The unsweetened sweet life

Even better than before

It’s embarrassing to confess to a change of diet. Maybe because it signals an acknowledgement of failure, and is coupled with a never-quiet desire, embarrassing in itself, to talk and talk about your change of habit, as these are so difficult to achieve.

It’s probably why some former smokers can become insufferable crusaders after they quit. Few people want to hear about someone else’s feats of self control, so going preachy is an almost-acceptable way to boast about your heroic deeds under the cover of morality.

With an eye to gradually overhauling my diet completely, I began in mid February by cutting sugar out entirely. I wanted to lose excess body fat certainly, but that wasn’t my only motivation. Over my adult years, I’d come to accept fatness, since no matter what I tried or how I trained, I never lost weight, and only gained. What I truly wanted was to be free of compulsion.

Even back in my earliest childhood memories, there is always a feeling of being spellbound by food, all food, but especially sugar. In adulthood I’ve often wondered if this was because I was bottle fed from day one. Baby formula wasn’t very sophisticated back then, it was basically all sugar.

It contributed I believe, but the atmosphere of my early childhood household was thick with my mother’s fears and dominated by her disordered eating, which both my brother and I were infected with. I don’t blame my mother for this. Two of her sisters are bulimic, so there’s clearly a story there. My father, an athlete, tried to make his children into athletes, but he lead with contempt, and he loved indulgence despite his athleticism, both of which doomed his efforts to failure.

Of my appearance, I am fully aware. I’m not motivated to conform to any ideal of appearance. Beauty is not a thing, it is a moment in time. Addiction is a moment too, and at the end of passing enough of those moments while holding the line fast, lies freedom.

No doubt, the idea of sugar addiction is laughable to many. Having lived and left behind addictions to cigarettes and alcohol however, I feel the similarities. I take no credit for not being a drunk anymore. It was the advent of romantic happiness, random and inexplicable, which shattered my oh-so-Australian dedication to drinking. Cigarettes were a different story.

If sugar was my first addiction, cigarettes were my first love. I’d never bothered about my health, indeed I’d been raised to think of bad health as inevitable and best ignored, so my relationship with cigarettes was a win-win. There was never a downside, until a few years ago, when I realized for the first time, that I was likely to go on living for quite a while, and that putting my husband through something like his wife having lung disease, would cause him pain. I’m not always quick on the uptake but I do have a conscience.

I have relapses, but I quit a 20 year strong packet a day habit. I planned to alter my diet completely and break the influence which sugar has always had over me, as a series of quitting things. The first, the worst and the hardest, had to be refined sugar. For me, there is no help from substitutes. Artificial sweeteners give me stomach aches, and the natural sugar alternatives like stevia taste foul. The hardest part was going to be beverages: the alteration of my coffee-and-tea habit, my milkshake habit and my wine habit.

For loss to succeed as a strategy, there must be a gain, or at the very least, a lessening of pain. For chains to support rather than bind, they must be of our own making. So I bound myself with a series of deals. The first deal for the worst stage was that I would eat whatever else I wanted to, do whatever drugs, be however useless and unproductive, as long as I consumed absolutely no sugar, which as well as refined sugar includes honey, maple and all other syrups, dried fruit and sweet juices.

It had been my habit since tweenhood to drink too many cups of coffee and tea, hot or iced, in a variety of styles, to count in a day. I was always sipping something, a flat white, an iced green tea, a bubble tea, a hot chocolate, a chai latte. It never really ends. I truly love beverages, and so few of them are enjoyable without sugar. I already drank a lot of water but inching the other beverages out was pretty torturous.

After six weeks of experimenting with all kinds of brewing with all kinds of teas and coffees, I settled into a routine of making a strong pot of pour over coffee in the morning. With the right beans and a pinch of sea salt, and by mastering a very slow pour, I gradually eliminated enough bitterness to make black, unsweetened coffee palatable. Nature can sometimes be a helpmate, and this was one of those times. By cutting sugar entirely and eschewing sweeteners, my palate began to change, an unlooked for but almost divine intervention.

Milk has always been almost lifeblood to me, even though pain in my stomach should have led me to guess earlier in life that I’m not entirely dairy-tolerant. My milk intake was coupled together so closely with sugar that I had to cut it right out. Although I was initially focused on refined sugar, I had planned to address my lactose consumption in due time. That time came a lot faster that I imagined.

