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.

With great interest I dove into the The Blue Zones (2nd Edition) to see if there was any overlapping lifestyle choices amongst the world’s populations of longevity superstars. Dan Buettner and his team traveled the world to try to figure that exact same question out. While they presented lots of information in their book, I found my conclusions to be a bit different than theirs.

Many years ago Kate Moss got in a world of trouble for making the statement, “Nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels.”  The gist of her comment was she’d rather be skinny and not eat certain foods, or much food at all, than be fat and eating all the stuff she craves.  While I couldn’t condone the anorexia and eating disorders surrounding that mantra, I thought that with a slight twist it could actually be a very positive statement.  So I’ve changed it to, “Nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels.”

During my vegan experiment week one of my favorite new recipes was this delicious concoction that I found on Vegangela. The blog is a treasure trove of tasty looking vegan recipes. My friend Eric was nice enough to direct me to the site and afterward I had a field day looking for my next recipe. This Oven Baked Mexican Quinoa Casserole is exactly what I was looking for.

With all the data collected about my week of eating vegan, plus my own direct personal observations of how things went.  I thought it was time to take a look at how things went and if there are any lessons learned from it.

Do you hear a repetitive dialog in your head going something like, “I know I should do [insert idea here], so maybe I’ll start [tomorrow, next week]…”  So something like, “I know I should stop eating donuts for breakfast, so maybe I’ll start eating healthy tomorrow.”  Or, perhaps something like, “I know I should work out more, so next week I’ll start using that gym membership that has been unused for the past three years.”  When I get in these ruts I always wonder what it is that has me stuck.  I honestly think it’s just a case of self sabotage being done subconsciously.  Maybe it all it takes is thinking about the situation from a slightly different perspective to get the ball rolling towards doing rather than wishing you had done it already.

The final day of the vegan week experiment is over.   As promised, it started humdrum but ended with some good experimentation and flare!

The fourth day of this experiment was one where I was really close to breaking it. Stress always requires release, and we want to fall back on our crutches.  That’s booze for some, drugs for others.  For me it’s food.  Combine that with some lack of preparation and I narrowly averted breaking the plan.  I didn’t though, and got the chance to try another new dinner option concocted by my friend.