Burn, Baby Burn

My life "theme" has recently changed. It used to be "If it doesn't burn, it's not food." My current theme is "Food is a vehicle for hot sauce."

I love hot, spicy things. I eat some form of very hot spice around twice a day. I've gotten to the point where I use hot sauce like other people use oil and vinegar on salads or ketchup on eggs. Most of it's just not that hot any more.

We were in the city last weekend and we walked by a local grocery store. Why not buy some groceries here? (as opposed to getting back to the east bay and doing it.) So we did. And they had new hot sauces! So I bought four new bottles, and two of them are very hot! I love that.

I'm really enjoying learning about the various spicy peppers. Each one affects your mouth in a different way. Some will slowly ramp up to their peak of hotness, others will be very very hot quickly and fade away just as quick, others will only affect the tip of your tongue, while others still will only affect the back of your mouth. Yum.

Yesterday I finally got around to bottling my new beer. I'm very excited to drink it. I realized that I get so excited when I brew beer that I have historically felt the need to use hops in all the phases of brewing. And I think for my beer tastes now, it's not such a good fit. This might explain my lack of home brewing recently. But this beer only has finishing hops and has lots of blueberries. I'm guessing it's going to have only a slightly more complicated taste that bud, or something along those lines. And that might just be perfect for me now.

Oh, and as a side (for those of you who may be following this blog) I've lost 15 lbs since starting these CRON angled food changes during tax season. It's very exciting. (And I really haven't had a headache in many, many months too - thankfully.) 8 more to go and I'm done.

Calorie Restriction Society

Yeah, it's a little weird, but it's a little of what I'm into right now. Don't worry, it probably won't last that long. I'm very whimsical like that.
Basically the idea goes like this: Your body has the capacity to efficiently digest X amount of food. When you've digested that X, your body is no longer as efficient of a digestion machine and thus you wear out due to the inefficiencies. You might get cancer, or whatever evil disease you might die from. So what you do is eat less calories per day than you would normally and slow down your metabolism a bit. In this way you live longer and in a more healthy state because you don't wear down your body early. They've shown that this works.
The important thing to remember is that in those less calories per day you must get the exact (or more) amount of nutrients that you need to be healthy. That's pretty much the main difference between this and anorexia. Eat less, but make each bite count more.
Here's a pretty good article about the whole thing.
I've been doing this for a couple weeks now less than perfectly consistently. I feel a lot better and I've discovered that I'm less sensitive to not eating constantly. Previously, If I didn't eat for four hours or so I would get this gnarly headache that would not go away. But now I don't seem to have that problem. I have some theories as to why this is. Perhaps in another post I'll get into that.
Here's another article.
I think the most fascination side effect of this is the amount I'm learning about food. Did you know that a plain bagel has almost 400 calories? That's ridiculous. I wouldn't waste that many of my calories on something so useless nutritionally now. And as a result I'm eating much less of those things that probably were spiking my blood sugar. Cool stuff. Food is life.