Tabasco your way to weight loss
BILL BROWNSTEIN, The Gazette
Published: Thursday, February 01, 2007
Order Bloody Mary. Then ask bartender to hold the ice, celery, salt, pepper, horseradish, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce and - sadly - vodka.
The more astute among you will realize that all you're left with is the Tabasco. Correct. Now knock back the Tabasco.
Movie buffs, this is not just a masochistic, modern-day variation on the classic Jack Nicholson rant in Five Easy Pieces. It is actually a prelude to a hot diet.
A spoonful of Tabasco may not make the medicine go down, but it can apparently eliminate the pounds. The Hot Sauce Diet is all the rage these days - particularly among those with cast-iron intestines and tummies.
The thinking behind the diet must be that if the hot sauce doesn't at least curb your appetite, a sufficient dose could cause your intestines and tummy to spring a leak, still resulting in your wasting away
from a blimp to a mere beer barrel.
The Hot Sauce Diet is the brainchild of one Spiro B. Antoniades, an orthopedic surgeon from Baltimore who would seem to know more about spines than stomachs. However, the good doctor did shed some 70 pounds in a year simply by taking swigs of hot sauce and dousing his dinner with it. Better still, he didn't suffer an ulcer in the process.
He has since penned the slim volume The Hot Sauce Diet: A Journey of Behavior Modification (available at Amazon.ca). The key here would be "behaviour modification," a subject some of us find too easy to resist.
It's all about the pain game. Whenever Antoniades has the urge to pig out, he simply tortures himself by knocking back some Tabasco straight from the bottle. Apparently, the ensuing pain will come back to haunt him the next time he wants to chow down on a Big Mac or six.
"For serious, inappropriate, uncontrollable hunger, I recommend a full swig of hot sauce straight from the bottle," he writes. "I know this is drastic, but inappropriate hunger behaviour needs to be punished. Once the swig is in your mouth, you should not swallow it immediately but rather swish it around like a wine connoisseur until the burning effect diminishes."
Not only that, but the swish could cure cavities, too.
This would seem to be a rather heavy-handed approach to dieting. Really, one could just as soon modify one's behaviour by poking one's eye with a sharp stick every time one has the yearning to pillage one's fridge.
For this particular hot-sauce freak, though, the diet does have a certain appeal. Just as long as there is a little food involved.
For eons, scientists have been extolling the virtues of capsaicin, the key chemical that gives cayenne its pop in hot sauces. Capsaicin has been credited in everything from fighting infection to stimulating the heart plus other valuable organs to alleviating arthritis.
On the other hand, too much of the stuff can lead to digestive difficulties best left undescribed while one devours one's breakfast. Put it this way: The makers of the following hot sauces didn't call them Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally, Screaming Sphincter, Kiss Your Ass Goodbye or Colon Cleaner for nothing.
On that tender note, Antoniades also advises dieters to drink lots of water and eat slowly. Not that there's much likelihood dieters will be quickly downing grub laced with Tabasco, let alone such personal faves as Crazy Jerry's Brain Damage Mind Blowin' Hot Sauce or Iguana Radioactive Atomic Pepper Sauce. (Use of the latter will not only result in the shedding of many pounds, but also in bringing down an entire regime.)
The danger, though, is that the Hot Sauce Diet could cause some to lose their will to live before they lose weight. So, have a Bloody Mary - fully loaded - before making any rash decisions.
and then there was an asian kid (who spoke english but not well) and took a spoonful and was litterally bouncing up in down for water and the teacher couldnt get what he was saying, and then she was yelling at him when he was gasping for water and had tears in his eyes
Sriracha's good stuff, although IMO a bit too sweet for some things. Jamaican Pickapeppa can also be too sweet sometimes, but it's very good as well.
