MacDonald, 33, gave up refined sugars on Jan. 1, 2008, partly as a test of willpower, partly as a reflection on the impossible.
"I'm pretty self-disciplined," said MacDonald. "Sugar was the one thing that kept laughing in my face. One Oreo has never in my life meant one Oreo."
The task wasn't as clear as it sounded.
Eliminating "processed sugar" seemed an easy enough goal. Corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup were clearly off-limits, like plain white sugar. But what about stevia? An acceptable natural ingredient, she decided, though her baking experiments with it didn't work, and it wound up as a tea sweetener. What about "truvia"? It's derived from stevia, but didn't pass her sniff test. As readers found her blog, "My Year Without," she started fielding questions. What about eating organic sugar? Is it OK to eat foods that use evaporated cane juice? Raw sugar?
"It's all nutritionally deficient, our bodies can't use it, so what's the point?" she said.
At the beginning, in January 2008, she stuck her head in the doughnut case at the local Safeway, and breathed in over and over again. "I am fully aware of how unsanitary this is," she wrote.
By February, the sugar cravings were so wild her husband once "must have heard me running around the kitchen in a frenzy because he yells, 'Take a giant bite of cottage cheese!' " she wrote.
But she was feeling strong. Every time she successfully resisted, she thought to herself, "The work this took is not going to be for nothing."
And, she admits, she already was feeling superior from her success. It wasn't pretty, but at least it helped.
