Year of No Sugar Read Free Page B

thought about it. And thought about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was as if someone had spilled seltzer on the keyboard of my brain: it was sizzling and spitting and making very strange humming noises that only I could hear. Forget a lightbulb above my head; this was an acetylene torch . I realized I had better talk to Steve.
    If my husband thought I was completely out of my mind, he hid it well. Instead of being horrified or dismissive, he seemed intrigued if a bit apprehensive.
    â€œ A whole year without sugar?” he wondered aloud. “Hmm.”
    Yes. This was my idea: the whole family—myself, my husband Steve, and our two daughters, ages six and eleven—we would not eat added sugar for a whole year . The more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. Why not shun sugar , specifically fructose? Find out how hard it really would be?
    I was a writer, after all, and I had been looking for a new project to focus on. I had seen Super Size Me , and I had read Animal Vegetable Miracle and Julie and Julia —all projects by people who might not have been experts per se, but who had an overwhelming desire to do something unusual, somethingout of the mainstream—and perhaps, in the process, come to some unforeseen conclusions about themselves and the culture we live in. They all involved food. They all involved a proscribed time period. That was key: I knew I’d never get everyone on board for this project unless the experiment had a definitive beginning and a definitive ending. A yearlong timeline was long enough to really mean something, to represent a true commitment and shift to a whole different way of doing things. Maybe even long enough to see some potential changes in ourselves develop. Would our temperaments change? Our waistlines? Our blood work? Our palates? And yet, still, it wasn’t forever .
    At that point, I knew we didn’t go so much as a single day in our house without having some form of sugar or other, perhaps not even a single meal, so this experiment was pretty much guaranteed to wreak all kinds of unpredictable havoc with our lives. I loved it.
    I would start a blog and write about what happened, the day-to-day events that were bound, I thought, to be interesting or surprising, or frustrating or funny. The writer in me loved the idea of searching out the answers one by one like a kitchen-cupboard Sherlock Holmes. Not just for ourselves, but for others as curious as I was. Had anyone done this before? Could we really do it? What would actually happen? Would we all be abjectly miserable for twelve months? Would we all grow thin and haggard for lack of cheerful sweetness in our diet? Would we develop superhuman levels of health and agility, able to leap tall boxes of Bran Flakes in a single bound? Would we secretly hoard candy in our shoes and cupcakes in our sock drawers? And oh, God, what about Halloween ? And Christmas ??
    Well, I reasoned: There’s only one way to find out.
    _______
    Now I can hear you saying, “But wait a minute! That was quick. Didn’t you put up a fight for your beloved sugar? Didn’t you go for at least a dip in the river of Denial?”
    Well, perhaps I should back up.
    Up until the year of the experiment, we—myself, my husband, and our two daughters, Greta and Ilsa—were a fairly normal family when it came to food, I think. Perhaps a bit on the liberal, organic, dirt-worshipping side, but nevertheless, still fairly middle of the road. We ate meat. We liked snacks. We liked desserts. When the circus came to town, we’d throw caution to the wind and purchase big, fluffy balls of electric-pink cotton candy despite all our better judgment. Life is short, I reasoned, and although I have my requisite worried-Vermont-mom concerns, (hormone-free beef? GMO corn? pesticides in the potatoes?), I tried to keep them in check. I didn’t want my kids growing up being afraid to live .
    We had come to this