112. Sugar, Sugar, Everywhere...

Sugar, Sugar Everywhere

Why have I become so fat?  There is really only one reason why I, or anyone else, gains weight. 

As long as I burn off the same number of calories every day through exercise as I consume as a result of eating, I will not gain weight.  If I don’t burn off my daily calorie intake, I gain weight – simple!

I don’t eat a lot.  Honestly, I don’t!  Much to Caroline’s consternation and she was brought up in a northern household where to waste food was a sin and plates were always left empty after meals, I often leave quite a lot of food on my plate.  I stop eating once I am no longer feeling hungry.  I accept that it is wasteful but as I paid for it and no one is offended as I cooked it, it doesn't matter.  I rarely eat between meals.

So, it must be the kind of food I eat.  I must be eating high calorie food.

According to the medical profession, the maximum sugar intake per day for a healthy life is 30 grams.  Have you any idea how little this really is?

Breakfast is the meal I look forward to most.  First thing in the morning is the only time of the day when I am really genuinely hungry.  I eat a sort of lunch every day, which is maybe a sandwich or something like a boiled egg and I always eat in the evening but I am never hungry before either of those meals.

I have come to realise recently that I eat lunch and dinner every day almost out of a sense of duty - I’m not really hungry but as it’s a mealtime, I eat. 

I am retired and I no longer work.  Caroline works full time and gets home between six and seven every evening.  She is always hungry because she leads an active, sometimes frenetic life, both physically and mentally:

“I didn’t have time for lunch,” is an almost daily refrain.

What we eat in the evening is whatever I have prepared that afternoon.  I sometimes wonder if I would prepare and eat dinner every day if I lived on my own.  I am fairly sure that I would not.

When I was 55 and before my liver problems, I weighed 165 pounds (11 stone, 11 pounds).  During my illness, my weight fell to 138 pounds (9 stone 12 pounds).  Since I have made a full recovery, cooking and eating are two of the few remaining pleasures left open to me.

I don’t smoke and obviously, I never drink alcohol.  My ongoing problems with severe arthritis mean that any type of aerobic physical activity is beyond my capability.  I cannot walk more than 50 metres without experiencing severe pain and I can’t jog any distance at all. 

Consequently, almost all my time is spent sitting and not moving and therefore I am burning very few calories.

My weight is steadily rising.  I have kept a record:

In August 2009, it was 147 pounds, 10st, 7lbs.

In August 2010, it was 165 pounds, 11st, 9lbs.

In August 2011, it had risen to 186 pounds, 13st, 4lbs.

By August 2012 my weight had risen to 195 pounds (13st 13lbs) and it has stayed there, ± 3 pounds, for the past three years.

As a result, I am 35 pounds, or more than two stone heavier than I should be. 

Before I put any sugar on my Weetabix and All Bran this morning, I put two and a half dessertspoons of sugar that I always add (I know!), on to the scales.  I was astounded by the weight of sugar: 35 grams!

I put the sugar back into the jar and then weighed the two teaspoons of Demerara sugar that I would have had with the first of my two cups of coffee that accompany my breakfast: 9 grams.

That means I consume 50 grams of sugar and that is almost twice the recommended healthy daily intake.  That is just at breakfast - no wonder I am so fat!

You probably think that more than 50 grams of sugar a day is an outrageous amount and I agree, but I do have an excuse - of sorts: I was a child of the 50s.  In September 1953, when sugar came off ration, I was 6.  This was the opening paragraph in the Daily Telegraph the next day:

Children all over Britain have been emptying out their piggybanks and heading straight for the nearest sweetshop as the first unrationed sweets went on sale today.

My diet as a 6-year-old was quite unlike that of a child of today.  In August that year, my 4-year-old brother and I had sat in a sidecar, alongside our parents on a motorcycle combination, as my father drove to Barcelona and back.  The trip took over five weeks. 

There were no official campsites in central France in 1953 and every evening we sought permission to camp in a farmer’s field and the following morning we drank warm, unpasteurised milk from that farm.  I can still recall the distinctive taste. 

The water wasn’t safe to drink.  There was no bottled water and so my brother and I had to drink rough, local wine.  We never liked it.  Butter and margarine couldn’t be stored in mid-summer without refrigeration and so bread and jam was just that – bread and jam.

I can’t remember it but I expect that after rationing ended, only a week after our return to the UK, I was spoiled by having sugar with virtually everything.  I even remember going to nursery with a sugar sandwich as a packed lunch.  Hence, I suppose, my problems with sugar until today.

As I write this, at 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, my sugar intake today, so far as I know, is zero grams.  I say “so far as I know” because I have no idea how much sugar is in processed foods.  I have looked at the sugar content of a 150ml tin of Schweppes tonic water: 5.1g per 100ml. 

That means that there is about a quarter of the recommended daily intake of sugar in just one small tin and I sometimes drink three tins a day.  Not anymore!  How much sugar is in supermarket bread?  What about ‘healthy’ yoghurts and soups?

Weetabix without sugar is just about edible but hardly enjoyable but coffee without sugar is fine.  If my experience with coffee, mirrors that which I had with tea, when I gave up sugar in it some forty years ago, I will soon adapt.

I expect that the pounds will just fall away.  We’ll see.

March 9th 2016

They didn’t!

Well, that’s not quite true because they did to begin with but then it stopped.  I lost 10 pounds over first the three weeks of my “no sugar” regime. 

I was on a plateau for a few days but then, even though I was keeping to this new diet, the pounds slowly began to return.  Six weeks later, I was back to my original weight.   

What now?  I can’t reduce my sugar intake and so I’ll just have to try and move about more.  But my ankle pain is getting worse and I can hardly walk.

I have surgery scheduled for June.  This time next year, I’ll be jogging and at least a stone lighter.

