To lose the weight I did, I had to cook my own food. I had to cook a lot of my own food. Many recipes I relied on so heavily, I started to get sick of them.

And that’s where the madness began.

Because, I got creative, but didn’t much change the core foods. Steaks, pork chops, chicken, sausage, and salads. That was basically all I ate for nearly a year, and the result was a desperate and mad scientist quest to make things taste better without increasing caloric intake.

It led to me working with hot sauce and spices on a level that made my tongue into a shell of itself. My taste buds are overstimulated in some of the oddest ways. Subtle flavor is not going to cut it with me. Most of what I eat is savory, so I make things ultra-savory. I don’t eat sweet things often, but sometimes I need pure stevia sweetener to calm my tongue down after some of my recipes.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised this happened. I’ve always tended to like extreme flavors. Sipping what was essentially pure garlic broth, eating slices of raw onion, and making my food so salty that most people couldn’t attempt a bite were all common occurrences when I was a kid.

My mindset has been to eat heartily, to not savor but instead have enough that I’m eating for a while, and to value flavor over a food’s aesthetic. If it tastes good, who cares if it’s normal or looks appetizing?

And, yeah, that may go a long way to explaining my weight issues in the past, but, hey, trying to make each meal something interesting applies just as much to a salad as it does to any hamburger.

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Special thanks to: Bob Gerkin, Collin Pearman, Dylan Alexander, Jerry Banfield, and Michael The Comic Nerd. 

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