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How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell

January 25, 2025
in News
How My Trip to

Quit Sugar Became a

Journey Into Hell
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Here is what the companies that manufacture hummingbird feed are praying you don’t discover: Using pantry ingredients, it’s a breeze to make perfectly serviceable nectar in your own kitchen. Mix one part sugar with four parts tepid water. Swirl until it’s all the color of a fogged window pane. That’s it. And you know what else? Homemade hummingbird nectar tastes like an afternoon in heaven — like warm air that has been lightly sweetened. You would be crazy not to help yourself to a glass or two while you’re whipping it up, even if it means you end up filling every hummingbird feeder a little less. In fact — here is what the hummingbirds are praying you don’t discover — you owe birds nothing; once you’ve finished preparing it, you can keep the whole cocktail for yourself.

I love two things in this world: sugar and myself. One result of my nonstop efforts to delight myself is that I end up consuming, every day, vast quantities of sugar. Oh, my God, I forgot my husband. Sorry, I love three things in this world: sugar and myself and my husband. Now that you bring him up, my husband, who is very dear to me, is worth mentioning. He does not love sugar.

What my husband enjoys is scaling new peaks of health. My interminable quest to attain additional sugar is an inexhaustible source of stress for him. Here is a scene, variations of which play out with impressive regularity in our house: My husband sticks his head around a doorway and says something like: “There are 30 empty packets of Gushers in the trash can. Do you know anything about that?” I (completely horizontal on the couch) lock eyes with him — a capo squaring off against Quantico’s newest class clown. “I never heard anything about that in my life,” I say. I keep staring until he walks away.

The savvy reader may suspect that I exaggerate for comedic effect. Am I, a (just barely) 35-year-old woman, truly habitually eating many, many pouches of Strawberry Splash Gushers and trying to hide all evidence of this from my husband? The answer reminds me of something from the third season of Bravo’s “Ladies of London” TV series, which I will devote the rest of this paragraph to describing. The context for this scene is that Juliet, who is not from London, is trying to become friends with Sophie’s then-sister-in-law Caroline … Now that I can be reasonably certain that my husband has stopped reading and skipped ahead, allow me to grab your wrist way too tight and hiss-whisper that, yes, I’ve got goodies hidden all over this house that he doesn’t know about, that he will never and can never know about. Maybe twice a year, the man I love stumbles upon a private cache of, for instance, Dunkaroos and accuses me of hiding them. “They’re not hidden,” I say — which is 100 percent true in that moment. “That’s where we keep those.” (In a drawer he didn’t know our house contained.) Hear me when I say this: I do not hide the high-octane sugar treats that I buy in bulk from Amazon from my spouse because I fear he would criticize me for eating them or exert any undue influence over what I eat; he has never done anything like that. He is really nice; you can ask anyone. I do it because I fear it would distress this kind man to comprehend the true amount of sugar I’m devouring in a given day and also because I dread the unlikely but not impossible scenario in which he, God forbid, asks to try my Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups with Tongue Tattoos on Every Roll and enjoys them, and wants them to be something he and I share (happened with Swedish Fish!!!). There are only 10 Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups inside every box of the 10-pack of boxes I have on auto-delivery on Amazon — not enough for two people. And that’s why, ultimately, I side with Sophie in that episode of “Ladies of London.”

I would be happy to eat what my husband does if any of it tasted as good as Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups. The problem is that it doesn’t — not even close. I know this marks me out as an immature deviant among my age cohort. I envy the ease with which my acquaintances casually consume coffee, red wine, beer and broccoli rabe in social settings. These I can sip, nibble or mime ingesting; in truth, I am unable to choke down a single serving of any one and no more likely to crave them than printer toner or plywood.

Acknowledging the chasm between what I prefer to eat and what every adult I know prefers to eat is unnerving, in the same way it is mortifying to peer into the Grand Canyon. By any common metric, I am a healthy size for my sex, age and height (charming woman, almost under 35, marginally taller than average; if you must know: 130 pounds at time of writing). At annual checkups, my body’s basic functions regularly reveal themselves to be in good working order, my teeth undecayed. The absence of obvious negative effects provides no comfort; I worry I am like a woman who doesn’t realize she is in a slasher film, because she is unable to hear the tremolo strings. I fear my drive for sweets is evidence of a problem that will remain undetectable until the day my, in hindsight, obviously poor choices cause me to be struck down with no warning.

But what if it were possible to rewrite the ending of my slasher? To make it, instead, an artistic feature with no discernible plot depicting the quiet dignity of life as a (legally speaking, though you would never guess) 35-year-old woman? An understated film that I would never watch? The only way to accomplish that would be to figure out a way to make myself want sugar less — or, even better, to not want it at all. Could I do this? The marshmallow-crème foundation of my diet suggested I could not. But perhaps someone professional could.

