I was checking through my local Costco Membership Warehouse the other night, mainly to see if they had the 12 pack of SoBe Lifewaters I had heard they were now carrying. When I passed by the DVD section, I just took a quick look and what caught my attention was that they had a set of display boxes containing the various seasons of the show Bewitched. They had all eight seasons of Bewitched available for $12.99 each. A great bargain if you are looking for a deal on getting the episodes from the show.

I didn’t realize Sony had finished releasing the entire series, I had been buying them as they came out for the first four seasons, but didn’t buy the fifth season as it was more expensive than I was willing to spend at the time and I never heard about the subsequent seasons being released after that. I was certainly presented with a case of temptation as it would be quite easy to just get the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth seasons right here for a bargain price. I decided I would give it some thought but since it’s Costco, I would definitely have to think quickly as things there tend to sell quickly and they may not be there when you come back.

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In my time on the Belly Fat Cure, one of the earliest things recommended was very dark chocolate, first Jorge Cruise was recommending the Green & Black’s’s 85% Dark Chocolate, and more recently the Ghirardelli Midnight Reverie 85% Cacao dark chocolate. Both offer dark chocolate with only 5 grams of sugar per serving. I’ve never been a big fan of dark chocolate in my life so I’ve resisted trying either brand…until now.

Pretty much my indulgences in Chocolate on the Belly Fat Cure have been in the form of sugar free chocolates such as the line of sugar free chocolates from Hershey’s which includes miniature sized candies of several Hershey owned brands like Hershey’s (Chocolate Bars), Reese’s (Peanut Butter Cups), and York (Peppermint Patties), which have been fine, but sometimes not quite as indulgent as I would like. I’ve also just allowed myself to have the chocolates I do like but only in very small tiny portions, such as a single Dove square, or my favorites imported from Canada such as mini Aero bars and mini Coffee Crisp bars. I’ve actually done quite well with those, I ordered some from Canada in July and I still have a sizable number of the mini bars left and it’s now February. In the old days they wouldn’t have lasted a week, much less 7 months so far.

So I happened to be in the store and saw the Ghirardelli chocolate, and thought I’ll give it a try as I can have four squares of it for a single serving. So I got it out to the car, and opened up the package and broke off a small piece and bit into it, and let’s just say, I quickly posted on Twitter that not only was it my first ever purchase of the 86% Cacao chocolate, but also my last purchase and that my opinion of it was that it was “Fucking Disgusting.”

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I don’t often make it to the coastal areas of San Diego any more, and these days when I do it’s the coastal areas near San Diego, not so much the North County coastal areas. I opted for a nice drive down the coast and when I neared Encinitas, it struck me that it’s been ages since I last visited Lou’s Records on Coast Highway.

I spent a fortune there back in the day as they were the best place to get import CDs back when I used to buy a lot of music. In fact, my very first visit was an expensive one as I found some amazing hard to get ABBA imports that to this day I’ve never seen anywhere outside of overpriced eBay auctions. Lou’s Records was also the store where I did my very first special order of an import, which was for a Swedish language solo album by Marie Fredriksson of Roxette. So when I decided to stop in at Lou’s I wasn’t sure they were even still around as it seems stores dedicated to selling music are harder to find than they used to be. Fortunately Lou’s was still there and I was instantly nostalgic for the hours I would spend combing the racks there for the many treasures I would find there.

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Following my visit to the Sonic Drive-In in Vista, I stopped at the nearby Frazier Farms Market mainly to see they had any Ginger Ale Zevia, which they did have, but I was intrigued by what I saw next to the Zevia. With so few beverage manufacturers realizing that there is a market for sugar free drinks that don’t use artificial sweeteners, it’s always a nice surprise when a new comes to market that is able to be naturally sugar free, and today, I discovered a new product that I just had to bring home to try out.

