The Beginning

This was all my husband’s idea.

I just want to be clear on that one point. Anyone who knows the two of us would guess that I was the one who wanted to try to live without sugar. After all, I’m the one who worries about her weight—he has annoyingly high metabolism. I’m also the one who worries about food ingredients—we’d be all organic if we could afford it. And I’m the one who has tried to get us involved in different exercise programs, who reads health magazines, who has actually been to the doctor in the last five years. But it was actually Andrew who suggested that we were getting too much sugar and other sweeteners in our diet. “I’m going to stop eating sugar,” he said one afternoon. “Wanna try it?”

It was as if he had thrown down the gauntlet. Of course I had to say yes.

And how hard could it be? Prior to his challenge, I would have said that we were pretty healthy eaters. Whole wheat rice, lean cuts of meat, salads topped with homemade vinaigrette. We snacked on fruit and ate high fiber cereal for breakfast. Yes, we had our moments of weakness—notably trips to the grocery store for afternoon candy bars and late night ice cream treats—but we were at least conscious of the fact that these were weaknesses. We didn’t keep any of that stuff around the house to make those slip-ups even more challenging.

But as we talked about what exactly we’d try to do, we began to realize that those treats were actually a bigger part of our life than we thought. And we also began to realize that other foods—our cereals, our condiments, our canned goods—had a lot more sugar and sweeteners in them than we’d ever noticed.

So we cleaned out the cabinets, went to the store, and then, like true twenty-first-century yuppies, set up this blog to record our journey.

It begins: living without sugar. How hard can it be? We'll keep you posted.