01/08/2025
Eve Schaub's memoir is witty, raw, and eye-opening: she takes us inside her family’s 31‑year-old‑daughter–mom turning point, when her household pledged to eliminate all added sugar for an entire year.
Watching the viral lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” from Dr. Robert Lustig lit the spark. She believed sugar was poison and she decided her family would test that theory. What followed was not just a nutritional experiment, but a seismic shift in awareness, identity, and even joy. We follow Schaub through label‑reading marathons, restaurant confrontations, recipe failures, and emotional breakdowns (hers and her kids’) but also unexpected wins like clearer taste buds, higher energy, and fewer sick days.
Schaub writes with humor and humility. She never moralizes, but she doesn’t minimize the emotional weight of food traditions either. She’s a mom who still bakes for love, for community, but now asks: does love need sugar? Her journey turns domestic labor into activism, and simple meals into a kind of resistance.
5 Lasting Lessons from Year of No Sugar:
1. Sugar Is Everywhere, Even Where You’d Least Suspect
Schaub was shocked to discover sugar lurking in essentials like bacon, mayonnaise, deli meat, bread, soups, and condiments. Hidden sugars are industrial sweeteners added for cost savings and taste longevity not for our health. Recognizing how pervasive sugar is was the first real blow to their assumed "healthy" diet.
2. Reading Labels Becomes Revolutionary
The experiment turned grocery shopping into detective work. Schaub spent more time reading every ingredient list with disbelief, hearing sugar’s many names, like dextrose or corn syrup. This deliberate awareness radically changed what her family accepted as "food."
3. Palates Can Change and Sometimes Reject Sweetness
By mid-year, sugary treats tasted too sweet. One daughter even got a headache after just two bites of cake. The family's cravings faded; sugar no longer felt normal. This shift revealed how deeply sweetness is conditioned and how liberating it can be to recalibrate it.
4. Health Benefits Can Be Subtle but Profound
The Schaubs didn’t lose dramatic weight, but they noticed real changes: more energy, steadier moods, and fewer sick days, especially for the kids, whose school absences dropped drastically. These outcomes weren’t flashy but life-shifting.
5. Food Is Deeply Cultural And Giving It Up Forces Honest Change
Their no-sugar status disrupted holidays, birthdays, and family traditions. They learned hard lessons about how sugar is woven into identity and affection like how Schaub once used baking as a tangible expression of love. But they also discovered creativity and connection in new rituals: treating real fruit as dessert, cooking together, and crafting new ways to celebrate.
Year of No Sugar isn’t a diet book. It’s a memoir and manifesto about awareness: seeing how much sugar shapes our culture, health, and habits. Schaub’s year of no added sugar slowed her down and rewired her relationship with food, family, and love.
This book is perfect for anyone curious about clean eating, grappling with food addiction, or just wanting a more intentional life. It will irritate you, amuse you, and maybe horrify you but most of all, it will reveal how quietly, insidiously addictive sweetness has become and how gently and profoundly, you can unlearn it.Eve Schaub's memoir is witty, raw, and eye-opening: she takes us inside her family’s 31‑year-old‑daughter–mom turning point, when her household pledged to eliminate all added sugar for an entire year.
Watching the viral lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” from Dr. Robert Lustig lit the spark. She believed sugar was poison and she decided her family would test that theory. What followed was not just a nutritional experiment, but a seismic shift in awareness, identity, and even joy. We follow Schaub through label‑reading marathons, restaurant confrontations, recipe failures, and emotional breakdowns (hers and her kids’) but also unexpected wins like clearer taste buds, higher energy, and fewer sick days.
Schaub writes with humor and humility. She never moralizes, but she doesn’t minimize the emotional weight of food traditions either. She’s a mom who still bakes for love, for community, but now asks: does love need sugar? Her journey turns domestic labor into activism, and simple meals into a kind of resistance.
5 Lasting Lessons from Year of No Sugar:
1. Sugar Is Everywhere, Even Where You’d Least Suspect
Schaub was shocked to discover sugar lurking in essentials like bacon, mayonnaise, deli meat, bread, soups, and condiments. Hidden sugars are industrial sweeteners added for cost savings and taste longevity not for our health. Recognizing how pervasive sugar is was the first real blow to their assumed "healthy" diet.
2. Reading Labels Becomes Revolutionary
The experiment turned grocery shopping into detective work. Schaub spent more time reading every ingredient list with disbelief, hearing sugar’s many names, like dextrose or corn syrup. This deliberate awareness radically changed what her family accepted as "food."
3. Palates Can Change and Sometimes Reject Sweetness
By mid-year, sugary treats tasted too sweet. One daughter even got a headache after just two bites of cake. The family's cravings faded; sugar no longer felt normal. This shift revealed how deeply sweetness is conditioned and how liberating it can be to recalibrate it.
4. Health Benefits Can Be Subtle but Profound
The Schaubs didn’t lose dramatic weight, but they noticed real changes: more energy, steadier moods, and fewer sick days, especially for the kids, whose school absences dropped drastically. These outcomes weren’t flashy but life-shifting.
5. Food Is Deeply Cultural And Giving It Up Forces Honest Change
Their no-sugar status disrupted holidays, birthdays, and family traditions. They learned hard lessons about how sugar is woven into identity and affection like how Schaub once used baking as a tangible expression of love. But they also discovered creativity and connection in new rituals: treating real fruit as dessert, cooking together, and crafting new ways to celebrate.
Year of No Sugar isn’t a diet book. It’s a memoir and manifesto about awareness: seeing how much sugar shapes our culture, health, and habits. Schaub’s year of no added sugar slowed her down and rewired her relationship with food, family, and love.
This book is perfect for anyone curious about clean eating, grappling with food addiction, or just wanting a more intentional life. It will irritate you, amuse you, and maybe horrify you but most of all, it will reveal how quietly, insidiously addictive sweetness has become and how gently and profoundly, you can unlearn it.
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