That new product is Steaz Zero Calorie Sparking Green Tea. Essentially it’s a flavored tea product made with sparking water so it looks and tastes more like an exotic flavored soda instead of a tea product. The tea is sweetened with Erythritol and Stevia extract thereby making it a great option for people following Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program. The teas are also organically grown with special mention on the bottles about how its sustainably sourced for a natural and organically based beverage. There’s also several logos on the bottle to indicate it’s compliance with several programs such as certifications for being organic, vegan, fair trade, and a low carbon footprint during manufacturing. Essentially indicating the company is as environmentally focused as it is profit driven, definitely an admirable quality.

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To most of the rest of the country, Sonic Drive-In restaurants are a common, everyday sight and experience. Perhaps, one hardly worth taking note. However, they are relatively new here in San Diego, with their first store appearing in Santee about a year ago. I still have not visited that location, but on my way to my Post Office Box in Carlsbad I was driving through Vista and found they had put in a Sonic Drive-In near the recently redeveloped Main Street area. In fact, it’s really close to the old Peppertree Frosty shop that has an amazing variety of milkshakes and other ice cream treats.

I decided to give Sonic a try as I haven’t done a “drive-in” experience in years and thought it might be fun. I pulled into an open stall, decided on what to have then pressed the button to call the store to let them know I was ready to order. Once the order was placed, I loved the fact I could just pay with my Debit card (using it as a Mastercard) right at the menu board right next to the speaker and within a few minutes a young girl on roller skates was out to deliver my order and receipt. It was really cool. I know once the drive-thru was introduced, the drive-in’s were pretty much existing on borrowed time and nearly disappeared permanently, fortunately Sonic has been able to revive the format and make it accessible to folks who might never know the concept ever existed.

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Yesterday, I decided to stop for some food after work and while driving through Escondido, I decided to stop at the Farmer Boys Restaurant on Valley Parkway. Farmer Boys is a chain of restaurants throughout Southern California although they have next to no presence at all in San Diego County. They have 2 stores in Escondido, but are mostly located in Riverside and San Bernadino counties. (They even have 2 locations in Las Vegas.)

The restaurants are pretty cool as a kind of hybrid fast food/sit down restaurant. You place your order at the counter like a fast food place and if you’re dining in, they give you a number and serve your order to your table on real plates with real flatware, not the disposable paper products of traditional fast food places. The place has a more rural appeal in terms of appearance and fits in with a country style home feeling, and is really quite a pleasant environment to dine in. And the service is quite friendly too.

Farmer Boys has the tagline “World’s Greatest Hamburgers” and while many places make that claim or something very similar, usually it’s just over inflated hype. Would I consider the burgers at Farmer Boys to be the World’s Greatest, no, not by a long shot. But what I would say is that they’re definitely on par or slightly above the average sit down restaurant. And while the tagline really focuses on burgers, they really do offer quite a selection of different things, burgers are just a small portion of the menu. They do offer a rather large breakfast menu, so they have a greater bit of variety than you’d expect for a place claiming to be a “burger” joint.

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To help promote the Belly Fat Cure book, Jorge Cruise has been making a couple of appearances to sign books for the public. At the moment only two appearances had been scheduled, an appearance earlier in the month at a Costco membership warehouse in New York, and today at the Morena Boulevard Costco here in San Diego. The signing started at noon.

I wasn’t planning on attending but I had an appointment to check out a room for rent in the Pacific Beach area at 2 pm and Pacific Beach is just a couple of miles from the Costco location. I took care of my morning errands and got to the Pacific Beach area at about 1 pm and since I had an hour before my appointment, I headed right over to the Costco. I wasn’t sure if it was still going on but thought I’d check it out just in case.

Sure enough, the signing was still going on and Jorge was busy talking to folks and as soon as he saw me he introduced me to the group of people around the table. He invited people to ask me questions and I did field a few from people who had seen the sugar video I did with Jorge. Overall it was really nice to meet some people interested in losing weight. Also there was Michelle McGowen, a fellow Belly Fat Cure success story. Jorge then shared samples of his sugar free brownies with the crowd and amazed them all with how sweet tasting a sugar free treat can be.

