guest blog: sugar. what, indeed, is the deal?

As a highly experienced and well-trained Sugar Buzz Pro and Holistic Health Counselor, Chef Aja asked me to share some of what I have to say about sugar. My name is Shannon McCarthy, and during the day I'm a visual artist, sometimes with paint, sometimes with whole foods. But not at the same time!

A preface: I used to work as a baker, and could pack away two pounds of cookie dough in a day. I accepted the fact (and myself for it) that I was going to eat a lot of cookies and bread everyday for the rest of my life. Whatever we resist persists, right? In college I attended Overeaters Anonymous for a year as a desperate attempt to stop eating all the time. I was told to give up all sugar and white flour, and eat a diet consisting mostly of steamed broccoli. I tried that, for like, a day. Rather than giving anything up, I started buying and eating boxes of donuts- since everyday was the last day I’d ever eat a donut! Because it was tomorrow, always tomorrow, that I would totally, completely, be a pure shining beacon of sugarless-ness. Riiiiight.

Wondering if you eat more than the 'ol pancreas actually wants? Let's talk about food in general. Every food we eat has different properties that give us a certain food experience, none of which can be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What we can say is that to continuously repeat a specific food experience is to invite imbalance. It's mathematical, nothing else. A fat like raw olive oil is important to consume because my body needs it to keep up my arteries and a green like arugula is important to consume because it keeps my blood clean. If I only eat arugula for a year, my hair will probably fall out because I've got thin blood and no fat to build with. If I only eat olive oil for a year, my skin will look pasty with all that building oil in my blood and no cleaning greens to keep it in check.

The same thing holds true with eating sweets. Too much sweet puts excess sugar in the blood. Nature provides us with lots of sweet food that comes out of the earth: squashes, berries, hanging fruit. On a continuum of sweet stuff the ground gives, those foods are on the sweetest end of the spectrum. If we were to do like the bears before they hibernate, we would eat an astounding quantity of berries, put on some good warm fat, approach a diabetic coma, and sleep for a couple of months. But let's suppose that we are not bears and are not planning to eat pillows onto our hips. How could we balance eating berries?

Well, what’s on the other end of the sweetness scale? Bitters! What's bitter? Herbs like mint, parsley, cilantro and other greens like spinach, kale, mustard greens, and cabbage. (The play between the sweet and bitters is what makes a spinach and strawberry salad so tasty…and balanced).

Speaking of sweet foods from the earth, let's get back to one of the sweetest of all: sugar cane! Despite various names and appearances, cane products are all from the same plant, but have different levels of processing. As a general rule of thumb, the darker the sugarcane product, the least processed it is. Black strap molasses would be the least processed, and white sugar the most (and the cheap brown sugar you buy at the regular grocery store is typically just white sugar with molasses added back in).

Some people stay away from any kind of cane product all together since they call it addictive. This isn't actually a categorical fact, that sugar is addictive. It only becomes fact through personal experience. Some people want sweet food when they don't want to want it, some people don't have any preference either way. Our own inclinations will tell us if sugar is something we wield, or something that wields us.

I'd like to address the folks who eat sugar when they don't want to eat sugar.
Sweetness is a flavor related to the earth mother. Think sweet pumpkins and squashes in autumn. Sometimes when we want sweetness, we want a ‘Mommy-feeling’. Since many of us haven't learned how to nurture ourselves, we get as close to what we can to what feels right-- something sweet in our mouths. There's nothing, actually, to be done about it but to notice it if it's there.

The good news is that we can supply that for our own self without anything external. Yet, to get to the internal nurturing, I found it helpful to start with external nurturing. We want to be clear that the guilt factor involved in eating doesn’t get us anywhere. It just makes us hide ourselves from ourselves even more. We perpetuate our habits by resisting them, and we heal habits by giving them attention and loving them as they are. So to celebrate what we think of as, a ‘bad thing’ to do is a big step in the direction of self-tolerance (let alone self-acceptance! Let alone self-love!). So, give a little self-love with a little bit of balance. And if there's no balance, love yourself for that too.

Recommended reading on how to eat in a kind way to ourselves: Nourishing Wisdom by Marc David

Note from Aja: For Shannon's scrumptious cookie recipe and a follow-up from Shannon, check the comment from her below!