For six weeks, I allowed myself to eat anything as long as I ate no sugar. Cutting sugar completely in this way, barring a piece of fruit in its natural state every couple of days, resulted in two unimagined outcomes. The first was the radical change in my palate. When I did relapse on sugar, it began to taste sickeningly sweet. Many hours were torturous with near-overwhelming cravings, but there was distraction enough, just enough, in experimenting in the kitchen. There was also a neat glass of the vodka I had infused with blackberries to drink ice cold from the freezer, if I made it sugar-free through the day.

The first couple of weeks of no sugar were the worst, though the very worst was the first three days. There wasn’t the withdrawal agonies I had gone through when I stopped binge drinking or quit smoking. What there was, was a lethargy of body and mind so complete that I couldn’t move. Because I had no appetite for any normal food, there were hunger pains. For three days I laid on my couch, crying fairly often, getting high, and drinking a liqueur glass of cold blackberry vodka at the end of the long day. After three days, the desire for sobriety returned, and I began my experiments.

I was horribly plagued with cravings but gradually they became dismiss-able. Sometimes I caved and drank a small milkshake, or shared a bottle of wine, but the key to quitting something is never being thrown off by relapses. Anyway, I found myself learning from my relapses. As the level of my blood sugar faded lower and lower, as I imagined must have been happening as long as I didn’t feed it, my thinking opened up. I began to ‘sit with’ the cravings, to examine them, to thwart them. I was determined to quit sugar but it was simply impossible, unthinkable utterly and completely, that I would give up or round down on pleasure. Only in the most extreme emergency would I ever consider that.

So I pushed myself around, finding enjoyment wherever and whenever I could, and counted the days, and cooked a lot. In a much shorter time than I would have imagined, just over two months, I’m at the end of stage one. I no longer feel compelled by sugar, and one of my planned stages, slashing dairy, I already inadvertently completed. After I’d cut my sugary milk drinks out, when I did relapse on one of them, it always gave me a stomach ache. My desire for enjoyment and to not feel ill or in pain, began to override the cravings for soft cheeses, milkshakes and affogato, which is a scoop of ice cream in a shot of espresso. I know there’s medication for lactose intolerance but for right now, I have an interest in gaining power over my compulsions, rather than smoothing the way for them.

I eat two or three meals a day, depending on how hungry I am and how active I’ve been. My sugar cravings are present but manageable. In my plan, I was leaving what I thought would be the second-worst stage, slashing bread, for last. As it happened, I went a couple of weeks without bread by accident. I’ve always deeply loved and needed bread, as much as dairy, but I was so wrapped up in resisting sugar cravings and my new experiments in cooking, that bread fell out of my much-perturbed mind.

So, I find myself ahead of schedule, but it’s still a long, disciplined road ahead. As I cannot eat without pleasure, I’m driven to cook. I’ve developed the most delicious chicken salad I’ve ever made. Despite the spritely flavor, it’s obscenely simple. I roast a whole chicken with bushels of gremolata of fresh parsley, a mix of flat leaf and curly, zest of a whole lemon, and a few garlic cloves pushed under the skin, then serve it room temperature with a cold and crunchy Romaine lettuce. The chicken’s own fat and some real balsamic vinegar de Modena make a round and complete dressing. I regularly make nut milk now, which I find refreshing when homemade with blanched almonds. I’ve developed an interest in vegan stocks and broths, and I’m becoming braver about trying seafoods, historically an anxious area for me.

It’s a little terrifying to cut elements from your diet. There’s something, well, final about it, death-like. Often over the past two months I had moments of terror, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of an eternally-restricted existence, fear of pain. But they were only moments, and they passed. Enough of them passed during which I held the line, and now I’m here, haunted but moving forward. I don’t count calories or make portion controls or keep track of my exercise, but I’m steadily losing fat. Keeping a food diary has been essential for me. When, every morning, I can sit down and review what I ate the day before, it spurs me to carry on.

Breakfast: 3 rashers bacon, olives and pickled onions

Lunch: avocado sushi roll w ginger

Dinner: 1 piece of fried chicken and dandelion greens w hot sauce

Drinks: black coffee, almond milk, water