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One of my favorite things of 2009, was discovering Zevia’s all natural sodas when I was introduced to the Belly Fat Cure by Jorge Cruise. I’ve been a big fan of Zevia since my very first purchase. Their sodas are all natural, and naturally sugar free, and calorie free. They are sweetened by Stevia, a South American plant who’s name means “sweet leaf” and Erythritol, a sugar alcohol that naturally occurs in plants.

At the time I first started trying Zevia, they only had four flavors, Cola (similar to Coca-Cola or Pepsi), Natural Twist (a lemon-lime soda similar to 7-Up or Sprite), Root Beer (similar to A&W), and Orange (similar to Fanta). Soon after they introduced two new flavors, Ginger Ale (similar to Canada Dry) and Black Cherry (similar to a Cherry 7-Up). And now they’ve introduced a new flavor called, Dr. Zevia, which naturally is similar to Dr. Pepper.

It was quite a while following the introduction of the Ginger Ale and Black Cherry Zevia flavors before I ever found them in the stores, so this time I ordered a couple of cases of the new Dr. Zevia directly from Zevia. Fortunately they were offering a great discount at the time which dropped the price of shipping for the two cases down to just a couple of bucks over top the price of the cases. And after a couple of weeks of waiting for the order to ship and for FedEx Ground Service to deliver it, the Dr. Zevia had finally arrived.

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As some of my readers may recall, a few weeks ago I had a craving for some A&W food, and to my surprise discovered all the locations in San Diego County had closed up shop. (Click here to read about it if you missed it.) Since I was in Orange County for Robert Shadbolt’s birthday at Disneyland, I decided on the way home I was going to seek out one of the A&W’s on the way home from Disneyland. But I wasn’t really hungry and by the time I found the location in Mission Viejo with a slight diversion off the highway, it was a few minutes before they closed.

I didn’t really want food, so I elected to just get a Root Beer Float, except using the Diet Root Beer instead of the regular. Officially even those are a no-no items on my Belly Fat Cure program, because the ice cream has sugar in it, and the Diet Root Beer has aspartame in it. But as a Dr. Edward Taub frequently states, “Everything in moderation….including moderation.” And so I had a small Root Beer Float with two bad ingredients. On the Belly Fat Cure, I’m not supposed to have a meal that exceeds 5 grams of sugar and 2 carb servings or a 5/2. The Diet Root Beer Float was a 17/2, which is okay on the carb end, but 2 more grams of sugar than I’m supposed to have in a whole day. Still far better than the 57/4 getting the regular root beer version would have been. So I cheated on my program a little.

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Following the great day at Disneyland to celebrate my friend Robert Shadbolt’s birthday, our group decided on dinner at Anaheim’s Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant. The chain of Bubba Gump restaurants takes it’s name and inspiration from the 1994 Forrest Gump film originally directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks in the title role. As a themed restaurant, Bubba Gump offers a seafood dining menu in addition to a themed gift shop and effectively offering a unique way to keep the spirit of Forrest Gump alive and well in the mind of consumers long after the original theatrical run of the film.

According to the press kit, Paramount Pictures originally approached Rusty Pelican Restaurants, Inc. about extending the brand of Forrest Gump into the realm of casual family dining. And by 1996, the very first Bubba Gump Shrimp Company themed restaurant opened it’s doors in Montery, California. The company specifically targets tourist destinations for their restaurants, such as the Anaheim location which is a couple of blocks away from Disneyland, and other locations including Universal’s City Walk in both Hollywood and Orlando, Times Square in New York, Pier 39 in San Francisco, and the Mall of America in Minnesota. Bubba Gump is Paramount’s most successful foray into themed restaurant licensing, but wasn’t the first.

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