Photograph courtesy of the author.

Sunday, December 7, 2025

My husband says sugar is in everything, pointing to the bread on our counter, the jar of nut butter, the smear of spicy mayo on the side of my bowl of take-out tuna rice. He presents these facts as if they are revelations. I decide the rules of my sugar fast will be looser and therefore possible to stick to. So, no dessert. No honey, no maple syrup. Dates would be cheating. Nothing that could be described as architected solely for pleasure.

I ingest over 1,500 grams of sugar a week by virtue of my job as a baker. I spoon custards and eat scraps; I lick my fingers when they’re sticky. I used to order dessert before dinner, but lately I’ve lost my sweet tooth, a gradual erosion: I brought an apple galette to a housewarming and couldn’t manage a single bite. At work, I don’t bother to taste as much as I should. I forget to add salt, and a cook gives me side-eye.

I wonder if a week without sugar will rearouse my desire. Maybe if I interrupt my intake, I’ll like my job again. Like quitting one form of nicotine to replace it with another.

Monday, December 8

Opened the restaurant alone at 6 A.M., lumbering in my puffy coat down to the basement. Brioche buns laid out to proof, toffee glaze coaxed into a bowl. A bottle of lemon curd snatched from the lowboy. Ordinarily, I squeeze some onto the back of my hand, dart my tongue into it to make sure it hasn’t turned overnight. I sniff it instead, but curd doesn’t smell particularly bad if it’s gone off, so I don’t trust myself. I swish it around in my mouth and then spit it into the trash can. I remember someone telling me about a sober sommelier. This feels much less dignified, gloop caught in the back of my throat. The same problem arises with the chai-orange whip that accompanies the hand pie. I take a different tack: Nora arrives, and she becomes my mouth so it’s right as rain for service. A cruller fries too flat. I put it on a plate for family-meal scrounging instead of eating it.

I start on a batch of cinnamon roll filling and pop a Cool Mint Zyn, 6 mg. 8:15 A.M. Sharp and sweet. Maybe it’ll impede my reflex to lick up dribbles. People think bakers passively follow recipes, but we taste just as much as cooks do. Jesús takes the raspberry juice left over from my granita and adds oat milk and honey; he holds out the Vitamix. I tell him I’m not eating sugar, and he nods at me like I’ve told him I’m sick.

Around noon, Ella and Ham come in for a meeting. I’m expected to present them with dessert, and I do. I parade out all my offerings, and they look surprised when I don’t bother with a plate for myself. I tell them I’m not eating sugar and discover being on a weird diet cleanse is an efficient way to avoid substantive conversation. Giving up a food group is familiar and innocuous, and copping to it gives the illusion of disclosure without real vulnerability: I’m burned out and don’t have the energy to be doing this extra gig. Ella tells me she’s considering an all-meat diet for a week instead of questioning my lackadaisical attitude. I house an omelet with broiled tomatoes and toast at the end of my shift. Dessert doesn’t cross my mind the entire day until my husband wants to watch TV while eating ice cream.

Tuesday, December 9

I wonder if it’s possible that sugar is responsible for my glumness. I wake up in high spirits, which strikes me as noteworthy! Would be nice to pin it all on a single enemy. Sugar leads to inflammation; inflammation is the source of all ails, et cetera. Francesca, my best friend and an ER doctor, is always saying that mental clarity comes from detoxing. Without a product engineered for pleasure, I will, supposedly, rediscover dopamine in the mundane: An apple will taste achingly sweet. My skin will be brighter, tighter; my mind uninhibited. When I saw Dr. Edwards this year, she first asked about my nicotine consumption (cigarettes → vape → Zyn), then about my eating habits. I told her I am committed to a well-balanced diet, which is a lie. Much of what I eat is free food from PR dinners and fistfuls of streusel at work.

Oatmeal for breakfast, ordinarily drowned in maple syrup or light brown sugar because, after beginning the day by opening Instagram, I am hungry for dopamine. The oatmeal is gruel without it, the peanut butter (no added sugar) tacky in my mouth. Computer work because the restaurant is closed. When I’m not baking but everyone else is commuting to the office, I feel guilty and out of sync with the world. I refresh my email constantly. A message confirms my attendance to a well-known baker’s cookie swap at an ice cream shop in the West Village. What cookies will I be making? the PR rep asks. Another is a last-minute invitation to a tasting later this week, “rooted in the long-standing holiday custom of gathering family and friends around a bountiful table of thirteen desserts. We hope you’ll join us!” I do not respond.

Wednesday, December 10

Zyn on the walk to work. The bodega was out of Cool Mint, and I remembered someone saying the coffee version tastes like a Werther’s. It does.

