My biggest mistake of 2015? Letting my husband watch a food documentary three weeks before Christmas.
Not just a Michael Pollan-esque “eat real food” documentary, a Sugar Documentary.
We aren’t what I would consider a sugar-crazy family. My 5 year-old boy has been known to scold strangers about high-fructose corn syrup. So when my husband raved about this movie, I thought “You’ve got to be kidding. We’re not addicted to sugar. I can easily give up that extra bagel.”
A few nights later, he was still talking about it and asking ME to go ahead and watch the movie. A couple days later, I found myself agreeing to a cold-turkey sugar detox for the entire family.
My husband stood, gleefully, next to our pantry reading every single ingredient on our boxes of supposedly healthy organic food.
“This tomato bisque has 5 grams of sugar AND it’s an added ingredient. It has GOT to go.” He triumphantly tossed it into our “go” pile.
A day later, we officially begin. I ate some extra fruit with my breakfast of eggs and no-sugar added bacon. My husband had to work on some meat butchery with a friend, so he left me with the detoxifying children. I gave the kids some vegan potpies that had no added sugar for lunch, and took them grocery shopping for no-sugar added food. I ended up with a bunch of organic junk food that had no added sugar but had plenty of added salt. It’s all about the balance, right?
That night, I realized we had no butcher paper for the 120 pounds of meat that my husband was bringing home. I went out in search of the paper and tried four stores. None of them had it. Target failed me. Even Wal-Mart failed me. Amazon’s two-day shipping wasn’t going to help in this situation. I had a blaring headache at this point. I was hungry, emotional, and irrationally angry.
I hit up the packaging aisle at Wal-Mart, knowing that they sold brown kraft paper there. I tried calling Michael about eight times….remember the irrational part? He never answered, so I bought the kraft paper, after googling “the difference between kraft paper and butcher paper.”
In the parking lot, there was a middle-aged man who was walking horridly slowly in front of me. Something about this man’s body language really bothered me. I’m not sure what it was, but it became an issue. I am not a violent person at all. I prefer the avoid conflict and pass the bean dip route. But for the first time in my life, I genuinely contemplated whapping a complete stranger over the head with a kraft paper tube and shouting out “ha-HA!”***
That’s when I knew that I had a sugar addiction issue.
The next few days were a brutal mashup of headaches and wanting to eat everything in the world. I felt like the worst mom ever, because I realized how much sugar had been affecting my mothering.
The kids adjusted almost instantaneously. After the harsh detoxifying period, Michael and I commented repeatedly that parenting felt so much more fun and freeing. We couldn’t tell if our kids were disobeying less or we were remarkably more chill about infractions. We felt like superparents.
And we didn’t mind the weight loss, either.
Eventually on the ninth or tenth day, the sugar-free lifestyle didn’t seem like work. We didn’t crave anything with extra sugar. Until Christmas. We allowed ourselves some “sneaks” at Christmas, you know, not to be rude to our families. And at New Years, I found myself back to square one…. with the bonus of knowing why I was so lethargic and why my moods were swinging. So we went back off sugar, with genuine concern for the welfare of strangers in parking lots.
It may have seemed like the worst decision of 2015 to let my husband watch that documentary, but it turned out to be a really great choice for all of us.
How about you? Ever attempted a sugar detox? Did you survive?
***no anonymous strangers were harmed in the making of this post.
