Archive for March, 2010
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Day 7: To Live and Die on Donut Holes
First, I doubt I would have gotten to Day 7 without you. Merci.By you I mean the collective You to whom I am writing every day. Since we’re all One, I guess this is a complicated way of addressing myself.
Hence, success – so far. And no I am not feeling any of that cloying brand new me high a lot of magazine articles etc. promise you post-sugar. I continue to be irritable – especially wherever there are other people. I am currently pricing vacations in the northern Yukon and the Australian Outback.
Given some stress this past week, I normally would have thrown in the towel around 9:30 p.m. on Day 4 and made a trip out for a Magnum ice cream bar in the messy back freezer at the Epicerie Centrale across the street.
But no, I’ve kept going because my digital conscience required it. In fact, I’ve become so conscientious that I even skipped something I’d ordinarily consider OK even when on a no-sweets regime: a raspberry smoothie from the new Zest Juice Bar.
This place advertises sans sucre ajouté. No added sugar. But I know they use frozen yogurt. So I asked the guy if there was truly no sugar in the yogurt. I explained I was giving up sweets and writing a blog about it so I had to know. For You.
He denied there was any extra sugar, until I asked the question three different ways (he’s French) and he finally admitted he put “just a little” in the frozen yogurt before mixing it up
Smoothies don’t rate as something I crave, exactly. I crave candy – and to a lesser extent cookies and ice cream. Pies and cake come last. So under my own personal dietary no-candy laws, smooothies are allowed. But given all the focus that’s come up as a result of me writing this journal, I decided to have pure juice, sans sucre ajouté, instead.
I’m being extra-strict with myself because I know full well how eccentric my own no-candy dietary laws can be once I get past the first week or so of giving up sweets.
Once when I was in my 20s, I gave up sweets for about nine months or so. But for the last few months, my dietary laws got more and more…flexible.
For example, at the time I was a newspaper reporter in California. There was a Winchell’s Donuts right outside where I worked. I love Winchell’s Donuts. Unlike the sickening 40-pound hockey pucks that pass for doughnuts at Dunkin Donuts where I grew up in the Northeast, Winchell’s doughnuts are to me, fantastic delicacies baked by ethereal chefs wearing angel wings and perched on the highest clouds.(Yes, idealistic Francophiles who think if it’s French it’s gotta be better than anything in America – I’d take Winchell’s over French pastries.)
By the by, Winchell’s had an excellent selection of doughnut holes in addition to the main doughnuts. (Can I say I just left this page to go to the Winchell’s website to review my old favorites – chocolate iced buttermilk bar, bear claw, maple iced French donut – and thought, forget it. This no-sweets deal is the silliest idea I’ve ever had. I’m going to fly to Santa Monica tonight and head for that dirty Winchell’s with the homeless people near the Third Street Promenade and eat every doughnut I want. And then go over to See’s candies on Wilshire…)
Anyway, I’m back. I’ve got some healthy chicken cooking on the stove. I’m sure that’ll be just as good.
Back to the Winchell’s doughnut holes. So way back in my 20s, I’d start buying a few doughnut holes every afternoon because what you may not know is – doughnut holes are not really doughnuts and therefore not really sweets.
I continued to eat doughnut holes well before finally admitting that I was eating sweets when I said I wasn’t.
Among other things I’ve considered non-sweets: whipped cream. A can of whipped cream (which tastes way better in France than the synthetic Reddi Wip you buy in the U.S.) clearly has sugar but since it is not classified by the general public as a dessert by itself…then to me it is allowed per my innovative, no-sweets dietary laws.
Also: jelly beans or other tiny candies taken from someone else’s glass jar on someone else’s desk are not really candies nor do they contain calories. Tiny stale chocolate Easter eggs found underneath a cousin’s son’s nightstand in a suburb also do not qualify as candy.
My dicey dietary laws are not my only worry as I face the remaining 268 days without candy and sweets.
I know that right about this point, Day 7, the novelty, what little there was, has worn off. And the addictive part of my brain will be seeking substitutes.
Normally – during other failed no-sweets attempts – I stock up on peanut butter and honey right about now.
Peanut butter and honey become my candy. I have a little spoon – and I start beating a path to those jars as if they were lines of coke on the kitchen table. Just one more spoonful. No, wait, just one more. This is going to be it. Really. OK, just one more.
Honey has always been allowed under my dubious dietary laws. But when talking to Connie Bennett of Sugar Shock the other day, I heard her mention that she considers honey to be a sugar to avoid.