The problem is that I wasn’t directly seeking to lose weight. It’s not that I accept my body; of course I find this sausage casing unacceptable. But I find it unacceptable in the same way I find it unacceptable to pay $9.99 per month to stream AMC+, which I do even though I am firmly against it. Right away, I discovered that few practitioners offer health regimens explicitly designed to make adherents like food less. (Possibly this is to avoid the appearance of creating name-brand eating disorders.) Desiring a semblance of a formal plan, I ransomed my email address to the polished websites of multiple resorts offering programs that purported to fuse “health” with “luxury,” in exchange for the cipher keys to their ambiguous pricing information. They began emailing me weekly — sometimes daily. It was immaterial that no single plan offered by any of these entities was designed to address my goal; all promised sumptuously customized futures, a level of personalization beyond anything I had experienced in the decades in which my life had been left in my inexpert hands.

“This is what your new lifestyle will feel like,” vowed the website of a facility called Vivamayr in southern Austria. “Mentally and physically invigorated | full of new perspectives | light, free and clear | vitalized and energized.” I had never been any of those. I did worry that they all sounded a bit like euphemisms for “hungry” — but the actresses Rebel Wilson and Elizabeth Hurley seemed to love this place. Whom could I trust in life if not Rebel Wilson and Elizabeth Hurley? Other resorts listed perilously into vacation territory; the Vivamayr literature, with a glacial blue “typical day” infographic that proposed a 6:30-7:30 a.m. wake-up followed by hours of “medical therapies and treatments,” portended radical severity — a quality to which my cream-puff center had never been exposed. I entered my credit-card information.

Dogs like sugar. Cats don’t. Bears like sugar. Seals don’t. Every human is born liking it, at least as far we know. Compared with A-list senses like sight and hearing — so scrutinized that natural individual variations among humans are, as a matter of course, “corrected” — the mechanics of taste, and its cousin, smell, are obscure.

Chemosensory researchers tend to believe that sugar fancying is a trait common to omnivorous animals because, until the recent invention of artificial sweeteners, sweetness signaled the presence of calories. Consuming enough calories to survive, Dr. Gary Beauchamp, a psychobiologist, told me, is “the most important thing” in an animal’s life. Beauchamp is a former director and president of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research institute in Philadelphia. For nearly the entire history of evolution, Beauchamp says, eating enough calories to stay alive was “a really tough job.” A drive to consume sweet things offered another advantage: It served as a clue that something was edible; naturally sweet-tasting items are rarely poisonous to humans.

Apes, I was informed by Dr. Paul Breslin, a member of Monell and a professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University, are “basically sugar eaters.” Chimpanzees, with whom humans share about 98.7 percent of their genome, derive about 80 percent of their calories from sugary fruit. Breslin told me that all apes, including humans, evolved to live the way wild apes still do: surviving cycles of feast and famine by gorging on calorie-dense fruits whenever they are available and scraping by on less caloric vegetation when they aren’t. But advances in the science of food preservation, and the establishment of a global supply chain, and Amazon’s subscribe-and-save option for Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups with Tongue Tattoos on Every Roll, have created a consequence unprecedented in the natural world. For many modern humans, Breslin says, “the tree simply never stops fruiting.”

Quirks of genetics and taste-bud architecture impact the might of sugar’s pull on any individual. But there are species-wide patterns: Children, for example, like sugar much more than adults. Beauchamp assessed the sucrose preferences of children ages 11 to 15 across a decade. “There seemed to be a real change, probably around puberty,” Beauchamp says. Their affinity for sweetness had dropped. A popular hypothesis suggests the appetite for sugar wanes as individuals exit their period of rapid growth. Constructing muscle and bone — the round-the-clock busywork of the young — requires vast amounts of calories. Breslin suggested that I might think of my voracious, inexhaustible appetite for sweets as a biologically childish trait that I have retained into adulthood, comparable to his own adult ability to digest lactose — a trait a majority of the world’s population loses after infancy. “I have a juvenile ability to digest milk,” Breslin told me. “And you have retained the juvenile ability to love tons of candy.”

I would not be allowed to demonstrate this inspiring talent at Vivamayr, which imposes strict rules on guests’ food consumption. Even fruit is banned because of its sugar content. The facility markets itself as a “medical health resort” modeled on the philosophy of Dr. Franz Xaver Mayr — a physician born in Austria in 1875 — who, based on my reading, attributed every common physical complaint, from heart disease to looking ugly, to digestive problems. Relief from such conditions was possible, Mayr insisted, only through strict adherence to a regimen of rigorous expurgation, zealous deprivation and relentless calm. Mayr’s teachings were collected in a book written by one of his students: “Health Through Inner Body Cleansing: The Famous F. X. Mayr Intestinal Therapy From Europe”; it is currently in its 44th German edition. The primary tenet of Mayr’s medical philosophy, as relayed by his disciple-biographer, is that no digestive system is “completely healthy.”

