Archive for January, 2012

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January 23, 2012

Recapping 7 Days without Sugar

The last week went pretty quickly so it’s time to recap!

Honestly, this challenge wasn’t terribly hard or a huge change from my normal routine. That’s encouraging, but it felt limiting because it is. I dreamed one night that I had cheated and eaten a bunch of Hershey Kisses out of the freezer. On waking up, I found no evidence that I’d actually done so in my sleep, thankfully.

After a few days, I started to notice just how often I walk by Saint Cupcake, Cacao and Coco Donuts. They’re not places I go particularly often but are my go-to choices when I want cupcakes (try the toasted coconut), drinking chocolate and donuts, respectively. Since when did I walk by them multiple times a day? The answer is always, but they kept jumping out at me because I knew I couldn’t get myself a treat. I may get myself a celebratory cupcake, and then the obsession should abate. Even though we all know you’re not supposed to reward yourself with food. Doing a food challenge doesn’t seem like an effective dieting technique because of the risk you’ll overdo it once the taboo is lifted. Maybe this is an insight into why traditional dieting doesn’t work for most people.

By last night, I couldn’t get sweets off the brain. My guess is that’s again just because I couldn’t have them. I did make a couple of sugar free treats during the week, but temptation is everywhere. Maybe staying off the sugar for longer would have fixed the fixation. It’s hard not to focus on what you know you can’t have.

I have to say having lots of fruit on hand was a huge help. Many times when I wanted cake or a cookie, I would peel a couple of clementines and have those. They’re cute, delicious and peeling them and taking off the little pithy strings is really distracting. Those babies kept me from being miserable more than a few times. I also bought some blueberries (from Chile), and made sure to have some persimmon puree on my morning cereal. Plus lots of pears from the farmers market.

Even though a no sugar diet isn’t very far off what I have normally, I’m really happy to get back to what Mark Bittman calls “sane

Yummy, yummy orange-y pastry!

eating.” Basically, be sensible—like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes most of the time, but nothing is totally off limits. He talks in his book Food Matters about having a cheeseburger with fries and a soda–every few months. If you figure that meal easily has 1000 calories, a few times a year is plenty. And something like this tangerine-sized orange roll- at the Fehrenbacher Hof- is fine every now and then. I enjoyed every bite of that this morning.

I’m glad I did this challenge even just to see how hard it is to pick something and eliminate it from your diet. That step isn’t very hard, but I underestimated how limited I’d feel. It’s much nicer having the option of having something sweet and just deciding to have something else.

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January 18, 2012

Challenge Update

I’m just a couple of days into this sugar challenge and I already have some thoughts to share. I woke up on day 1 thinking about the big bag of Hershey Kisses that’s residing in our freezer. I hadn’t thought about them in days. As I made tea (rather than coffee) and nibbled at some leftovers from Gravy (eggs and hash browns), I wondered how this would go. My mind kept wandering back to desserts and Gravy’s hot chocolate (it’s amazing), which I had the day before day 1. So I ate a pear and it was wonderful.

At a Winterhawks game later that day, I had an interesting encounter with a Rose Garden staff member. I had brought along a

My contraband for the hockey game.

few almonds and a Larabar in case I needed to snack during the game. We’ve been to the Rose Garden a time or two and I was confident that any bread product there would contain at least one refined sweetener (figuring that Subway bread is comparable [PDF]). I wanted to spare myself the temptation of a hot dog or pizza, so I brought my own snacks. As the guy was looking in my bag, he nudged the Larabar and said “what’s this?” Foiled. While I looked up and raised my eyebrows up to my hairline I considered telling him that I’m gluten-intolerant and what did he expect me to do? I didn’t, and he asked me to just leave the snacks in my purse. Good thing I didn’t bring my own applesauce.

I did as he asked and ended up eating a couple of nachos with cheese dip. It occurred to me that the dip could contain sweeteners, so I stopped eating. After looking up some queso dip online, I found an ingredient list that includes maltodextrin—which isn’t exactly a sweetener—and MSG. That was a bigger surprise to me than the lack of corn syrup. Lesson learned: if you’re trying to eat a healthy diet without rogue ingredients floating around, sporting events are not the best places to get a meal. But really, we all knew that already, didn’t we?

