my new york

why i try to avoid sugar as much as i can: part three

my take on eating has always been you can't knock it until you try it.

if being a vegetarian works for you, fantastic. (it did for me for years).

if being vegan is your jam, more power to you.

if eating raw or eliminating sugar or avoiding gluten strikes a chord than do it.

and if you've never tried it and don't know how it will sit with you then shut up about it.

the proof is in the pudding.

i do not however, extend this courtesy to diets. atkins, weight watchers, south beach or any other. mostly because i really believe that they do not work. even if the in the short term weight is lost, there are hidden costs (health) in the long term. and i believe the lip service we pay in praise of diets steers most people in the wrong direction--arms them with false and misleading and ultimately damaging information.

i've learned over time to mostly shut up about this in my daily comings and goings. no on in a vulnerable position who is at a loss and attempting to do something good for their life wants to hear that their latest diet will do them more harm than good.

so now i try to keep my mouth closed and walk away. (and talk about here instead).

however, before i figured this out i was out to dinner with a small group of friends and one of the girls said she was going to try weight watchers and i said i thought it was a bad idea--i'd lost weight on it and then lost years to an eating disorder.

and she looked right at me and said, yeah, but i don't have an addictive personality.

it was one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me.

i don't know if she ever did weight watchers. but i know the weight wasn't lost.

and that's okay. that's not her fault. i only point it out to say that we (the collective cultural we) are looking for answers in the wrong place. we want immediate results. we want to press the big-red-easy button and reap our rewards. i think collectively we're all straining under a sort of veruca-salt-psychosis: i want it and i want it now.

and this isn't dictating just the manner in which we try to lose weight--it governs what we eat and when. we eat raspberries flown from halfway across the world because they're not in season where we live, but we still want them. we exploit the lives of countless animals and try to expedite the process in which they age so as to have more and have it now (and we do this by pumping them full of antibiotics and hormones which we then ingest second hand). i want and i want it now is now our cultural refrain. and it's stripping the earth of its precious resources at a startling rate.

we are a selfish species.

we buy more and spend more and waste more and we do it in the name of capitalism.

i may not know much about economics but i do know that a system that only measures growth when we live in a world of finite resources is bound to run into a fatal flaw at some very critical moment.

i've gotten myself off on a tangent. i really don't want to talk politics (but i mentioned the above to someone recently and they said, oh, wow, so you're really liberal. and i thought what? how'd you get there? i feel like that's just a rational thought--and one that makes me pretty moderate).

i mention all of this because the way in which we grow and eat food is a tremendous allegory for our current state of affairs.

{if this is of interest to you, or even if it isn't, dan barber's TED TALKS are must sees: his foie gras parable + how he fell in love with a fish}

we need to eat more simply and live more simply. we need to go back to the dinner table. sit around it with our family (and accept that many people now have different working definitions of this word). break bread. take vegetables form the garden. and connect in a way that has nothing to do with facebook and foursquare and any of the other multitudinous applications that serve a purpose i'm no longer sure of.

not eating sugar works for me. it's my thing. and i encourage everyone to try it. to experiment with it.

within a few months of giving it a real and honest college try my occasional (but still present) binges came to an end. i don't think it was just the absence of sugar--i think it was all the work and effort of the years before, but i do think sugar, or rather the lack of it, was a key player.

people have been asking where i stand when it comes to eating fruits. it's important to know that i don't think i've ever craved a piece of fruit in my life. i'm just not a fruit person. i really like vegetables and i'd seek out some good grilled asparagus before i ever picked up an apple. so i very rarely eat fruit (but that's me). the information out there suggests that perhaps we all need to start saying vegetables and fruits (as opposed to fruits and vegetables) and start thinking of them in that order--that even fruit, healthy as it is, should be eaten in moderation.

but when it comes to health and sugars, fruit is not my main concern. it is the hidden sugars. it is all the sugars injected into processed foods. i operate under the assumption that even if i avoid sugar as much as possibly can, i will still probably exceed the recommended daily limit, simply because it is everywhere and in everything.

i don't eat honey. i don't eat agave. i don't differentiate between table sugar or raw sugar or fake sugar or corn syrup. i assume it is all damaging in some way. which sounds tremendously boring, i know...until you give it a go.

and suddenly everything tastes sweeter. (i joke about how i now put shallots in everything--but it is such a sweet a delectable onion!)

that being said if i'm out with friends and everyone is having ice cream, i'm probably going to join in. there is also the occasional ben and jerry's pint that is eaten alone and on a friday night (you win some, you lose some).

a few quick hints: when i first cut out sugar i'd have a big tablespoon of peanut butter at the end of every meal because i associated it with sweet and it sort of tricked my mind into thinking i was getting that finishing-sweet-treat i was so accustomed to. i also put cinnamon in my coffee (a great anti-inflammatory) because i associate cinnamon with sugar and having just one half-of that combo allowed me fill in the other-half by just imagining.

i don't eat stevia or any of the natural sugar replacements because i don't feel the need for them. once i got over the emotional attachment to sweet and the subsequent cravings i just didn't feel the need to seek them out and incorporate them into my life.

i think the hardest part in attempting to cut out sugar is dealing with backlash of everyone around you (and that will be final topic i discuss in part four of this series).

why i try to avoid sugar as much as i can: part one, part two.

i'm still working on a permanent food + health tab. i realize that many links redirect to my old blog which then redirects you here and that can be tremendously frustrating. i apologize for that and beg your patience as i attempt to get all of this in working order.

round these parts

it was spring when i first fell in love with brooklyn.

just over a year ago.

and it's been a spring-sort-of-love-affair ever since.