An email I received from Vivamayr before my stay advised that I would find my ingress into the abattoir of wellness less jarring if I — “a full seven days” before my visit — adjusted my dining habits in the following ways: consume only “easily digestible foods,” “avoid all forms of raw fruit and vegetables” and “eat little or nothing in the evening.” Unfortunately for Vivamayr, while I am not overly pious, I am a devout follower of one quasi-religious doctrine: “Leave it in God’s hands.” It works like this: I, by default and invariably, leave everything “in God’s hands.” Having thus outsourced all responsibility for my behavior, I proceed in carefree comfort, living exactly how I want to live, with no exceptions, secure in the knowledge that any action I do or do not take has been explicitly approved by God.

God’s plans for me at the Atlanta airport were surprising, even to me. Despite the Vivamayr email’s urging that I consume “little or nothing in the evening,” God suggested I bring a three-piece fried-chicken dinner with cornbread, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes and peach cobbler onto the plane, to be consumed while flying over the night-black sea. As I crossed the food court to Savannah’s Candy Kitchen, God and I came up with another little scheme: If Savannah’s Candy Kitchen had chocolate covered strawberries, I should buy them. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t; I would drop the matter at once. And, oh! God had placed some there for me to find! I would have loved to give God a great big kiss at that moment.

When I landed in France the next morning for my flight to Slovenia (whence a hired car would drive me across the Austrian border to Vivamayr), my trousers smudged with the melted chocolate of the strawberries, God directed me to eat several miniature baguettes, two peach-melba desserts and an assortment of chocolate pastries from an airport lounge. While I honored God’s wishes, I also recognized this as frenzied and unscrupulous behavior, rather like throwing on my hazard lights to shoot up heroin while double parked outside the rehab facility. Not for the first time in my life, as I watched God pilot my hand to the second peach melba, I judged myself fortunate to have received from God no interest in narcotics.

My first collision with the adamantine wall of Vivamayr house rules coincided with my arrival. By the wall clock, I spilled into reception in the early Austrian evening. According to my biological clock it was midmorning. By my mental clock, scrambled from traveling in the opposite direction of the sun for some 27 hours, all the numbers had fallen off the timepiece; I was in the middle of a daylit night, and it was time to dream for a thousand years. A handsome young concierge briskly enumerated the unique furnishings and provisions of my modest room: on the bed, a charcoal gray bathrobe; atop the robe, foam flip-flops; next to the toilet, a red emergency-medical-call button; tied to the shower faucet, a bundled red emergency cord with a yankable toggle at the bottom bearing a pictogram of a nurse; on the phone, a button I could press to contact the on-staff medical team “for emergency cases” at any time, day or night. There were always medical staff members on call, the man assured me. The tangible manifestations of so much precaution were unsettling. What sort of emergency was going to happen to me here?

“You have,” the young man divulged, “energized stones in the bottle.” He gestured to a glass carafe containing one moss-colored rock, one rock-colored rock and one rock the dull red of a cinnamon stick. If I poured water over the stones and left it for several hours, he said, the liquid would “be mineralized through the stones.”

“What are the stones?” I asked. “Mineralized stones,” he said and then began explaining which of the in-room teas I should drink at which times of day.

All I wanted was to sleep. This, the fetching man explained, I was welcome to do. Dinner, however, was beginning in the restaurant downstairs shortly, and after 7 p.m. there would be no food available. I feared I would starve to death in the night with no dinner. How long had it been since my last peach melba? I headed for the restaurant, as alert as a ghost drifting through drywall.

The dining salon radiated an aura of translucence not normally associated with nourishment. Open to the summer air, it bore no colors darker than the silhouettes of white tablecloths on blond wood. Most of the text printed on the slim white menu was set aside for the conveyance of rules. Guests were entreated to “chew each bite thoroughly,” to drink nothing while eating, to “avoid all activities” during meals and to finish up “with a pleasant feeling of satiety.”

“We have small philosophy about the food here,” said a smiling uniformed waitress who appeared at my patio table, which faced a lake. Her voice was comforting and faintly apologetic; a murmur a person might use to inform a kitten that its illness is terminal. I should eat very slowly, she explained, and chew each bite at least 40 times. Numerous Vivamayr employees would stress this point in the days that followed.

Nearly every item I received — all stylishly plated — was liquid or viscous, which complicated chewing. There was a shot glass of eggnog-colored goop (liquified sheep-curd cheese, olive oil and olives), a shot glass of green gloop (liquefied avocado), a bowl of glassy soup the hue of workhouse gruel (eggplant and coconut water), a doll-size creamer of pale gold oil (linseed) and a small, dense puck: one of the varieties of slightly stale bread offered at every meal to encourage vigorous chewing.

