My Week Of No Sugar

It began with a podcast, heard on a drive, at the beginning of a long weekend. The podcast addressed the perils of modern eating, and the toxic, addictive qualities of sugar.

I have heard a lot about "evil sugar" over the past few years. It has displaced fat as the enemy #1 of the health conscious, and become the subject of fitness rants with topics like why sugar is the worst thing for you ever. From lifestyle blogs to the New York Times, journalists have been suffering through a month without sugar.

My reaction was to think guiltily of the cold, premium craft sodas (cane sugar sweetened) and the dark chocolate pieces I consume at the end of a typical work day; and then to move on to other things

 My husband's was more decisive. "Let's quit sugar for a month," he said, "starting today."

"We've already had some sugar today," I countered, "let's start tomorrow."

What I really wanted to say was, let's start never, but I gave into peer pressure. And so it began.

The rules were simple; no added sugar, in any form, in anything. Natural sugars (fruits, milk, dates, raisins) were allowed.

Day 1

We are attempting a hike today, among the more ambitious in recent years. I have bravely had a breakfast of sugarless coffee (not that bad, actually) and oatmeal sweetened with dates (quite delicious).

Apart from water, we have no supplies except an orange and a banana from the hotel buffet. Our other food supplies were sugary Indian biscuits, out of bounds now.

After over 4 hours of scrambling up rocks and down stony pathways, my body screams for a lemonade, but my spouse is stern. Our late lunch is accompanied by a berry smoothie, hardly sweet at all. And after the inevitable headaches all afternoon (sun? sugar?), I have to give up my favorite drink of Fresh Lime Soda at the Indian restaurant dinner. I could weep.

We hit the Walmart and buy bushels of fruit. Berries, cherries, peaches, litchis, bananas - the sweeter, the better. At night, we feast on fruit like we never have before.

Day 2

Another day, another sugarless breakfast. A beautiful garden, a dose of strong summer sunlight. By afternoon, we are driving home and my body is reacting terribly; headaches, nausea, dizziness. I have started to realize that my desire for an afternoon cuppa is not just a caffeine dependency, but probably a sugar dependency as well. My body has started to crave it. I give in and have a mildly sweetened drink at our lunch pit stop. The headaches die down a little bit. I am relieved.

Day 3

At home, heavy on chores. Dates sweeten my breakfast which is not too bad. Again, the biggest struggle comes in the afternoon. I feel hungry and dissatisfied after my unsweetened tea. We have become diligent fruit shoppers; when the fruit bowl empties our anxiety shoots up.

Day 4

Back to work. I stay on the wagon, though I feel exhausted and the headaches hit. Fruit and dates form a big part of my day.

I begin to talk to people about the sugar fast and am surprised by how many have given up sugar either permanently or temporarily over the past couple of years. I am encouraged to know that I am not alone in my headaches or my cravings.

Day 5

More of the same. I am getting used to sugarless coffee in the morning, and enjoy my afternoon tea unsweetened and accompanied by a couple of dates.

Day 6

Friday. I fall off the wagon today afternoon; back from a long meeting and exhausted, I dive into the refrigerator for a piece of chocolate. I eat it and nearly throw up; all the sugar in it makes me feel sick. It is too much.

Day 7

I am tea shopping today, wanting to make up in flavor what I am giving up in sweetness. At the beautiful tea shop, I join friends at the tiny cafe. I usually avoid dessert since I don't eat eggs, so I am not too put out at missing the scones initially. But then the wait staff informs me that they are egg-free. I fall off the wagon by tasting a tiny piece of scone. They are mildly sweet, light, buttery and perfect. I could cry.

Day 8

I have a perfect coffee at my local coffee shop, and day dream about how it could taste even better with sugar added. In the afternoon, I have some sugarless adrak tea accompanied by dates. Feeling hungry and unsatisfied, I binge on (unsweetened) snack foods. But I am left feeling ill, and vertiginous to boot. I begin to read more about sugar online, looking for alternate perspectives and find this more moderate one from my favorite Indian nutritionist. Irritable and upset, I immediately eat two ginger cookies. I feel so sick I want to throw up.

Conclusion So Far...

Have I given up the sugar fast? I don't think so, not quite.

The fact that I am struggling does mean there is an issue here. And I think I am already not enjoying sugary cookies or chocolates any more. The problem is (and will continue to be) the beverages. They are habits and hence a struggle to give up.

I have fallen off the wagon almost every alternate day, as you may have noticed. My husband, to his delight, has stayed on the wagon with zero slips.

