I first heard of Matt Frazier “The No Meat Athlete” on the Rich Roll Podcast last week. The guy is basically an average Joe that decided he wanted to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Along the way he became vegan and blogged the entire process. He has a new book out as well, but the recipes I posted last week (humus and the granola bars) were the things that caught my eye the most. I decided to try out a good homemade health bar recipe and I think these are it for me!

Journaling is one of the best way for you to determine what is actually going on in your life and to have a definitive record of progress or degeneration.  That is true for everything from emotions, to food to body measurements.  Especially when one is not on some radical transformation plan, we often don’t appreciate the smaller changes which are going on in our lives.  Besides that we often don’t take the time to listen to our body and how we are feeling.  Measuring these qualitative things are very important if you want to determine changes in how you are feeling over time.

We all get sick sometimes, and we know instantly that something is wrong.  However what about a gradual change in our mood or how we feel?  Our brains are good at normalizing behaviors. That leads us to treat certain chronic conditions, or feeling a certain way over a long period of time, as “just the way it is.”  Many times it is not a matter of it just being status quo for our bodies but instead symptoms of problems which we are dealing with due to diet or lifestyle.  By tracking and trending these things you can begin to see patterns emerge and start trying to address them proactively.

I believe I’ve written before about how I want to phase my various diets over the life of this experiment.  I know I’ve written about it in my personal notes, but believe I have only covered it as part of another article.  Regardless, I’ve recently been giving some considerations to the original plan and have modified it to be a bit better at capturing what I’m trying to do.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with talk radio.  At best I love the debate that it can bring up but I hate how irritated it makes me as I sit there listening to stuff I consider to be BS.  I love the fact that ideas are being put out there, but invariably it’s put out in an overly reductionist way to specifically invoke that sort of response.  I long abandoned political talk radio because of it and instead picked up listening to fitness podcasts, among others.  Sadly I find myself going through the same emotions far too frequently when it comes to basic understanding about common sense diet and nutrition.

As I was getting more and more into doing from scratch food preparation I really wanted to but was always intimidated by the thought of doing anything with dairy.  Making your own cheese or yogurt sounded like nothing but a ton of trouble and something I was bound to screw up.  After talking to a friend about the concept of making fresh yogurt he said he doesn’t eat store bought yogurt anymore and that it was incredibly simple to make.  I’m here to say that he’s totally right, but having tried lots of different techniques to get “store bought” texture without the additives, I can tell you there are definitely ways to screw it up too.  Bottom line is if you can bake a Duncan Hines box cake, you can make yogurt.

I remember several years ago reading about the so-called localvore movement.  Perhaps that was made the most vivid reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a great exercise in adding prose to an otherwise dry topic, albeit a very delicious one.  While hardly at the bleeding edge of localvorism, I was into it before it was plastered all over menus across the country and in the lexicon of the common person.  However my experiences with that have to date been intermittent.  What I was hoping to do along with the rest of the diet experiment is to try to eat more local and cleaner.  I was afraid that maybe it would be too difficult, but after a little help from internet I believe it won’t be too bad, or too expensive either.

Starting on 7/8/2013 I started my attempt at cutting out artificially sweetened beverages, specifically diet soda, from my diet.  I have wanted to get off this damn kick for some time and I knew I would need to do it for my diet experiment.  The first phase of that draw down ends today, and I was supposed to be down to just one can a day, down from 10-12 a day when I started.  After that I was going to be down to just 7 cans a week, then 6 then so on until I was having none at all.  I’m happy to say that not only have I abstained from regularly drinking any diet soda or artificially sweetened beverages for nearly a month, but I’m not even tempted by it any longer.

Biohacking is a relatively new phenomena, and I myself claim to be a biohacker.  Reading a lot of the different blogs and articles I wonder if I’m a different kind of biohacker than many of the others writing about these things.