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.

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.