January 5th, 2025
I have just completed day 7 of being sugar-free and I have to say today was a good day. I ate more fruit, had fewer temptations for sugary items, and was quite productive. The best part of my day was playing two hours of tennis. After declining several Sundays last year, mostly due to my foot, I participated in “rock ‘n roll” tennis at City Park with 11 other tennis junkies this afternoon. It’s a miniature doubles round-robin tournament just for fun where you rotate partners and shift courts depending on whether you win or lose. The temperature was so perfect out today, that we could forgive the gusting winds preceding an impending large cold front that will keep us off the courts. Anyway, after the tennis, we congregated on the porch of the club enjoying the last of the warm breeze, socialized, and enjoyed some cold beers – inspiring me to write about- well- beer.
First, I truly love beer. I can probably count on one hand the beers that I don’t like and I have tried hundreds of them. I already hear people saying, “You know, beer is sugar. Are you giving up alcohol too?” The answer to this is no.
According the website, brewdog.com–
“Outside the realm of alcopops, sugar is rarely added to alcoholic drinks, including beer. However, it does play a part in the fermentation process. That’s when yeast converts the sugars released in malting into alcohol. Because the sugar is converted, it theoretically means that beers have very low sugar.
Interestingly, light beers are often those with higher sugar, and low alcohol beers can also be quite sugary, as the sugar produced in the malting process is hardly converted by the yeast. However, in regular beers, the amount of sugar is typically less than 2 grams per litre, or less than 1 gram per pint. There are 20 grams of sugar in a Mars Bar, and 10 grams in a can of Coca Cola Original (but none in Diet Coke, which sweetens with Aspartame and Acesulfame K).“
And I am not trying to have a scientific debate about how my body processes carbohydrates. The bottom line is that different substances have different effects on different people and, for me, beer simply does not have the same addictive quality as sugar.
First, I tend to only drink socially or maybe reward myself with a nice cold one after an extensive day of yard work or a completed project. It is never a drink I choose under depression or stress. While I could drink with the best of them in my college days, my desire to do that type of heavy drinking has declined right along with my metabolic rate which allowed me to process all that alcohol in the first place. Nowadays, water is the larger temptation of the two. College days trained me well, I guess, to “see off” a bottle of water in a few seconds. My wife doesn’t drink so I might not pull out some beers until I have a guest who does drink. I don’t feel the need to cap my night off with a drink like I feel the constant urge to have dessert- a little something sweet after dinner (or any meal for that matter). So I could easily buy a six-pack and have it hang around the house for a few weeks. Meanwhile, a box of cookies doesn’t stand a chance of surviving that long. The phrase “stale cookies” is the ultimate oxymoron in our cupboard.
So today, I capped off some great tennis in lovely weather with a nice cold one. Yep, just one. That was enough. Fortunately for me, I was able to experience a whole new beer- Classic City Lager. Cheers to that!
