Sugar Blues

As of Dec. 21, I hit my 100-lb. goal.  Actually I weighed in at 141, which was 102 down.

I decided, as I expected, I wasn’t going to stop there, though.  As I had told Jo-Ann at the outset, I knew I might want to lose more than that, as I wasn’t sure what was possible, and she, of course, answered, “Anything’s possible.”  I still had a bit of a paunch, saggy with loose skin, not a washboard stomach yet.  I felt, maybe another ten pounds.

However, that would be after Christmas.  I had planned from the start to do major cheating over the holiday, with foods that I only eat once a year. If there’s any time that should be a major cheat-athon, Yuletide should be it.  That’s exactly what I did.  Turkey… sage stuffing… chestnut stuffing… gravy… trifle… patty shells… and my favourite Christmas food of all time, shortbread cookies.

These cookies are my mother’s simple recipe from northern England, and I cannot imagine a Christmas without them.  In Ideal Protein terms, they aren’t so much non-IP-compliant as anti-IP-compliant, made of a delicious combination of pure fat to load into your digestive tract, and unadulterated carbohydrates, both simple and complex, to stimulate your insulin into telling your body to store that pure fat as pure fat.  The recipe is:

[WARNING FOR READERS SKIMMING THE BLOG LOOKING FOR RECIPES: THIS IS NOT ONE OF MY DELICIOUSLY-IP-COMPLIANT ONE.  WEAK-WILLED DIETERS, AVERT YOUR EYES.]

½ lb salted butter

½ lb. unsalted butter

¼ cup fruit sugar

¼ cup rice flour

4 cups all-purpose flour

In a big mixing bowl, cream butter, add sugar gradually, add rice flour gradually, add all-purpose flour gradually.  Consistency should be such that if you gently knead it, it stays smooth rather than falling apart.  Knead the dough until it’s warmed enough to roll.  Cut into cookies however you want to do it (I use my mother’s old cookie-cutters, some of which are 60 years old) and bake at 275 until slightly browned (20-25 minutes).  You can dip them in chocolate for extra decadence.  I guess there’s a little nutritional value in the butter.

So when Christmas Day came around, or even a little before, I indulged.  I stuffed myself with cheats.  And the very first thing I started with, on the morning of Christmas Eve, was as many shortbread cookies as I felt like, which was about four or five.

And then an amazing thing happened.

Gradually this feeling came up, of being unpleasantly jazzed up, agitated… not a bad mood such as nervousness or anger, but… a kind of disturbing inner restlessness.  And a sense of having been slightly poisoned.  Certainly I was not feeling the happiness, contentment and overall “all-is-well” feeling that I have come to think of as normal.  What the heck was this?  The oddest thing about it was that I knew it… it was familiar, though it had never been so obvious.  I’d felt it many times before—after eating shortbread cookies, after eating trifle—but had just never really been conscious of it, or thought of it as abnormal.  Now it felt really abnormal.  I didn’t like it.

I realized: I was really feeling a sugar high for the first time in my life.  After nine months without sugar, I’d stopped being used to it.

When I thought about it more, I had some truly amazing revelations.  First of all was the incredible possibility that I had been unknowingly causing myself a constant underlying tension, so that I could never really feel “all is well,” by eating sugar like this for my whole life.  I quote me from Day 20, April 26, 2012:

Another fantastic thing that has happened since I started the diet, and, I think, because of the diet, at least in part: every now and then I get hit with the most positive, happy, everything-is-going-wonderfully mood.  I feel inspired, expansive, free, capable... amazing.  I can't say I've never had this before, as I have in recent years, but now it is more intense and much, much more frequent.  In fact this morning, or maybe it was yesterday, I was in a funk, thinking about how my Google Analytics are sucking and how I'll never get a readership and so on, when I whined via IM for a bit with a dear reader/friend, and suddenly I just flipped over into that incredible positive.  It was like a switch.  I've never felt anything like it in my life.

I didn’t connect this with lowering my sugar intake.  I thought it was because I was so happy to be losing weight, or it was some mysterious metabolic effect of the diet.

Then I had another thought.  I was not a sweet tooth at all when I was a kid.  When candy was being offered around, I always turned it down, enough that I felt maybe there was something wrong with me, since all the other kids liked it so much.  I would eat it only rarely.  I remember thinking it would be too much in some way.

Now I thought: could this be because had I learned, so young that it was earlier I can remember, that if I ate sweets I’d get this unpleasant reaction?

Stimulants and I have never got along well.  I never drink coffee, never did; I drink decaf tea.  I had a friend who swore by benzedrine, so I tried it once when I was younger and more open to experimentation with drugs; the result was precisely the feeling I get just before I write an exam, so needless to say I never did that again.  I don’t need stimulants; my own mental energy draws me out of bed, wide awake, usually  sometime between 5 and 7 in the morning, and keeps me going all day unless I have to nap because I haven’t slept enough.

But sugar is a stimulant… a subtle one compared to some of these others I’ve named, but still, a stimulant.  On Christmas Eve morning, and then a couple of times later in the holiday when I did the same thing again out of a combination of wanting to know for sure that’s really what it was, and wanting to eat shortbread cookies the way I had every Christmas before, I really had it driven home to me.

The upshot is, I’m swearing off sugar in large amounts.  Even for Christmas.  That’s it—I’m done.  I don’t like that feeling.  It does not feel healthy.

What I’m going to do is try making those cookies, that I love down to my bones, with sucralose.  I will report on how it works out.

--