So; I may continue this and complete the month to reassess my baseline before returning to (hopefully much less) sugar. Or I may reintroduce 1-2 spoons, preferably unrefined jaggery, into my afternoon tea. After all, simple pleasures are important. And mental health as much as physical health.

On Simple Pleasures, And A Morning Routine

I've been trying to live with a morning routine, one that will survive the vagaries of weather, the uncertainties of a consulting job, and the minor health issues that plague me like ants. 

It's a simple routine, the primary component being waking up at the same time every day; early enough to ensure some me-time, a feeling of control over my day.

The other component is banning my cell phone. My old-fashioned alarm clock takes away the snooze option. Leaving the blinds open to the morning light helps. Most important: I don't start my day with email.

On fine summer days, the morning routine ensured I would get outdoors, smell the roses and watch the geese on their own constitutional. As November creeps up, it allows for some treadmill time. The routine lets me savor a hot breakfast without gulping in a rush. It lets me dress and prepare for the day in a slow, relaxed manner.

It's a few minutes of stillness, of pleasure, before everything else takes over. Amidst the gloom of 24 hour news coverage, of election cycles and climate change, of terror attacks and gun violence, of war and refugees and autocrats, of racial discrimination and sexual discrimination all pouring into our eyes and ears - it's a happy place. 

And the older I grow, the more I find joy in these small pleasures. In pausing to listen to a bird sing hidden in the leaves, in watching the flash of its wings as it glides past momentarily. Noticing the details of a flower, the patterns of light reflecting off water, or the unique way each sunset tinges the urban landscape.

Happiness is a moment of mirth, a fresh sunny morning, a feeling of health, a crisp slice of buttered multi-grain toast, a tidy desk, a perfectly brewed cup of tea.

In the sweep of things I cannot control, I strive to make a small place for these.

Slam dunk - into my cuppa!

Are you a dunker? And by that, I mean - do you like to dunk edible objects into a sweet, milky cup of tea?

A proud tea drinker since my first spoonfuls at age two, I started dunking early on.

Growing up in a Gujju household, my forays into dunking started with crisp round whole wheat khakras, lightly spread with pure homemade ghee. I was taught by my father to fold them evenly in half with a snap - breaking them into semicircles, quarters and then eighths; then dunking just long enough to end up with a crunchy delicacy, juicy and flavorful from the tea and yet not soggy. I can still associate that taste with the large and chaotic eat-in kitchen, my grandfather and father reading the Times, my mother and Gangaram bustling around the morning cooking.

As a Bombay kid, my next forays into dunking came from Parsi bakeries. Khari biscuits - light, flaky and rich, held pockets of tea in their delicious maida layers. And jeera butter biscuits, dipped appropriately, ended up spongy from the inside and crisp from the outside with the additional interesting bite of cumin.

Those early experiences resulted in my most important lesson about dunking - timing. Dunking should improve texture and consistency, deliciously alter it, but not too much, and certainly not beyond recognition. It's a bit like breakfast cereal, really. And dunking too long results in a disgusting mush that disintegrates into the cup.

Years passed, and favorites got added on. Rusks, that stodgy staple of the Empire, and labeled "toast" by Bombay's baniya stores, were a natural addition to the category - hard, dry and mildly sweet - barely palatable on their own, but wonderfully enhanced by the hot liquid.

Sunday mornings at my grandmother's house evoke waking up to kadak pav - fresh, yeasty, crusty-hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside bread, slathered with salty Amul butter and dipped into a bracingly spicy adrak chai.

The green lawns of the Hindu gymkhana bring to mind sea breeze, middle-aged men in white shorts with their badminton rackets, and piles of buttery crisp toast to dip into mint flavored milk tea, thick and sweet, served in glasses.

Walking over to the canteen in my Indian office, we often had 4 PM snack breaks, with spongy white Wibs bread, edges cut off, buttered half an inch thick and dipped into the strong sugary office chai served in thick brown stoneware mugs.

And for all the Parle-G dunkers - it's not really my ... cup of tea, should I say? Sweet with sweet just doesn't do it for me, I want salty/fatty/spicy flavors with my sweet Indian tea.

The Netflix Detox

On this wind-and-snow battered Saturday morning when I (and the whole of the Northeast) woke up to a moving wall of white outside our windows, I ended my subscription to Netflix. There was a moment's temptation to perhaps defer this to a working day or one with more clement weather, to submit to another winter weekend of huddling on the sofa and binge-watching; but we had decided - no more.

