maybe they should. For example, Matt likes the refrigerated grapefruit that comes in a jar. That stuff is sweet (I know this because I like it, too.) There are two varieties: the refrigerated grapefruit that comes in a jar, and the jar right next to it, same brand, that says “No Sugar Added” on the front. The nutrition label on the back of the No Sugar Added jar reads 0 grams of sugar. Great. Into the cart she goes.

Granola bars have presented the biggest challenge for me. I’ve seen sugar grams in one little bar as high as 47, but nothing lower than five. Some of the really high ones, though, have no added sugar. They’re just chock-full of dried fruit. And some of the low ones have no fruit in them at all, but sugar is the second or third ingredient on the list. Cereal is equally challenging.

All of the looking (which, honestly, has taken far less time than it sounds—perhaps an added fifteen minutes to one trip to the store, five the next, and now I’m in a routine) sent me back to the Internet. I wanted to know just how much added sugar is okay.

And here’s the answer: for a women, the maximum is 100 calories a day, which equals about 25 grams, and for a man, the maximum is 150 calories, or 37 grams.

Two things to know about that: it isn’t much. A one-serving bag of plain M&Ms contains 30 grams of sugar, none of it naturally occurring.  And the other thing is that not a single gram of added sugar is healthy. Our bodies do not need it to function, and it isn’t helpful in any way.

Enough with the boring stuff. Let’s move on to what life has been like with low sugar.

One, I haven’t been counting sugar grams. Instead, I completely eliminated all desserts and then, for the rest of it, made some decisions about the troublesome foods like granola bars, yogurt, and salad dressings.

For breakfast, I usually eat an English muffin with peanut butter and a banana. I double-checked my muffin: one gram of sugar. I can live with that. Many peanut butters have added sugar; I am sticking with one that doesn’t

Every day, around 9:30, I get hungry. That 6:00 a.m. muffin is long gone, and lunch seems an eon away. My many-years habit has been to have a cup of low-fat yogurt and a low-calorie granola bar. Both are loaded with added sugar, it turns out, so what to do?

Plain no-fat yogurt mixed with fresh fruit and about 10 almonds. Voila.

The next challenge was to find a low- or no-sugar salad dressing. My dear friend Sunni makes the most fabulous homemade stuff, but something about the process of whipping up my own dressing has never caught on for me. Not going to lie, I want convenience with this one. I found a couple of yogurt-based dressings that have one gram of sugar in a serving. I can live with that, too.

What I have yet to tackle are the cans of soup I love on a cold day (added sugar) and the pasta we cook for dinner (added sugar). I'm afraid to look at the label on my favorite jar of pasta sauce.

Baby steps.

Last but not least, how has this affected me?

Significantly.

I have been a snacker my whole life. When the whole “eat many small meals a day” revolution started in the 90s I remember thinking, “Permission to snack! Yes!” Some of this is my physiology, but much of it is an awful habit. Well, vastly reducing sugar has vastly reduced snacking. Yes, I still nosh on popcorn while I read. Yes, I still eat an apple on the drive home from work. Yes, I still want a snack in the evenings. But the tendency to have my fingers in something at work or after dinner is far, far less.

Another interesting thing … everything tastes terribly sweet to me. Baby carrots are so sweet, I swear they’ve been sprinkled with brown sugar. Same with my morning coffee. I have been using flavored creamer and a packet of Splenda for years. Now I can’t stand the Splenda; it tastes awful. 

Isn’t that weird? I think it’s weird.

Here's what I know: a little bit of sugar makes me want more sugar, and then more sugar makes me want obscene amounts of sugar. This is where the word addiction is apt. Eating something mostly sugar-based, like a cupcake or ice cream, triggers a bizarre response in me. I suddenly want more of something—anything—and my thoughts become wholly preoccupied with getting it. This is where having very little sugar is giving me freedom.

Lastly, the big question: have I lost any weight?

So here’s the deal. I didn’t set out to lose weight on this low-sugar deal, but I certainly would not have minded if I did.

In my post-menopause world, weight loss has become a street fight. I cannot even tell you. I run, I bike, I do not eat meat, I eat something fried once in a blue moon (thank you, Shake Shack friends), and now I’m eating almost no sugar.

You’d think I look like a gymnast. Alas, I do not.

No weight loss the first two weeks of January. On week three, I dropped two pounds.

Yep, that’s it. Two pounds. (Matt, that boogerhead, lost nine.)

So, where does all this leave me with sugar?

Well, it’s complicated. At the moment, I can’t imagine adding sugar back into my diet, not even in small quantities. Let me tell you, a couple of weeks ago, I ate cereal without first checking the label. Within minutes, my hands were shaking. I went back to the box and checked. Sure enough, there were twelve grams of sugar in one serving. I felt awful, sweaty and hollow, like I was coming down with the flu.

So, yeah, I’m not super excited about sugar.

But here’s the sitch: Matt misses sugar like crazy. His is counting down the days until February, when the month of No Sweets, No Treats, come to a blessed close. He wants his scones, his ice cream, his Blue Bird cupcakes.

When I told him I wasn’t ready to get back to sugar yet, he paled. I reassured him he can eat all the sugar he wants, but he loathes the idea of being out of sync in our habits. How he is going to reconcile his twin desires to love both me and sugar, I don’t know. We’ve got some talking to do, for sure.

And I’ve got some thinking to do. I want to know if being a short-term abstainer can lead to being a long-term moderator. I don't know yet.

But I see that I can’t make a choice in isolation and expect it to have no impact on the people around me.

Yesterday was my birthday. My friends and family and co-workers were lovely with their affirming words and cards and balloons and text messages and coffees and lunches and—best of all—time. Noticeably absent were cupcakes and chocolates. No one talked about it. There just wasn’t any sugar.

As I put my head on my pillow last night, I thought about my people and their quiet solidarity. I wondered if I’d been a challenge for them, if anyone had gone to the store and thought, “Well, crap. She’s off sugar. What to do?” But no one made a thing about it. They just showed up with sugar-free love.

Sugar.

Free.

Love.

Well, now, would you look at that? Good golly. 

And it’s only January.