The portions, I sensed immediately, would be a problem. My husband once observed that the highest compliment a member of my family can pay to food is that “there is a lot of it.” The food tasted fine, but by my family’s metric, the meal was one of the worst I’d ever been served. Hardest to swallow — apart from the roll — was the imperative to do nothing but calmly eat while eating calmly. I gazed at the lake, which took all of three seconds.

Squeals of delight erupted behind me. I glanced back to see two women in their 50s embracing with the bewildered relief of shipwreck survivors. They were strangers, I gathered from eavesdropping, who had learned from a mutual friend that both were at Vivamayr. One of them — Iranian; tasteful loungewear; warm brown bob — was seated before her own bowl of faint soup. The other — American; arrayed in sleek spandex; dark curly hair — had already finished.

“It takes, like, five minutes to eat,” she said. Her voice was like the first sugar-snap peas of March: crisp and bright. Their faces scrunched in silent giggles.

I whipped my head to face them, dropping any pretense of not listening. “I’m glad you said it takes five minutes,” I whispered. “I’m going as slow as I can.”

“Oh, God,” purred the Iranian, “I’m so happy to have some people!” We paused our frantic cross-table whispering as a member of the staff glided by. The first three days, the American warned us, were the hardest — but it would be worth it.

At 3 a.m., I bolted awake, clutching a cold, wet towel to my abdomen: my “liver wrap,” applied at bedtime per the instructions on my printed schedule. A faint signal like a just-rung bell — the clapper stilled, but the note fresh in the mind — pulsed through my body: candy time! If I’d been home, I would have tiptoed out of bed and quickly had a Fruit Roll-Up or four before falling back asleep. I braced for cravings to rend my thoughts, but experienced only mild dread. The primordial parts of my brain, I suspected, had not yet comprehended that the regular candy deliveries had been canceled. I didn’t want to be there when they realized.

In the morning, at the conclusion of light group aerobics, the vivacious American woman approached me. If I wanted, she said, I could join her and her (now my?!) Iranian companion at their new shared table. This was an astoundingly friendly gesture: Because of the way the assigned seating worked, she was, effectively, inviting me to join them for every single meal for the next five days. Of course I wanted to.

Over breakfast (cotton ball of cheese, streak of cheese, round of stale bread, no water), I learned that the Iranian, whose husky voice lent her, always, the luxuriant impression that she was just waking up, was seeking to alleviate symptoms of Type 1 diabetes. She had come to Vivamayr after attending a presentation by its representatives in Dubai, where she lived. The American, who invariably appeared in stylish workout clothes, had recently emerged from cancer with a heart rate closer to that of a healthy Yorkie than an adult human. She hoped to ascertain the cause of her elevated heart rate and lower it. Both women assured me that fate had sent me to the lakeside resort for “a reason.” (Specifically, the American figured, after hearing a bit about my favorite snacks, that I was prediabetic.)

After breakfast, I met the brisk, pleasant woman with chin-length gray hair who would be my physician for the week. She set about determining the contours of my medical health with the polite alacrity of an ethnographer interviewing cannibals. What beverages did I regularly drink? How many bowel movements? Could she see my tongue? Click click clickclickclick clickclickclick clickclickclick went her computer keys.

She recited the litany of tests and treatments I would undergo during my stay: mineral analysis, free-radicals assessment, urine analysis, cardioscan, muscle testing, nasal-reflex therapy, cryotherapy, massage, abdominal treatment, osteopathic treatment, having salt scrubbed into my entire body, one-on-one nutritional counseling, a personal exercise training session and two kinds of baths (one for feet only). She described, also, the complex timetable that should govern my consumption and nonconsumption of various liquids both during my stay and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of my life: one glass of water containing one teaspoon powdered magnesium citrate first thing in the morning; actually, before that, take one teaspoon of “mouth oil” and pull it back and forth between my teeth for at least five minutes; thrice daily, dissolve one scoop of alkaline powder in water and drink it — do NOT drink it with food, drink it “between the foods”; together with a meal, or just before, or immediately after, dribble 10 drops of “bittertropfen” into a sip of water (“for the liver”); drink the volume of at least two of my Vivamayr-branded water bottles per day (vegetable broth, available at all times from a spigot at the tea bar — in the clear glassware provided, it looked and felt to the touch like urine — could count as water for these purposes).

A few hours later, in a meeting with a Vivamayr nutritionist, I would receive additional drinking instructions: once back home, keep alcohol and juice in the mouth for three to five seconds before swallowing (but better to never drink alcohol or juice); stop drinking any liquids 30 minutes before a meal; resume drinking liquids one hour after a meal; prior to the 30 minutes before and 60 minutes after, when I “don’t feel thirsty,” take “three or four small sips” of water every 15 to 20 minutes. (If I feel thirsty, “then it is too late.”)