So I did not buy honey today at the 8 à Huit.
But I did buy peanut butter.
What did I eat this afternoon? A few spoonfuls of peanut butter and raspberry jam, which I always have in the house. The jars are still there and basically full. Peanut butter and jam are totally allowed but that’s not the point. I know me.
Funny thing is, the more I write this journal, the more I toy with the idea of going farther and trying the whole sugar-free thing. Not just candy and sweets. I mean no raspberry jam, no muesli for breakfast if it’s the muesli with sugar in it.
But I didn’t do it today.
And right now I’m not craving anything. The chicken was actually quite good!
Notice I didn’t say pork.
That might hit a bit close to home.
Ta,
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Day 6: "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"
Watch it and weep sweetfreaks. You can watch it in chunks if a 90-minute lecture is not your cup of sugar-free tea. But it’s good and the kind of eyeball-glazing info I gobble up when I want to be MOTIVATED! to get through this first week without candy.
We’re all 25 pounds heavier than we were 30 years ago, Dr. Lustig says.
Why? One clue, “It ain’t the fat, people.”
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Day 5: Cue the (Real) Sun
I planned to ask the questions when Connie Bennett, Queen of all that is Sugar-Free in the Universe, and I spoke on the phone tonight from her Manhattan hq at Sugarshock.com. Connie, if you don’t know, is Martin Luther King of the kick-sugar world. Connie has a dream – and that is to help everyone who wants to – get off sweets.She wants to help me. Theoretically, I want and need help. I think.
But it’s strange and awkward to be the one being asked questions when you’re the one who does the asking. (See also: entire career.)
Connie knows how to ask questions (she’s a former journalist) – as well as help (certified life coach.)
“What is your goal in giving up sugar?” Connie asked me.
Here’s the thing. Today I’m not so sure I want to. Had another stressful day – four hours at post offices tracking a lost painting my cousin mailed me from the U.S. – or was it stressful because I wasn’t eating candy along the way?
So I didn’t want to talk goals to Connie. I wanted to ask her what is the point, really, of doing this.
Quitting sweets is a great idea, sure, the night before you actually start doing it.
I couldn’t escape Connie’s questions, though. It reminded me of how I ask people questions. Lots of things about Connie reminded me of me.
“Where do you see yourself three months from now?” Connie pressed.
“This is where I have conflict,” I said.
“Tell me about the conflict,” she said.
Hey, what am I doing on the couch?
Plus, I’ve interviewed so many people that when I’m being interviewed, I feel a false self come up, as I’m parroting some of the more canned responses I’ve gotten over the years.
It was hard to explain the conflict because I don’t really understand it myself. I love candy, I think, but I don’t love being a slave to it.
Connie listened. She wanted me to think about what my life would be like in a year from now if I gave up sweets.
Well, I said dutifully. I’ll probably lose weight. I’ll probably be calmer. I’ll be healthier.
But I don’t know if I want to do this, I said.
The more questions Connie asked, the more awkward and fake I felt answering them. The more uncomfortable I felt, the more feelings came up. Paging Dr. Phil.
Every cliche in the book came up. Like I didn’t want to say goodbye to things. I didn’t really want to move on. I like the past.
“Perfectly normal,” said Connie. “There’s often an emotional attachment to sugar.”
“Ugh,” I said, or something like that. This sounds corny, I told her, but it’s as if I give up, sweets, well yay for me – but it’s going to be as if every day from now on is going to be cloudy.
There won’t be any sun. Maybe some organic peanut butter but no sun.
Connie suggested what I thought of as sun might be fake sun.
Connie was driving along Pacific Coast Highway one day after she had kicked sugar, she said, and she realized that she felt as if she was seeing the sun for the first time. Really seeing it.
“You have to trust me, the sun will be out,” she said.
I do trust her.
She gave me four assignments:
1. Write about a typical day and how much candy and sweets I eat. (Ate?)
2. Write about my resistance to this. (Easy!)
3. Write about the benefits to your life a year from now if you stick with this. (A year seems like a long time from now.)
4. Write about what you can do instead when you feel like reaching for something sweet. (Lie down in the middle of the street and scream?)
Forecast for tomorrow in my neck of the woods: rain.
Sun to come out on the weekend.
If you’re interested in being coached by Connie, click below:
Read Connie’s March 2 AOL piece here about Ellen De Generes and Jeff Garlin kicking sweets.
More on Connie to come.
Keep paddling. I hear there’s real light at the end of this.