Yesterday I made black bean cookies with toasted hazelnuts and dried unsweetened pineapple instead of chocolate pieces and sweetened cherries. I also whipped up “icing” from coconut milk and creamed honey. They’re delicious and I went a bit overboard because they’re “guilt-free.” I think once they’re gone, I need to try not having dessert per se. Bring on the fruit. By keeping this challenge limited to sugar, I’ve made a lot of processed, unhealthy food acceptable for the week. This has me wondering if I could do a more comprehensive challenge. Maybe something like a vegan challenge (but nothing like Oprah’s—which included mass amounts of highly processed foodstuffs), or a 100% whole food challenge. I think the whole food idea gets more to the point of having a healthy diet.

To sum up, it’s going well. Honestly, it isn’t that hard to avoid added sugars if you’re not typically dependent on packaged or fast foods. We also generally don’t go to casual dining restaurants, where all kinds of added sugar, salt and fat are lurking. All these things make it easier to know exactly what I’m eating.

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January 14, 2012

The Sugar Challenge Begins Monday!

Now that the Christmas tree shaped cookies are gone, I’m ready to take on my personal food challenge! Starting on Monday, January 16th, I’ll go one week without any refined sugars—basically, cane sugar and any type of “corn sugar,” as the refiners would like you to call it. Less processed sweeteners, including honey and maple syrup, will be allowed. And I won’t be resorting to no-calorie, chemically derived sweeteners.

I’ll be resetting my sense of taste and making myself pay more attention to what I’m eating. It’s no post-holiday cleanse diet, but it will take some effort. There’s a lot of sugar hiding seemingly safe places these days (check your salad dressings—or tomato soup). I imagine that 50 years ago, if you wanted to stop eating sugar, you would just pass on cake after dinner. It’s not that easy now. I’ve read varied tallies of how much the average American consumes, but all the numbers are big ones. According to this aesthetically pleasing graphic, we eat about 141 pounds of caloric sweeteners annually. Divide by 365, and you get over a third of a pound daily. Daily!

Mark Bittman calls sugar the single biggest problem in the American diet (from his book Food Matters). The fallout is well documented, with diabetes affecting even the young and slim, and it’s no wonder when many children start the day with way too much sugar.

I think I’m prepared for the next week. I have successfully cut sugar for a day or two at a time in the past, but sticking to it for a week will be an adventure. I have some no sugar added sliced bread and a lot of fruit on hand, plus lots of whole grains, legumes and vegetables. And I’ll probably make a cashew-based “dreamcake” at some point. Bring on the week!

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January 10, 2012

My Latest Food Adventure: Oysters

Two weeks ago, me having just finished reading Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher, my husband and I went to Dan & Louie’s Oyster Bar to finally taste this magnificent food so exalted by so many. Here’s the short version: we tried oysters; neither of us likes oysters.

And the long version:

My new favorite food author, Fisher, wrote an entire book in the early-mid twentieth century just about the oyster. I had never once tried one, and I’m only a little bit grossed out by some shellfish, usually depending on how they’re prepared. Fisher described so many ways to eat them: on the half shell, Rockefeller, in stew or soup, and in stuffing to name a few, I figured one of them had to be amazingly delicious. They suddenly sounded like the ultimate comfort food, and I absolutely needed to try them.

Oysters Rockefeller

I’d been thinking about this new adventure for a few weeks, and when my husband suggested we check out the Oyster Bar, I looked forward to it for days. I’d settled on oyster stew ahead of time and possibly oysters Rockefeller before we started the walk to the restaurant. Oysters Rockefeller, we found, are not cheap but we got them anyway. They came out on a glass plate straight from the oven, the six mollusks removed from their shells and covered with a mixture of butter, spinach and bacon and served with lemon wedges. I ate one and then accidentally flipped one over, revealing the pale flesh and making me realize I was eating the whole body of a blobby hermetic critter. Come on, Lindsay, you ate bull tail in Spain I thought to myself and downed the second one.