Whether because of jet lag or a shortfall of resuscitative sugar compounds careering through my bloodstream, by lunchtime the first day I was so leadenly tired — even though the only other tasks I had accomplished so far were stripping off my spandex workout clothes to have my body rubbed with salt like a chicken carcass and stripping them off a second time to have my body rubbed with oil like a potato carcass — that I contemplated sleeping through it. But, fearing deprivation at dinner, I couldn’t miss lunch (a half-palm portion of cooked rectangles). It was, I feared, not an indication of robust vitality that, unable to marshal the effort needed to remove my spandex cladding a third time, I had simply face-planted onto my bed after eating and slept fully clothed until screamed awake by my iPhone alarm for my next appointment.

I lurched into a new office, where a man bearing a striking resemblance to Josh Hartnett in the M. Night Shyamalan film “Trap” interrogated me about my morning consultation.

“The doctor wrote that you eat a lot of sugar,” he said. “How much?”

Had he been American, I could have conveyed the depth, breadth and velocity of my sugar consumption with a single concept: Cookie Monster, but less particular. Did they have “Sesame Street” in Austria? I feared confusing him if I asked. To play it safe, I said something even more bewildering: “Picture a monster that just ate candy all day long. That’s me.”

“OK,” he said coolly. (“Sesamstraße,” I learned months later, does air in Austria.) “What? Chocolate?”

“Chocolate,” I conceded — but then puzzled over how to convey the overpoweringly red, rubber-soft chewy fructose corn syrupy solids of the General Mills snack arsenal to someone unfamiliar with the brand names. “I don’t know if they have a lot of these candies in Europe…,” I said.

“Jelly beans?” he asked.

(Twelve hours later, at 4:12 a.m., awake in my coffin-dark room, I would ruminate over the haste with which he flew to jelly beans. Was “jelly beans” just a candy term he happened to know in English? Regardless of how he landed there, the suggestion demonstrated familiarity with only the plainest and most common sweets — the cow parsley of the sugar world — and zero knowledge of the exotic and depraved comestibles available in the furthest reaches of the realm, the vastness of whose borders he had never even fathomed.)

“I’ll eat jelly beans if you got ’em,” I said politely, but shook my head. I buckled in to describe Strawberry Sensation Fruit Roll-Ups with Tongue Tattoos on Every Roll: “I don’t know if there’s fruit in it…,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, almost interrupting me. “A lot of sugar.”

He ordered me to seal my nostrils shut with a blue plastic clamp, and breathe for two minutes with my lips wrapped around a plastic tube. Then he directed me to stand on a scale, grasping handles that rose from its base on slender arms. (These, I found out afterward, when I asked how the contraption worked, had been gently electrifying my body while I held them.) He invited me to sit.

“That was not expected,” he said, clicking through pages of charts that had populated his computer. My thoughts raced: The tests had told him that my blood was the texture of condensed milk; that my bones had the density of Haribo gummies; what was the best way to tell my husband that I was dying? “That was not expected, that this is so good,” he continued.

The qualities ascertained, and their corresponding numbers, were meaningless to me. Intracellular water: 22.1kg. Essential fat: 5.7kg. Passive tissue: 9.4 percent. He handed me a printout of several pages filled with diagrams. Above each was a graduated color bar running from dark red (very bad) to dark green (very good). I was green by almost every metric, apart from relatively weak muscle distribution in my torso. “All in all, it’s perfect,” he said. “But,” he eyed me sternly, “less sugar, more sport.”

I gawked at the pages. “Maybe my body doesn’t respond well to that,” I wondered aloud. This man had just revealed to me the shocking news that I was, basically, a perfect physical specimen with a weak torso, and now he was trying to change the way I lived — to wrest things out of God’s hands. Maybe, I thought, I was like the mushrooms discovered at Chernobyl that eat radiation. Maybe I was the doctor, and this man needed my advice.

“How often do you exercise?” he asked.

“Never,” I said.

“OK, you have to start.”

Feeling fascinating now, like a medical marvel, I explained to him that, as far as I knew, I had never enjoyed any form of exercise. Perhaps suspecting me of only having overlooked how much I love, for example, squash, he began listing sports and asking, one by one, if I liked them. By the time he got to “golf,” the recitation of pastimes had grown so long that I wondered if he remembered the purpose of the list.

“Is golf a sport?” I asked. This broke his trance.

“Yeah, not really,” he said, and chuckled. Then grew stern: “But you have to do anything. You have to do it. Something.”

“We’ll see what happens!” I promised, as I stood to leave.

“Less sugar,” he said.

“OK!” I sang.

“More sport,” he said.

I could barely hear him; I couldn’t wait to tell my husband that a medical professional had (practically) said I never needed to exercise or choke down a vegetable ever again.