Ta,
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Day 4: Jeff Garlin Too? Kicking Sugar Hot New Trend!
“Curb Your Enthusiasm’s” Jeff Garlin was on “Regis and Kelly” Wednesday talking about, what else? Quitting sugar!
Garlin is overweight and a diabetic so he was super-motivated to go on an overall drastic diet – which included cutting out sweets.
See story and video here
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Day 4: Why is Ellen DeGeneres Copying ME?
Oops, I guess living in France has its drawbacks. I must be the last to know that Ellen De Generes started a “sugar cleanse” for the entire 2010 TV season. She started on Feb. 2 – which only makes me one month behind U.S. pop culture news.
Ellen is doing it the hard-core way,giving up everything that has sugar in it which as you know is just about everything. Here’s a clip from her TV show on Feb. 2 talking about giving up sugar. Check out her video diary about her sugar-free journey here and watch the clip from her TV show on Feb. 2, the day she kicked it all off.
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Day 4: Help On the Way with former Sugar Shrew Connie Bennett!
Who do you call in the middle of the night – OK, it’s not quite 11 p.m. here in France but I’d argue it’s always dark without sweets – when you’re thinking of slipping? Maybe sneaking out to buy a small bar of Milka chocolate? Like, who would really know, right? Just a small bar. One euro. What harm could it do?
You call the Queen of the Sugar-Free of course. Connie Bennett!
Connie, who sometimes calls herself “Sugar Shrew No More” presides over an empire helping people kick sugar.
Her HQ is her Sugar Shock website and she has a book, a blog – and about 900 other cunning and insidious ways to help you kick the habit.
Tomorrow – Day 5 – Connie is going to coach me by telephone from Chicago as I bitch and whine my way through my first candy-free week.
I’ll be interviewing her as well. My planned opening salvo?
“Connie, I’m not even sure I really do want to quit. A year – or a lifetime – without sweets? Who I am kidding? Who are you kidding?”
I’ll be posting the coaching session and interview online tomorrow.
P.S. I did not go buy that Milka chocolate bar. Yet
Ta,
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Day 4: I Hate Everyone
Wait, is that too harsh?
OK, I hate only certain people – everyone I ran into today on a rainy, windy miserable day in the south of France (yes we have those kinds of days here.) I had to deal some bureaucrats and doctors and it was an exercise in frustration – trying to solve problems and being blamed for said problems.
Was it someone, um, French who said, “Hell is other people?” Merci bien, Jean-Paul Sartre.
Victim much? Today, yes! And I felt sorry for myself which I almost never, ever do. It was the kind of day that started off on a bad foot (literally, see above doctor reference) and just got worse.
Coincidentally, today was also my fourth day of going without eating candy, cookies, ice cream, cake or… anything fun.
In other news, I’ve been ironing my hair shirt and it looks very chic on me as I lie on my bed of nails and read literature from Opus Dei. I like to get a good night’s sleep after spooning down my thin gruel, chewing on a crust of dark stale bread and downing my thimbleful of wheatgrass juice.
I mean, what else is there to when you can’t have what you want?
And what do I want? So glad you asked.
And what do I want some of the above spooned onto?
Guess what I am having instead? At this very moment I am drinking a large glass of water containing a fizzy orange tablet of magnesium. What, no castor oil chaser? Cod liver oil a la mode?
Good times!
Anyway, the magnesium is to help the sugar cravings which I have every day.
As you can see, the honeymoon is officially over with a mere 361 days to go in my Year Without Candy. I so felt that void today. Trying to kick sugar is worse when you’re running around and the weather is crap and people are annoying.
I wanted to go to the tabacs, newsstands, kiosks that are everywhere and just pop a Mars bar to take the edge off. I almost felt the void today where candy would usually be more than the craving for candy itself.
I don’t like the void.
But I haven’t had any candy or sweets yet. Yet.
Damn, I really am taking on water.
Ta,
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Day 3: Sleeping with the Enemy!
We have a new follower from the white side – white sugar that is.
Todocandy is for candy addicts, with candy blog reviews, candy lists, mouthwatering (sorry) candy ads.
We are featured today along with other reviews on what the site calls “Candy Tuesdays.”
They say: “Do you think its possible as a candy addict that you could go without eating sweets & candy for a year? Honestly, I’m a very disciplined person however a year is a very long time to me.. But Dana Kennedy an American Journalist living in France is prepared to do just that — NO CANDY FOR A YEAR! Check out her blog, I’m sure it will be a success. I’ll be following it!”