30. Chocolate pastry

For the last three weeks we’ve been staying in Islington, North London with Caroline’s sister, Joanna and her family.  This is because our cottage is uninhabitable.  We have had workmen in for the last two weeks and they will be there for at least two more. 

Our last tenants, two young women in their early twenties, left owing us several thousand pounds in rent and the furnishings and fittings so badly damaged that the causes can only be deliberate.  

They have left no forwarding address or phone numbers and so they have effectively vanished.  This means that the letters from the various debt collection agencies and businesses that they owe money to are building up daily.

Two bailiffs arrived the other day while we were inspecting progress in the cottage and demanded documentary proof that neither Caroline nor I are women with a Turkish last name.  

As we have not lived at this address for the past five years, we have no utility or council tax bills that we could show them.  

“We’ll be back,” they told us menacingly.  Caroline thinks that my calling her, “Fatima” all the time didn’t help matters.  She may be right.

Islington, in central London where Joanna lives, is very different from where we live on the outskirts in Winchmore Hill.  Exmouth Market, near Joanna’s house, is a wonderful place.  It is a narrow street about 400 yards long and the only vehicles that use it are those that are delivering.  

Consequently, Exmouth Market always has a vibrant mass of people ambling along it looking into shop windows, with others sitting at the many café and restaurant tables along both sides of the road 

There are lots of restaurants, bars, coffee bars and one patisserie in particular where I go for breakfast every morning.  All the staff working in it are French and they all speak perfect, idiomatic English but they hardly ever need to.  This is because, being Islington, all the customers insist on speaking in French.  All the customers that is except one - me!

I ask for a “Coffee and a chocolate pastry, please.”  I don’t and won’t even call them croissants.  All around me I hear Englishmen and Englishwomen asking for, ”Un café et un pain au chocolat, s’il vous plaît.”  Have they no pride?  

Are the events of August 1346 and October 1415 so quickly forgotten?  Do Crécy and Agincourt mean nothing today?  

These Frenchies (and I use the word in a non-racist, matter-of-fact, purely descriptive sort of way) came here to make money out of us.  They are not here to spread goodwill or Gallic culture, nor do they want to do anything to improve the quality of our lives.  They are economic migrants!  We should not pander to them.  

I fear though, that I am fighting a one-man, losing battle.  I also have a sneaking suspicion too, that Pierre behind the counter, with his stripy T-shirt, thin moustache and reeking of garlic, was born and bred in Peckham.

Recently, I have scored an own goal and weakened my strategic position in this battle.  One of my few faults is that I give too much of myself.  I even give to the French.  

Yesterday afternoon, at around four o’clock, I thought that it would be nice to have a cup of tea.  The tea was awful; the worst cup of tea that I have ever had.  It was so bad that I felt duty bound in that evangelical, generous way that I have, to inform Adrienne, the young lady who made it for me, exactly why it was so bad and how it should be made to make it perfect.  

I set out on this voyage of enlightenment with a heavy heart as I had already failed last week to get across to her the importance of the toast rack in the production of toast.  I was thinking that if the French brain was incapable of understanding the importance, significance and nuances of the toast rack, then I had little chance of getting them to make proper tea.

My cup of tea had arrived weak and milky and with the tea bag still in it! Just as I have educated you in the art of making proper toast (Toast - the proper way) so I shall now take you step by step through the art of making tea.

Some “Purists” will say that proper tea may only be made by using loose-leaf tea and a teapot.  They are right but only up to a point.  Modern tea bags allow the circulation of the water and the difference between tea made from a bag in a cup and that made from leaves in a pot, is minimal and to most people, undetectable.

The Frenchie girl made my tea like this:  1) She poured hot water on to the tea bag.  2) She added milk and brought it to me.

Unlike coffee, which is spoilt by being scalded by boiling water, proper tea needs boiling water to bring out all its flavour.  Indeed, the best cup of tea in the world is one made in the air-conditioned café on the shore of the Dead Sea where water boils at 101.5°C because it is the lowest point on earth and the average air pressure is greatest .  

By the way, the only reason that I have never climbed Mount Everest, the earth’s highest point, is that at its summit the water boils at only 69°C.  It is therefore not possible to make a decent cup of tea there.  What’s the point of slogging up to the top of Everest if you can’t have a decent cuppa while enjoying the view?

The tea bag then needs to be left to brew in the water for at least two minutes during which time it is stirred occasionally. The length of time that the bag is left in the water may vary depending upon your taste but I recommend at least two minutes.

Next, the tea bag is squeezed and removed. 

Milk may be added and sugar too but it is a totally different and in my opinion, a better drink without sugar.  

Hardly rocket surgery is it?

I remember when and why I stopped taking sugar in tea.  At around 6:40 pm on a weekday in June or July 1974 I was watching ‘Nationwide’ on television.  As he signed off, the presenter mentioned casually that he had heard that there was a sugar shortage.  

At 8:00 that evening I went to the corner shop run by the Shah brothers to buy some toothpaste.  The shop was packed and by 9:00 that evening there was no sugar to be had anywhere in London.  

A couple of days later one of the deputy headteachers bustled into my classroom to relieve me of my teaching duties.  She wanted me to drive another teacher, who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew where black market sugar could be bought.  We would drive six miles to buy 20 pounds of it.  We came back heroes.  

I had already tried tea without sugar by then and had realised that it was a much nicer and more refreshing drink.

I shall go back to the patisserie tomorrow and see if I have been successful.

No, I wasn’t!  It was a different girl who served me today but that is no excuse.  I find it hard to believe that Adrienne didn’t call an emergency staff meeting first thing this morning to spread the revelational news to her colleagues.  She didn’t - but that’s the Frenchies for you.  

They don’t share nicely like we do.