By far Vivamayr’s most stunning single feature was its idyllic setting. It boasted an exorbitant variety of leaves for wind to rush through: graceful weeping-willow boughs, whispery thickets of Chinese silver grass; the deepest green rose bushes; dense pine branches; half-submerged meadows of freshwater rushes. The wide lawn, which was trimmed constantly by a small, ovoid free-range robot, ran right up to the lake, and became it. Up close, the water was so clear you could watch white fish and pike flit around your feet as you descended the warm, slime-slick wood steps for a swim. From the two private docks, a tiny gothic church, spotless as a snowdrop, could be seen roosting atop a nearby hill.

And from the more westerly of the two docks, it was possible to stare directly at the smaller, even more westerly, even more private dock reserved for the exclusive use of guests staying in the Vivamayr villa (which goes for 3,750 euros per night). My fellow regular guests and I squinted at the private villa dock and tried to discern the facial characteristics, or even the age, of the woman we saw there. (Impossible.) Constantly, people were eyeing one another to see if anyone was a celebrity. As nice and as expensive as Vivamayr was, just about everyone knew of somewhere even nicer and even more expensive, where even wealthier people could pay money for similar services; I overheard so much talk of such places that I eventually found myself thinking of Vivamayr as their rundown, dumpy cousin. Was this, I wondered, the key to Vivamayr’s success? Can the ultrawealthy be convinced of the program’s virtue only if their destination is, in some way, less than ideal?

When I’d chronicled my relentless pursuit of sweetness for my Vivamayr doctor, her eyes had sparkled like sanding sugar on grocery-store cookies cut in seasonal shapes. “I have something in mind,” she said at our first meeting: “Functional MyoDiagnostic” testing for “food intolerances.” I had no idea what the hell that was; sounded great.

On the appointed afternoon, I climbed steep sunlit stairs to her office. She bade me lie down on an exam table. I was to use my thigh muscles to move my knee toward my head, overpowering gentle pressure from her as she pushed the knee in the opposite direction. I moved it easily. She began tapping teensy smidgens of substances onto my tongue with the aid of a wooden depressor. After each deposit of crumbs, I was instructed to repeat the knee-to-head maneuver. If my tongue encountered a substance my body “does not like,” the doctor said, my muscles would get weaker for up to 20 seconds, before recovering. In this way, she would identify allergies, weaknesses and deficiencies in my diet. I moved my knee without any trouble until she placed a fine white powder onto my tongue; suddenly, I could barely push against her. “That’s actually what I thought,” she said.

My muscles had reacted poorly to a few crumbs of yeast, the doctor reported, which meant that my craving for sweets was caused by a fungal infection in my gut. The microorganisms of the infection, she explained, lived on sweets, and I was feeding them constantly. “We have to starve it out,” the doctor said, of the thing growing inside me. “You know what it means: No sweets. No yeast.” I would also have to take medication. I was staggered. What I had believed was my own preference was apparently the insatiable appetite of a foreign invader. “What would cause this?” I asked. The doctor believed I had had this infection “for a very long time”; perhaps it grew out of an antibiotic I took at some point in childhood, she said. She was “absolutely astonished,” that my body had not been further ravaged.

I was not ready to give up sweets just because I had lost control of my person decades ago to some alien fungus that had hijacked my mind in its relentless pursuit of sugar. Because I was functioning well with the infection, I wondered aloud, wasn’t there a risk that, if I tried to eradicate it, my body chemistry would fall out of whack? The only risk, the doctor said, was in continuing to allow it to flourish unchecked. “It might interfere with your intestines” if I kept it “too long,” she said. “It might really harm your bowels. And your sugar craving will never end.” If I successfully eradicated the infection, she added, my digestion, which was already good, might, in some way, become even better.

I left the office feeling stunned. An unchecked appetite for sweets had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. Now I had received not only an explanation for its origin but also a plan to eliminate it. I imagined myself in the future, cutting (?) vegetables at home. I felt a twinge of melancholy; my adoration of sugar had so long been one of my defining characteristics. What personality trait would now be amplified to fill that silence? Mostly, I felt giddy. The test had worked like magic.

The excitement withered on the dining patio. Thanks to the new fungal diagnosis, my meals were restricted even further. Now, alongside my thin soup dinner, I could no longer have the plastic-foam crackers that previously provided, at least, a little crunch. I could have only a cold, chewy spiral of soy bread or hunks of boiled potatoes.

My anguish was compounded when I recalled a barbaric interaction I had earlier that day: In a morning consultation, my Vivamayr nutritionist informed me that I must stop drinking Diet Coke.

“Aspartame is poison,” she said. “It destroys your brain.” I would rather give up my brain, which I barely use, than Diet Coke, which is my favorite drink. “Aspartame,” she said, “we are using here in Europe to kill ants. It is poison.”

“How do they kill ants with it?” I asked, taking my brain out for one last spin.

“It is poison!” she said. She appeared furious about this. “It is sweet. The ants like sweet. And then when they eat it, they are dead.” Fortunately for me, and the ants of Europe, none of this seems to be true; multiple studies, for instance, have not found aspartame to be a useful insecticide. But even if I’d had those studies in hand to show the nutritionist, I was still nowhere close to regaining access to my Diet Coke.