I had never watched much television before moving to the US. My family of seven had two televisions, and I usually lacked the motivation to negotiate TV time and watch a specific show on a specific day at a specific time. At the same time, I am quite choosy and wouldn't watch just anything that was playing when the TV was available. All this translated to under 2 hours of TV a week.

Netflix on the other hand is peculiarly suited to my passive, demotivated, and yet selective TV-watching behavior. It is easy; it is available; it has variety and even quality; it is in short, a movable feast. Twenty minutes can seamlessly morph into an hour or three on my dilapidated couch. It begins to replace all the things I actually want to do at home, whether quotidian (cleaning, cooking), necessary for health (exercise,sleep), or good for the soul (entertaining, writing, music, art).

Like Thoreau in 1845, I now wish to live deliberately. To use my leisure time with the same thought and dedication I give to my career. To truly do the things I want to do, and to live a life of quality.

It has been 14 hours since I suspended Netflix, and since then I have:

• Exercised for an hour
• Spoken with my family
• Spoken with friends
• Listened to Andrea Bocelli and Luciano Pavarotti
• Cleaned out my bookcase
• Cleaned out my "miscellaneous" storage unit
• Packed a box of things to donate
• Cooked a healthy lunch
• Entertained friends over home-cooked dinner
• Made music
• Played two board games
• Written this blog post, my first of 2016

The withdrawal pangs are going to hit, perhaps mid-week. But thus far, cold turkey has never looked so good.

Accented

My accent sums up my existence, a microcosm of my journey. It is an Indian accent, a Bombay accent. It is light, and fairly clean, but still a "non-native" version of English. Which is ironic, as English is essentially my native tongue, a language I spoke exclusively in school, and a language I spoke even at home, most of the time.

To an Indian listener, it spells out my background, in detail. It is an educated accent - that of cricket commentators, television journalists, and theater actors. 

It is flatly correct in its Indian-ness, lacking the clipped inflections of a British voice or the softer undulations of an American one. It carries the traces of many different mother tongues - parents', friends', teachers'.

It used to trace out British pronunciations in a subcontinental mold, but a few American ones have crept in. Schedules have become "skedjuls", and jewellery is now "jool-ry", but I still stumble over the pronounced O's of celebratory, circulatory, and respiratory. Some colloquialisms have altered as well - I stand in line (except on trips to India, where I look for the queue in vain), ride an elevator to my apartment rather than taking the lift to my parents' flat, and dine with silverware, not cutlery.

Nevertheless, my accent is still largely unchanged, and carries expressions and inflections unique not just to my city and country, but even specifically to my school. Put me with my school mates from fifteen years ago, and you will hear the sameness.

It also carries my own idiosyncrasies - words I learned from the printed page that I mispronounce, words I did finally learn that sound too rehearsed, little interjections from long-forgotten friends that entered my lexicon and stuck there.

I will never deliberately change my accent to match my surroundings, and I will not make my speech into an act of theater or mimicry. It is my truth, my story.

A Memorable Meal

Flying into Bombay from sub-zero New York, we stepped out of the airport terminal into our families' arms and felt the warm, moist air settle around us in a welcoming embrace. It was 1 AM, and there was still time for our back-home ritual.

My husband and I got into our respective parents' cars and drove south through the island city, to Santosh Sagar, a tiny, basic eatery near our Malabar hill home. Even at that hour, crowds of cars hovered as waiters rushed to take and fill orders, an Indian version of a drive-through. 

The irresistible aroma filled our nostrils and our mouths watered as we sat around a plastic table on the pavement, impatient in the gentle sea breeze until the waiters brought us our little steel plates, steaming hot.

All of us - two families, eight people - had the same order, pav bhaji. No home cook can achieve this dish, nor can a fancy chef. It belongs to the streets of Bombay. The bhaji is spicy, buttery and tangy - a chunky mix of tomatoes, legumes and vegetables, mashed and cooked on a giant griddle. It is served with a side of lime and a slab of pav, a cushiony white bread that is saturated to its pores with salty, rich, yellow butter and toasted in the juices of the bhaji. 

We squeezed lime into the bhaji and broke bread together, spooning bhaji over the pav and eating with our hands, savoring the complex, robust flavors of our city as they burst harmoniously in our mouths, over and over again.

Grocery Shopping - Load/Unload

1. Load items into shopping cart
2. Unload onto checkout counter
3. Load bags into shopping cart
4. Unload into trunk of car
5. Load bags into shopping cart, wheel upstairs
6. Unload onto kitchen floor
7. Sort items into refrigerator/cabinets
8. Collapse - you are done until next week