these last few weeks have seen a rolling progression of the trees in bloom. first came the magnolia trees and then the dogwoods and the cherry blossoms and many others i can't yet name.

the trees just out of my apartment have caught fire with green and my tiny studio apartment feels like a grown up's tree-house (in the best possible way).

everyday in this second spring is a lesson in how easily gratitude can sometimes arise.

gratitude for the flowers and the trees and the angling in of the morning light. gratitude for the quiet of the neighborhood. for the sounds of the birds and all the sidewalk sales. for the court street fair and the parade to and from the garden shop because absolutely. everyone. here. tends to their herbs and flowers and front yards.

gratitude for how very much the whole of this place feels like home.

gratitude for the cool air that demands nothing more than a jean jacket. gratitude for such good girlfriends and their very perfect children and a meatball sandwich shared with my father on a monday afternoon before wandering through the whole of brooklyn heights.

it's such a good time of year this spring.

why i try to avoid sugar as much as i can: part two

a little while ago i went on a few dates with a man and i told him i'd once weighed quite a bit more. and he told that he'd once weighed quite a bit more. and we both sort of laughed and commiserated about having once weighed quite. a. bit. more. and he asked how'd you lose it?

i ate a lot of cheese.

no kidding. that was my answer.

in fact, i'm pretty sure there was a cheese plate before me as i said it. (i haven't met a cheese plate i can't make a meal of).

the first time i really thought i'd give "quitting sugar" a college try was about a year ago. i can so clearly remember heading to brunch with two of my girlfriends and eating a small dish and being ravenous for something after. and when i say "something" i mean something sweet. i wasn't full. i needed something sweet and sugar-loaded to fill me up. but because i couldn't eat sugar i went through a list of foods in my head. and where every other food was concerned, i felt full--there wasn't room in my stomach. but for sugar--just the thought of sugar--my brain and my stomach sort of miraculously opened up, made space. it was one of the more eye-opening experiences of my life.

it was also around this time that i was eating cheese one evening when i had a very clear thought: that's enough. i'm full now. (i'd never before felt that way when cheese was around).

here's what i can tell you about avoiding sugar just as much as i can: quitting sugar was (and still very much is) an experiment.

to begin i gorged on the information that's out there (like this exceptional new york times article). and i invested in the very simple notion that sugar is bad and fat is not. i was willing to say yeah, i'll give those full fats a go. i'll start eating butter without fear. hell, i'll even cook with bacon fat upon occasion.

having learned first hand (in a full body sort of way) that diets don't work and that very often doctors and nutritionists are not well informed where weight is concerned (politics and commerce really come into play here) i was willing to invest in the notion that the prevailing ideas of what is healthy, were totally wrong.

so how did i begin? well, i started reading this tremendous blog. and then i bought her ebook. and i went from there. slowly and with great love for myself...

this is what i understand to be true:

fructose is the problem.

when fructose enters into the body it is not immediately converted to energy but stored away as fat.

anything sweet and found in nature is safe to eat. (and by safe i mean not poisonous). sweet was in fact nature's little calling card that said yup, eat this, it's safe.

thing is, very few sweet things existed in nature. a berry bush was a rare and unusual thing to come across. and so when our ancestors did they would gorge on its treasures. but they came across such berry bushes very rarely (and when they did they had usually just expended tremendous energy to get there).

there was no hey-you're-full message associated with sugar because it was so rare that there was no need for it. but now sugar is anything but rare and the rate at which it became so easily accessible far surpassed our evolutionary ability to deal with such a change.

so the simple lack of the hey-your'e-full message is a huge problem.

in fact, sugar (fructose) gets in the way of the hey-you're-full messages from other foods, which may be an even bigger problem. leptin is a hormone that regulates our satiety and fructose sort of taps down on it and confuses the message or renders it all-together-absent and so we. just. keep. eating.

high fructose corn syrup is no more dangerous than any other sugar except but for how easy and cheap it is to make. which means everyone is making it. and putting it in everything. (especially in all those no fat, low fat foods).

4g is about 1 tsp of sugar.

yoplait's 99% fat free yogurt has 27 g of sugar per 6 oz... you do the math.

just start looking at labels. forget about calories. forget about fat content. just look at the sugar content. it is startling.

i don't eat any sugar/calorie free substitutes (splenda and the like). they are dangerous because they 1. desensitize our brain to what sweet it and 2. create a deficit in our body. we get this huge hit of sweet and none of the accompanying calories and our body becomes aware of an imbalance and craves calories (food) to make up the difference.

part three coming tomorrow. (part one here).

i've been so encouraged by the responses to my most recent food + health posts and plan to answer any and all questions that have been posed in the next few days. i'm weary of doing any posts that accurately show what i eat over the course of a day or a week because knowing that it'll appear on the blog will cause me to skew my choices so that they appear "better" than they might otherwise be--that being said, i'm going to do my very best to present an accurate depiction of what i do actually eat over a given period of time. know that much as i avoid sugar and skip dessert at the end of the meal, there are still days when i can eat the whole container of ben and jerry's oatmeal cookie crunch, ya know?

a day in the park

 

i'm really not sure there is anything better than a small child reaching up for your hand. i mean, that moment that they grab it, or the moment they plop in your lap, or call out your name in that very perfect little voice...

so good.

living in new york is mostly quite hard.

but every once and again there is heaven-sent-spring-day and you make a stay-cation of it and play tourist with your big camera and central park sites.

and you get to do it all with one of your very best friends and her very perfect little ones.

and it makes living in new york and being young feel like the very greatest thing that could ever happen to anyone. ever.