The oyster stew was exactly what I expected. Some of the oysters in it were chopped, and those were just fine, but the larger pieces of bivalve creature were objectionable. They have that slightly gritty texture so common in shellfish, and when you bite into them, what I suppose you’d call “oyster liquor” gushes out briefly. All that went through my mind at that moment is that “oyster liquor,” as I had feared, is a euphemism for seawater. The broth, made of butter and cream, was quite nice, and I did manage to reach the bottom of the bowl.

None of this is to say there was anything wrong with what we ate, just that we’re not oyster people. I didn’t ever think I was, but now I’ve confirmed it. Fisher’s prose about them convinced me to try, but maybe they’re an acquired taste. Now I’m onto the next book within the book I’m reading, and it’s called How to Cook a Wolf—it was written during WWII, and so far does not contain actual directions to cook an actual wolf. It appears to be a metaphor—were it not, rest assured I wouldn’t try to take her direction. I’ve come across some interesting advice about economy and balance that is highly applicable today, but that will wait for another post.

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January 4, 2012

Hello 2012, Goodbye Sugar (Briefly)

I’ve been wondering for a while how I would do with a personal food challenge. One of my favorite food blogs is 100 Days of Real Food; basically, a mother of two in North Carolina saw Food, Inc. and undertook a 100-day challenge of feeding her family nothing but real, whole foods. Now she’s doing it again, but on a food stamp sized budget. It sounds super intense. So what would my challenge be?

The answer is obvious to me: cutting out added sugar. I’ve thought about sweeping changes before and thought that getting 90 or 95% of the way there would be pretty simple. It’s the last little bit that’s so hard. I already eat mostly whole, real food, mostly vegetarian and mostly healthy (let’s leave the past month out of it, though). Sugar is a big weakness. I plan to make my challenge one week long sometime later this month. It’s going to require planning. Here’s what’s on my mind already:

*Coffee: I sweeten mine. I’ve experimented with maple syrup and agave and found that agave works pretty well. If I go out to coffee, I’ll have to bring my own sweetener. This requires thinking ahead. Noted.

*Anything in a package: Most things in packages have at least one sweetener. I’ll allow molasses, honey, agave and maple syrup, but corn syrup, cane sugar and all their relatives are off limits. This means I need to check the ingredients on Dave’s Killer Bread and see if there’s one without cane sugar. I think I can go without any other packaged items. If I do need anything else, I’ll check the ingredients carefully, but that’s something I already do.

*What’s in the pantry: Why didn’t my challenge start on January 1st like a resolution? Because we still have Christmas cookies, Toblerone bars (a Christmas tradition in my family) and lots of Hershey Kisses hanging around (these might need to go in the freezer). Starting with the year would have ensured failure. Better to wait a bit until the sweets on hand include banana soft serve and vegan “truffles” made out of dates.

*Spontaneous baking: Baking isn’t just about the end product; the process itself is very comfortable and soothing. I’m thinking making whole grain bread would help the urge, but I’ve also found some fabulous recipes that don’t include sugar…most of them at My New Roots.

Shunning one or several sweeteners and allowing others is totally arbitrary, it’s true. I’m sort of a believer that a sweetener is a

Hello, (sugar-free, vegan) truffles!

sweetener, but that all sweeteners are not created equal. Clear as mud, right? Part of this is that I want to recalibrate my sense of taste. After two months of frequent treats that were largely sweet, my taste buds are all hopped up and need to come back down to earth. Downing a mouthful of homemade toffee would feel excessive if I were at a more normal level of sugar consumption, but it’s something that happened with embarrassing frequency the week before Christmas. It’s time to get back to normal, where a brownie made out of walnuts and dates is sufficiently sweet. And maybe I only need one or two of those a day…not half a dozen.

So at a time TBD, but soon, I’ll undertake my little challenge and blog about it to keep myself honest. If anyone wants to join me, I’d love the company. Or do you have your own food challenge for the new year?

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