I think about Deb, who works as a book editor and spends her days reading drafts in their least legible forms. Her job is to make a manuscript into something the rest of us consume. By the time it’s on sale, she’s moved on. She barely has time to read for pleasure anymore. I never really eat my own desserts in their finished state either, just the components. I remember how I used to sit in front of the oven window watching butter and flour swell and brown and shatter. How does the rough puff puff? Anna once told me that when she watches movies she can see only the choices, the camera, the angle, the coloration. When I eat dessert at a restaurant, all I can taste is what’s wrong.

I go to my friend Rosa’s for dinner. Ordinarily I pride myself on having no restrictions, on being easy. This time when she asks me if I’m avoiding anything, I feel embarrassed. I say refined sugar, not the whole story but close enough. I’m the one who should be bringing dessert. I feel like less of a guest without it. I make up for it with two bottles of wine. Sausages first, plump and served with cabbage. It turns out there is dessert, because she is a chef and likes a constraint: honey-roasted apples with almonds and cheese. I take two bites because I don’t want to be rude, even though I promised to relinquish honey. I feel so extraordinarily guilty to be cheating so early in the week that I can barely taste it. Her boyfriend joins us for a drink and opens a Zyn tin, which makes me less embarrassed to put in my own small pillow of nicotine.

Thursday, December 11

The cookie swap is held at an ice cream shop in the Village. A sign on the wall reads: “We strongly recommend tasting it all.” All day I was supposed to make cookies, but I just couldn’t do it. I am tired and sticky and covered in flour grime. I don’t want to make something ostensibly for pleasure after a full day of baking for work. I arrive empty-handed. The spread is spectacular, mango and tonka bean Linzer cookies, shortbread freckled with sesame seeds, graham crackers festooned with icing. I see everyone I’ve ever met in the food world, clutching their tins to their chests. None of them know I’m not eating sugar. That’s part of the problem I’m having. There is no moral audience, no witness.

My dad is on Ozempic but manages to outeat it. He plows through an entire buffet but tells everyone he knows that it’s working—he’s down 0.6 pounds. I recognize myself in him. Maybe deprivation is compelling only insofar as it sets up a release. I don’t know what to do with myself. I wonder if everyone around me can feel my anxiety emanating off me. I pocket a rainbow cookie on my way out because it’s like five pastries in one: cookie, cake, chocolate, jam, marzipan. I cram it into my mouth before I can convince myself otherwise, reasoning that I have already failed once, so why not? The cookie doesn’t have much flavor, but the apricot layer is bright and tart, and the chocolate melts pleasingly onto my tongue. Briefly, I am enveloped in the sweetness. I imagine my eyes like a cartoon, popping out of my skull in glorious rapture.

Friday, December 12

A whitehead on my upper lip, which I blame on my indiscretion. Later, 2nd Ave Deli with my grandmother. Our ritual is Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry and a chocolate rugelach post-pastrami. She plans her week around this. She brings her glucose monitor. When I tell her that I have been abstaining from sweets, she asks me if we should take my blood sugar. I drop a bead of red blood onto the machine before we eat. Eighty-three, the monitor reads. Thirteen points lower than my baseline. “Wonderful,” she says.

Saturday, December 13

Up early again, but I slept deeply. Opening at the restaurant, then straight to Red Hook for a holiday market where Cake Zine has a table. I made roasted-pecan oat scones as a marketing tactic but did not taste them. People start lining up almost immediately. “I smelled them across the room,” they say. A woman takes a bite and closes her eyes. I watch her mouth work. I watch crumbs collect in the folds of her scarf. Someone asks if I have a gluten-free version. Another comes back to the table to tell me it’s the best scone he’s ever had. I say “independent food magazine” over and over. By the early afternoon, I realize I am starving. I am alone at the table, and the card reader keeps disconnecting from the Wi-Fi. There are still a few scones left, burnished brown. Usually I wouldn’t be tempted—I rarely want to eat the things I make—but I am hungry, and I haven’t been following my own rules anyway. I take small bites from the bottom first, avoiding the lacquered maple glaze. It looks like a mouse has been gnawing at it. The scone is heartier than I remember. My stomach makes an audible yowl. After a while, I take a piece of the doming top and flip it upside down like sushi so the sugar hits my tongue first, dissolving fast.

Nothing really happened this week. I didn’t feel my mind clear up. I don’t feel foggier. I don’t feel newly reunited with sugar or absolved of wanting it. I finish the rest of the scone in a few bites.

Tanya Bush is a writer and a baker. Her narrative cookbook, Will This Make You Happy, is forthcoming from Chronicle next month.