Wolfgang Maehr

Long time it has been since my last blog update… last time I was travelling. The same is the case this time – same region, similar stops but this time some more time and other modes of transport. Holiday. And I want to take advantage of some of the little time that can be found on holiday to give an update.

In terms of life not much news have happened. Chandigarh had become really hot and humid with temperatures up to 45ºC. Still, escapes to the hills have eased the sweat a little. During the time being also new people have moved in and out of the city – new interestring faces here and there. Friends have become married, engaged, started relationships and ended others. While it is clear that life has been rather eventful, I have been fairly stuck in the same work, eat and sleep rhythm. Work has brought new challenges with the responsibility of heading our development team of almost a dozen heads.

Maybe one of the most interesting experiences was to accept the challenge of a friend of mine to stay sugar (sucrose) free for the month of June. The idea behind the challenge was twofold: Improve your health and push your limits. On the first issue the benefits of limited sucrose intake are (according to my friend) a better sleep cycle, better skin and a calmer personality. If that’s not enough, I also wanted see how I can cope without the sweet bliss as I had suspected to be addicted to sugar for a long time now. So here I want to go through some of my observations related to that effort. But before that, a small overview on the rules. Natural sugar was allowed, most famous fructose (fruit) and lactose (milk), added sweetness and extra sugar was a no-no. As such, fruit juices or meals with sugar where it is not used for the sake of sweetness were allowed – most prominent would probably be bread or yoghurt. Also Coke Light and similar would have been allowed but I wanted to avoid that as well as to decrease my dependency on those drinks.

So the main strategy that worked for me was fresh fruits (water melon and mango), fruit juices and cheese. Cheese seemed to help me over most of the things because finding food without sugar is not easy in india, where even chips contain sugar. Same with drinks: As I already took a vow as not to drink alcohol, not having sugar essentially limited the choice onto water and lime soda (with or without salt). And water tastes very flavourful after drinking lime soda (observation #1). :D

Overall, the experience was that the abstinence was less hard than I thought – so no addiction there – but rather annoying as the amount of choices in restaurants was very limited. Yes, sometimes I would miss a kulfi (ice cream) in the evening and the cakes in the office (once almost accidentally licked my finger clean after cutting pieces for others…) but overall eating watermelons and mango did help a lot. The health effects for me seemed limited. I did not feel calmer – usually actually not even more tired – nor did I sleep shorter or get a better skin. But I observed mosquitos being less attracted by a probably less sweet smell.

The other main observation is how widely spread sugar is in our consumer goods. There is hardly any processed food available that has no sugar or artificial sweetener. I have no experience wit diabetes but I would imagine that it can become rather cumbersome to find things to eat and drink when even milk shakes are made with ice cream, bread use sugar for the yeast and potato chips have sugar for no obvious reason… Life without salt is known to be hard as we need the minerals when sweating, but life without sugar should be possible without more ado. Yes, north-indians are famous for their weet tooth, but is it really necessary to add sugar to mango shakes, orange juices and other sweet fruits. Juices made out of concentrate has always been a mystery to me. Well, I see the reason to make the concentrate in order to store it and transportation. But first removing all liquids to then stretch it afterwards with water again, what is the use in that? Why can most juice not be made straight from the fruits? Where is the problem that some packages taste different from others? Where is the problem if there are seasonal differences in the taste of packaged juices? Have we as humanity really reached a stage wehere we prefer the mass-produced, unified and quality-checked over the hand-made and natural?

Ok, enough ranting. What more was there to observe? Taste adapts. Yes, not really news for anybody. But interestingly different drinks now, after that experiment, work differently for me. I can still drink Gatorade or Sprite and other “artificial” drinks while I cannot drink juices like “Nimbooz” (7-Ups Indian lemonade) or Maaza (a mango drink). I suspect that my body is just used to certain drinks to taste artificially (the former ones) while expecting others to taste more natural (the latter ones) and then being disappointed when that is not the case. However, overall I could not observe my sense for flavour to change lastingly. Short-time changes however occurred list after drinking lime soda.

Finally, an observation about myself. Self-discipline seems just non-existent, which means that accomplishments happen due to external commitment and feeling for responsibility and pride. For years I have tried to get myself to try the early morning thing, or more sports or other changes like that. They never happen. However, I am sure if I make a bet that I’ll get up at 0600 every day for a month, I will be able to do that. Seems there is a hedonist wrapped in the peel of the feeling of pride – sounds like true Leo. :)

Happy summer everyone!