White Sugar--The Real Culprit

Years ago before I was married, I read William Duffy’s book, Sugar Blues. It was such an extraordinary book and it scared me so much that I didn’t eat sugar for almost a year. I still remember the opening story about Gloria Swanson “hissing,” “That stuff is poison, I won’t have it in my house, let alone my body.”

Several years later when I felt inherently that sugar was bad for me, and wanted another fix to get me off the stuff, I reread it, but it didn’t make half the impression as when I read it the first time. I thought of the famous quote by Alexander Pope:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Intellectually, I knew sugar was not good for me, but I had become inured to its evils. I felt I would be a fanatic to drop white sugar from my life—I mean everyone eats it! Sugar is in everything! And so even though I wished, wanted, and yearned for a beautifully thin body, I wasn’t willing to give up any of my habits. I felt I could overeat with impunity, gobble up white bread and ice cream and somehow it would all work out. I felt a c-pap machine was the ticket, and then the lap-band was the answer, but they were all pieces to the puzzle. I counted calories and felt if I just ate fewer calories then things would come together and I would lose weight. But last week after visiting with the family of my daughter Stephanie’s former companion, Ashly Gross, I started to rethink. As they say, two crop failures and an imminent drought got the Smith family to move to Palmyra, a convert usually has ten to twenty contacts with the church before really listening to the gospel, and me, well, I looked at Ashly’s mom, Lori, and I thought, “Marilyn, you are either serious about losing weight or you aren’t.” Lori hadn’t eaten white sugar since 1996 and she looked fantastic. She wasn’t always that way, but her husband introduced her to eating well and she went from there. After our talk and visit, I thought, “Marilyn, you have always known sugar was bad for you.” As Lori said, ‘Sugar is just one step away from alcohol. It is an addiction.’” And so I decided to do an experiment. I would go for one day without eating anything with white sugar. That meant NO yogurt, NO skinny cow ice cream, NO chocolate covered acai-blueberries, nothing! Basically, I had an omelet, cottage cheese and pineapple, chicken and vegetables. I wasn’t giving up the fat and salt (the other two addictions that Rob often mentions as the triumvirate of what food manufacturers lace their products to win American appetites—sugar, fat and salt) just sugar.

You can imagine my surprise when after the first day, I lost two pounds and then Saturday night, another two pounds, so that today, Monday, June 21, 2010, I hit an all-time low for my weight since my lap-band, 276.0, I am one pound away from having lost 50 pounds! That is amazing! It’s a wonderful event because whenever I get within sniffing distance of 50, I hit the wall and now I believe I have found the “culprit.” Sugar! White, granulated, C&H sugar! I didn’t want to believe it and the question now will be, how long can I stay “on the wagon?”

Surprisingly, it has been easier than I thought. Before I would start craving things and then sampling things to figure out what it is I wanted. But now my grazing is pretty limited, in fact, what used to be “grazing” is now breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t have that same rapacious thirst. And I definitely do not have the “stomach” to “stomach” it anymore.

My Gold’s Gym buddy, Laurie, tells me that whenever she goes on vacation, she eliminates sugar from her diet because she can’t exercise and invariably, upon her return she weighs less. When I was on my mission, I did Atkins, which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but I lost a lot of weight, and one of the premises is that you can’t eat sugar. I believe my body is allergic to sugar and when I eat it, instead of getting rashes or anaphylactic shock, I get fat. Some people can smoke and live to 100; others can drink without serious consequences, and others can eat sugar and it not be a problem, but I can’t. Just as a celiac has to avoid gluten like the plague, it is now evident to me that sugar is my nemesis. I once asked my friend who had hypoglycemia how he could forgo the donuts, brownies and other treats, and his response was, “The consequences are worse than the enjoyment.”

Life is a series of delayed gratification. Like the “Marshmallow Experiment” those children who could not wait to eat the marshmallow struggled later in life and had more behavioral problems, while those who waited tended to be more positive and better motivated, have higher grades and incomes, and have healthier relationships. Those children who were told the marshmallows were “yummy and chewy,” broke down in five minutes. But if they coolly thought of the marshmallows as “white puffy clouds” they could wait an average of thirteen minutes. Some children could wait almost eighteen minutes simply by pretending that the treat before them was a picture. In contrast a preschooler shown only a picture of a reward but asked to imagine that it was real lasted less than six minutes. Imagining the treat in all its proximate glory triggers an emotional response, while thinking about the reward in cool, distancing contemplative terms makes waiting easier.” (See Distracted, page 229)

So in order to overcome an addiction, I have to distance myself from the “drug.” I have to be cool and detached and look forward to the ultimate reward. A great tool has been the lap-band because it has given me the ability to think, think in a detached, calm manner. My object now is to strip away the glamour of chocolate and ice cream and calmly see them as the “vice,” the monster, the addiction that has controlled my life for lo, these many years. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and for me this is Day 6 of no sugar! I’ll just have to keep on walking.