By the next morning, I was losing my mind. “I miss my life” I texted my husband at 6:55 a.m., alongside a crying emoji. (It had been four and a half days.) The Iranian woman, thank God, had also had enough. I bumped into her outside the room-size white box that was the cryotherapy freezer, where I had just spent my longest four minutes of life disoriented, nearly nude and essentially blind (eyeglasses were forbidden inside the box). “I want to see the city,” she pleaded. She couldn’t remember what it was called. The two of us concocted a whispered plan: We would cancel all of our Friday-afternoon sessions and pay a cabdriver to take us there.

Ljubljana, Slovenia, is one of the most charming places in the world, so superlatively darling that the only way I can describe it is to say that it is the “Ljubljana” of Slovenia; to compare it to somewhere else would be a disservice. It is a town of curving cobblestone streets cluttered with meringue-kiss-colored buildings, of wrought-iron unicorns, of lush hanging baskets spilling over with bright summer blooms. Practically every structure we strolled past was the best bakery, with the cleanest windows, on the most sun-dappled stretch of sidewalk in Ljubljana.

But I felt an emotion I had never before encountered when staring at iced buns, which I have always greeted like family: torment. I was furious that the pink macarons adorned with candy flowers and delicate white chocolate bonbons and pastries painted to resemble deep-green dragon eggs were forbidden to me. At the same time, I felt like a failure for wanting them. This generalized resentment raging through my body made me feel foreign to myself. I had become a dry, mean thing, made of splinters. I was healthy now. I did not want to buy any souvenirs.

None of us knows for certain the strength of our mettle until we wield it against forces of oppression. My mettle turned out to have a serviceable life of approximately 45 minutes. I had been beaten down (for approximately 45 minutes). I had gamely donned the cumbersome blue robes of the martyr (for roughly three-quarters of one excruciating hour). And then I could fight no more. I turned to my diabetic friend, who had traveled over 2,000 miles and paid thousands of dollars specifically to inure herself against those indulgences that threatened her health, and suggested, in the fun-secret-surprise-hectoring tone of a popular junior enticing a freshman to shoplift cosmetics, that she and I should walk into the next bakery we saw and just buy something. Like a pastry! Oh, my God — a traditional Slovenian cinnamon pastry. We could just split one. I think we have to do it. When are we ever going to be in Slovenia again? Yes, we for sure have to do it. Ha-ha — let’s do it! OK, we’re doing it.

We did it, instantly undoing five days of detox.

“It has taste!” she said, sighing in ecstasy. I had fantasized that after a string of sugar-free days, my first taste of the taboo substance would impart a sweetness so crushing it would knock me to the ground. In reality, cinnamon-whirled potica wasn’t nearly sweet enough for me. Whatever. I was desperate, it was fine.

But in another way, it was miraculous. Even before it touched my tongue, the pastry was performing wonders. The second I began scrutinizing the bakery cases with intent to buy, the day commenced reshaping itself. Here was the soft-edged time I was used to, with fresh good news around every bend. How fun: an attractive alley filled with burnished bronze sculptures. How fun: a bachelor party wearing matching black tank tops. How bouncy it felt to leave everything in God’s hands. By the time we discovered, that evening, that we had bought tickets for a train that did not exist, and that there were no refunds, and that we would have to take a bus back to a random Austrian town, and hope to find a cab there, my mood had rocketed up so high it seemed improbable it could ever return to Earth.

“Does the bus have AC?” my friend asked the kindly ticket agent.

“This is not Romania!” said the agent, and laughed. (Then he sobered up and insisted we pay cash: “Is like Romania with cash.”)

My pep spilled over into my last full day at Vivamayr, such that I signed up for an afternoon hike through a curiously unpicturesque mountain wood. My fellow guests and I emerged at the mountaintop into the parking lot of a multipurpose activity center that boasted an observation tower, “the tallest tunnel slide in continental Europe” and, most impressive, a cafe with a flagrantly extensive selection of syrup-drenched ice cream delights. The sugar beast inside me, slumbering peacefully since the previous day’s cinnamon kill, sprang awake. Enraged to find itself recaged, it began hurling itself against the bars of my personalized diet plan with relentless fury. I flipped through the cafe’s trifold ice-cream-only menu so fast that my eyes tripped over the images; I was trying to look at every single one simultaneously. What did I want, what did I want, what did I want — clown-shaped ice cream with a pointy cone hat and dead M&M eyes. “Eisclown,” I read aloud from the menu. “No!” yelped an aristocratic young Englishwoman — a fellow Vivamayrian — when she saw me studying the brochure. “Don’t do it!” I stared into the clown’s M&M’s. “Eisclown,” I whispered to myself, trying to taste the words. I hadn’t brought any money. For dinner, I had an egg.