Thanks for the thumbs up, Todocandy, stay in touch!
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Day 3: The Early White Sugar Conspiracy!
When you’re kicking sweets, there’s no one better to read than William Dufty, ex-boyfriend of ancient movie star Gloria “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small” Swanson. Dufty wrote the gold standard of anti-sugar books, “Sugar Blues” in 1975.
Read here for a chilling excerpt from “Sugar Blues” or check out a shorter segment of it that I’ve added below:
Here’s what Dufty wrote about the early “sugar pushers” and how they spun sugar myths so hard that white sugar became imbedded and encrusted in American food and American diets for generations to come.
SUCROSE: “PURE” ENERGY AT A PRICE
When calories became the big thing in the 1920s, and everybody was learning to count them, the sugar pushers turned up with a new pitch. They boasted there were 2,500 calories in a pound of sugar. A little over a quarter-pound of sugar would produce 20 per cent of the total daily quota.
“If you could buy all your food energy as cheaply as you buy calories in sugar,” they told us, “your board bill for the year would be very low. If sugar were seven cents a pound, it would cost less than $35 for a whole year.”
A very inexpensive way to kill yourself.
“Of course, we don’t live on any such unbalanced diet,” they admitted later. “But that figure serves to point out how inexpensive sugar is as an energy-building food. What was once a luxury only a privileged few could enjoy is now a food for the poorest of people.”
Later, the sugar pushers advertised that sugar was chemically pure, topping Ivory soap in that department, being 99.9 per cent pure against Ivory’s vaunted 99.44 per cent. “No food of our everyday diet is purer,” we were assured.
What was meant by purity, besides the unarguable fact that all vitamins, minerals, salts, fibres and proteins had been removed in the refining process? Well, the sugar pushers came up with a new slant on purity.
“You don’t have to sort it like beans, wash it like rice. Every grain is like every other. No waste attends its use. No useless bones like in meat, no grounds like coffee.”
“Pure” is a favourite adjective of the sugar pushers because it means one thing to the chemists and another thing to the ordinary mortals. When honey is labelled pure, this means that it is in its natural state (stolen directly from the bees who made it), with no adulteration with sucrose to stretch it and no harmful chemical residues which may have been sprayed on the flowers. It does not mean that the honey is free from minerals like iodine, iron, calcium, phosphorus or multiple vitamins. So effective is the purification process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries that sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a chemist has on the laboratory shelves. What nutritional virtue this abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us.
Beginning with World War I, the sugar pushers coated their propaganda with a preparedness pitch. “Dietitians have known the high food value of sugar for a long time,” said an industry tract of the 1920s. “But it took World War I to bring this home. The energy-building power of sugar reaches the muscles in minutes and it was of value to soldiers as a ration given them just before an attack was launched.” The sugar pushers have been harping on the energy-building power of sucrose for years because it contains nothing else. Caloric energy and habit-forming taste: that’s what sucrose has, and nothing else.
All other foods contain energy plus. All foods contain some nutrients in the way of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins or minerals, or all of these. Sucrose contains caloric energy, period.
The “quick” energy claim the sugar pushers talk about, which drives reluctant doughboys over the top and drives children up the wall, is based on the fact that refined sucrose is not digested in the mouth or the stomach but passes directly to the lower intestines and thence to the bloodstream. The extra speed with which sucrose enters the bloodstream does more harm than good.
Much of the public confusion about refined sugar is compounded by language. Sugars are classified by chemists as “carbohydrates”. This manufactured word means “a substance containing carbon with oxygen and hydrogen”. If chemists want to use these hermetic terms in their laboratories when they talk to one another, fine. The use of the word “carbohydrate” outside the laboratory-especially in food labelling and advertising lingo-to describe both natural, complete cereal grains (which have been a principal food of mankind for thousands of years) and man-refined sugar (which is a manufactured drug and principal poison of mankind for only a few hundred years) is demonstrably wicked. This kind of confusion makes possible the flimflam practised by sugar pushers to confound anxious mothers into thinking kiddies need sugar to survive.
In 1973, the Sugar Information Foundation placed full-page advertisements in national magazines. Actually, the ads were disguised retractions they were forced to make in a strategic retreat after a lengthy tussle with the Federal Trade Commission over an earlier ad campaign claiming that a little shot of sugar before meals would “curb” your appetite. “You need carbohydrates. And it so happens that sugar is the best-tasting carbohydrate.” You might as well say everybody needs liquids every day. It so happens that many people find champagne is the best-tasting liquid. How long would the Women’s Christian Temperance Union let the liquor lobby get away with that one?
The use of the word “carbohydrate” to describe sugar is deliberately misleading. Since the improved labelling of nutritional properties was required on packages and cans, refined carbohydrates like sugar are lumped together with those carbohydrates which may or may not be refined. The several types of carbohydrates are added together for an overall carbohydrate total. Thus, the effect of the label is to hide the sugar content from the unwary buyer. Chemists add to the confusion by using the word “sugar” to describe an entire group of substances that are similar but not identical.
Glucose is a sugar found usually with other sugars, in fruits and vegetables. It is a key material in the metabolism of all plants and animals. Many of our principal foods are converted into glucose in our bodies. Glucose is always present in our bloodstream, and it is often called “blood sugar”.
Dextrose, also called “corn sugar”, is derived synthetically from starch. Fructose is fruit sugar. Maltose is malt sugar. Lactose is milk sugar. Sucrose is refined sugar made from sugar cane and sugar beet.
Glucose has always been an essential element in the human bloodstream. Sucrose addiction is something new in the history of the human animal. To use the word “sugar” to describe two substances which are far from being identical, which have different chemical structures and which affect the body in profoundly different ways compounds confusion.
It makes possible more flimflam from the sugar pushers who tell us how important sugar is as an essential component of the human body, how it is oxidised to produce energy, how it is metabolised to produce warmth, and so on. They’re talking about glucose, of course, which is manufactured in our bodies. However, one is led to believe that the manufacturers are talking about the sucrose which is made in their refineries. When the word “sugar” can mean the glucose in your blood as well as the sucrose in your Coca-Cola, it’s great for the sugar pushers but it’s rough on everybody else.
People have been bamboozled into thinking of their bodies the way they think of their cheque accounts. If they suspect they have low blood sugar, they are programmed to snack on vending machine candies and sodas in order to raise their blood sugar level. Actually, this is the worst thing to do. The level of glucose in their blood is apt to be low because they are addicted to sucrose. People who kick sucrose addiction and stay off sucrose find that the glucose level of their blood returns to normal and stays there.
Since the late 1960s, millions of Americans have returned to natural food. A new type of store, the natural food store, has encouraged many to become dropouts from the supermarket. Natural food can be instrumental in restoring health. Many people, therefore, have come to equate the word “natural” with “healthy”. So the sugar pushers have begun to pervert the word “natural” in order to mislead the public.
“Made from natural ingredients”, the television sugar-pushers tell us about product after product. The word “from” is not accented on television. It should be. Even refined sugar is made from natural ingredients. There is nothing new about that. The natural ingredients are cane and beets. But that four-letter word “from” hardly suggests that 90 per cent of the cane and beet have been removed. Heroin, too, could be advertised as being made from natural ingredients. The opium poppy is as natural as the sugar beet. It’s what man does with it that tells the story.
If you want to avoid sugar in the supermarket, there is only one sure way. Don’t buy anything unless it says on the label prominently, in plain English: “No sugar added”. Use of the word “carbohydrate” as a “scientific” word for sugar has become a standard defence strategy with sugar pushers and many of their medical apologists. It’s their security blanket.
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Day 2: Wanting… Chocolate
I’d give today a B+ in terms of sugar cravings – partly because I was so busy.
I had to give a talk to university students at the SKEMA business school in Sophia Antipolis north of Nice.
Then I got back and wrote a Huffington Post article about giving up candy and this blog. Then I was plunged into a crazy story about Italy’s wacky Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the showgirls he’s nominated to represent his party in regional elections.
But at 4 p.m. I felt that familiar pull – toward sugar.
I wanted to get up and go down the street to my favorite confiserie L’Art Gourmand, located at 21, rue du Marché and buy one of their four euro tablets of pure milk chocolate manufactured on the premises.
But I didn’t. At least not for today.
That’s the beauty of this blog. It’s so selfish. It’s not for you.
It’s for me. You’re my conscience. Whether you’re reading this or not.
When the sugar cravings come, I think of you.
And how this Piglet has to keep swimming.
Until next time,
About
Recent Posts
- Day 365: Tell the Women of Congo You Love Them!
- Day 364: What If the World Did End in 2012?
- Day 363: Twilight of the Dictators, Twilight of No Candy
- Day 353: Howl of a Candy Addict
- Day 351: Self-Deprivation Sucks
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