Something, I reflected the next morning on the trip home, was frantically wrong with me. I had not even managed to last five coddled days without consuming sugar. I was so alarmed at my behavior that I resolved to place a call to the smartest person I know, my friend Dr. Ian Slack, an allergist at University of Michigan Health, to get a second opinion. I asked what he made of the extraordinary diagnosis I received at Vivamayr: the leg-resistance test, the granules of yeast, the voracious fungal infection in my gut that had manipulated my actions for decades.

He was dubious. “What I’m struggling with is: She was measuring your muscle resistance against herself, and then using those results to tell her what your microbiome and food tolerance was?” Ian asked. He knew of nothing in the medical literature suggesting temporary muscle weakness could arise from crumbs deposited on the tongue. Furthermore, there are machines, he said, that precisely quantify muscle strength and resistance, requiring no estimation from a doctor. And there would have been a simple way to directly confirm the presence of a concerning microorganism: Take stool cultures.

Perhaps the diagnosis was wrong. If so, what did he suppose could actually be the matter with me?

All the other tests, Ian pointed out, indicated I was perfectly healthy. “I guess my question back would be: Why is it a bad thing to like sweets if otherwise things are going well?”

At no point — during my stay, or my life — had I ever asked myself this question. Any time a test result suggested health, I assumed I had slipped by on a technicality — that that test was not designed to detect the specific obscure condition that would obviously reveal me to have been pirouetting on the brink of death for years. The possibility that I could be flailing to solve a problem that did not exist had never occurred to me.

It is indisputable that I gained insights at the clinic. I had expected to be constantly famished — and was startled to discover that I never felt hungry. To realize that portions one-third or even one-fourth the size of my usual meals could entirely satiate me was unmooring. It followed that, for probably for my whole life, I had been snacking for no reason; what I’d mistaken for hunger was, in fact, boredom or simply a yearning to have a sweet taste in my mouth. What most rattled me in Austria, though, was not a physiological revelation but a mental one. I had long understood myself to be a person who laughs easily; who dances as if everyone is watching and I am an unbelievably good dancer who they all agree could dance professionally if I dedicated myself to it; who recovers from annoyances, and even misfortunes, lightly. At Vivamayr, the happy-go-lucky persona I had assumed to be the natural manifestation of my true character was revealed within a matter of days — hours — to be a false face. It was a beaming mask, fitting securely over my true snarling visage only so long as I was able to hop from cream puff to cupcake, so long as a mound of banana cream pie was always in the offing, so long as there was a full family-size bag of Swedish Fish behind every nearly empty family-size bag of Swedish Fish.

Perhaps I should have deduced this connection on the radiant late spring morning a few years ago when I awoke to a call from my father informing me of my mother’s unexpected death. Soon after I hung up — possibly because he had long ago discerned the food-governed pattern of my moods — my husband asked what I would like to have for breakfast. In the depths of the greatest loss I have ever known, instantly — automatically — a slot machine in my head came up all cherries. Like a child who, in the aftermath of a calamity, senses the commencement of a temporary phase in which no request will be denied, I answered honestly: “A really fancy cake.”

Within the hour, our kitchen counters had vanished beneath an extravagance of desserts: airy strawberry cream cake, chocolate cake with mortar-thick icing, sticky sweet tres leches, a wedge of cheesecake, a wedge of Key lime pie, tiramisu and on and on. Recalling, of course, that my favorite kind of dessert is a lot of dessert, my husband had enlisted friends to pad out the offerings. The appearance of rare goodies meant that, although the day was awful, it was not only awful. “She would have hated to miss this,” I told my husband.

My mom’s eyes, too, had always glittered for treats. It was not until I left for college and encountered classmates who greeted the dining hall’s parade of desserts as hostile invading forces that I began to appreciate the attitude she instilled in me. I wonder if my mother — who dumped packets of sugar onto lemon wedges at restaurants and then sucked the pulp off the rind — might have experienced sweetness the way I do. That is: as even more than a sensory pleasure, as a means of outsourcing optimism.

There are risks to this condition. It’s possible that a nascent administration will penalize companies for trafficking in the high-fructose corn syrup and neon-glow edible dyes I cherish, until our nation’s treats resemble the shadow-colored cereals of Europe. Also, it could be that what I mistook for the steady drumbeat of a mother’s food positivity was, in fact, the ticking of a time bomb — and that I have already done more damage to my insides than the most Austrian detox could reverse. But it appears that preserving this trait I don’t like about myself is the only way for me to retain the attributes I do like: good humor, a generally even-keeled disposition, the ever-present sense that I am on the brink of a pleasant surprise. Maybe if I gave it up I would live longer — but what would I do with the time?

Food stylist: Michelle Gatton.

The post How My Trip to

Quit Sugar Became a

Journey Into Hell appeared first on New York Times.

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