http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
We’ve all been there — we make a silly mistake in the kitchen that ruins a dish, or makes it less than dinner-party perfect. Luckily there are several common mistakes you can avoid if you just know what they are.
Here are the top mistakes to avoid when making everything from hard-boiled eggs and pork chops to brownies and burgers.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Family-style dining is one of my favorite ways to share a meal with people. It’s the ultimate ice-breaker. Once someone makes the leap and digs in first, the meal — whether comprised of family, friends, or soon-to-be friends — is instantly invigorated with a sense of sharing and conviviality.
And then there are the meals when you just want the food that’s on your plate. Baked potatoes, by their very nature, get you there. The fluffy potato, wrapped up in a jacket of crisp potato skin, is both filling and vessel. When you think of it that way, what you dream up to put in it runs the gamut from butter, salt, and pepper to this deceptively easy dish of baked potato shakshuka.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
During the holidays we talk a lot about making cookies and care packages for our human friends and family, but what about those of the canine variety? This year we decided to invite a few of our favorite Instagram-famous dogs – Toast, Muppet, and Pants – to our Studio Kitchn to help us make homemade treats.
Prepare yourself for the most adorable thing to happen in the kitchen this year.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
You’ve got to hand it to the skillet — it’s probably the most overworked, under-appreciated tool in the kitchen. It takes us from crowd-pleasing brunch recipes like chipotle chilaquiles to a dessert of cookie butter-swirled brownies without missing a beat. It goes from the oven to stove to tabletop without complaint, and it’s usually a breeze to clean.
Cast iron, stainless steel, and even nonstick — here are 10 times we were thankful for our skillets this past year.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Up until recently, I just assumed “the art of sandwich making” was better left to the professionals. I don’t mean the basics — like ham and cheese on white or a PB&J — but the more ornate ones, like French dips, Cubans, and spicy Italians. I guess I figured that perhaps a deli had access to top-secret restaurant ingredients, or at the very least better-quality meats and toppings.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
The popular story of how low-carb diets work goes something like this:
Reducing your carbohydrate intake lowers your insulin levels. Since insulin keeps fat locked into adipose tissue, lowering insulin can increase the amount of fat released to be burned for energy.
For the portion of the overweight/obese population with insulin resistance and chronically-elevated insulin levels, this is a fairly accurate description of why low-carb diets work so well. When you’re an insulin-resistant hyper responder in whom even a baked potato can cause elevated, protracted spikes in insulin that hamper fat-burning for long periods of time, or a person living under the backdrop of perpetually-elevated insulin, dropping the most insulinogenic foods can be your way out of obesity.
But that doesn’t explain everyone’s positive experience with low-carb diets. There are many other mechanisms by which low-carb diets exert their beneficial effects on bodyweight and body composition. Let’s take a look:
Increasing protein intake has many beneficial effects on health, particularly if you’re attempting to lose weight. Of all the macronutrients, protein increases satiation the most. This means a low-carb diet replete in protein can help control your appetite naturally. I wouldn’t say “effortlessly,” because deciding to eat more meat and fewer carbs technically requires executive functioning. But you’re no longer fighting your own body’s physiological desire for more food. You just don’t want anymore.
More protein also helps you retain, or even gain, lean mass during weight loss. Why does this matter? Because nobody’s trying to lose muscle, bone, or connective tissue when they lose weight. They want to lose body fat and keep or add muscle. Studies show that more protein in the diet consistently leads to greater retention of lean mass and more preferential burning of body fat during weight loss. For instance in weightlifters, a low-carb hypocaloric diet with 2x the RDA for protein resulted in greater nitrogen balance than a high-carb hypocaloric diet with RDA protein. In women, a low-calorie, high-protein diet was better than a conventional high-carb, low-fat diet at promoting lean mass retention, even in the absence of exercise. This increased lean mass also contributes to a greater resting energy expenditure, helping you burn more calories simply through daily existence.
Protein also has the highest thermic effect of all the macronutrients, meaning it takes the most calories to digest and further increases your energy expenditure.
Fat in a meal slows gastric emptying, especially when fewer carbs are eaten. When your food takes longer to pass through your gut, you stay fuller longer. When you’re full, you’re not interested in eating. When you’re not interested in eating, your calorie intake spontaneously drops. When you calorie intake spontaneously drops, you tend to lose weight.
In and of itself sugar isn’t “toxic.” It’s just pure energy absent any real micronutrition, and as long as you’re highly active and regularly clearing space in your glycogen stores for incoming glucose and fructose, a moderate amount is mostly harmless. Heck, I have a teaspoon in my coffee every day. In energy-replete humans—which is a significant portion of the population—excess sugar becomes deleterious. If the liver is full of glycogen, any fructose arriving there is converted to fat and contributes toward fatty liver or elevated blood lipids. If fatty liver progresses unchecked, this has terrible consequences for a person’s metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance, and waistline.
Because sugar is the most obvious carb to remove from one’s diet, low-carb diets reduce sugar by default and minimize the possibility of fructose-induced metabolic dysfunction.
Glycogen is how we store sugar in the body, and our capacity is limited. Larger muscles can store more glycogen, but the average person can count on being able to store about 400 grams of carbs between skeletal muscle and liver glycogen. Walking around with your glycogen stores perpetually topped off means there’s nowhere for excess carbohydrate to go. You either burn it immediately or convert it into fat for storage in the liver.
Carb reduction drastically reduces glycogen. That’s part of the reason we initially lose so much water weight on low-carb diets; water always accompanies glycogen. Glycogen depletion is the “switch” for the brain and body to begin utilizing fat for energy. Given access to fast and easy glycogen, it’ll choose to burn that first. Take it away through glycogen depletion (via training, low-carb, or some combo of the two) and you have no choice but to feast on your own adipose tissue.
Everyone knows what “carbs” are. Potatoes, pasta, bread, soda, sweets, that sort of thing. It’s not hard to figure out. And it’s really hard to “hide” carbs like you can hide fat. Either the food is obviously starchy or obviously sweet, and you know to avoid it.
Low-carb is delicious. Eating steak, steamed broccoli with butter, and sautéed mushrooms doesn’t feel like dieting. It feels like cheating. Meanwhile, Weight Watchers, ultra-low fat diets, macrobiotic vegan diets—these are diets in the worst sense of the word. And you’ll never forget it when you’re on one.
You can certainly dig deeper into the minutiae, but the basic advice—eat fewer carbs, stop drinking soda, and pass on the donuts—gets most people most of the way.
Severely overweight person drops carbs, increases fat/protein, and quickly loses ten pounds in the first week. It’s a common occurrence. I’ve seen it happen, and it almost always turns the weight-loss recipient into a believer who adheres to the diet for the long haul. It doesn’t hurt that much of the early low-carb fat loss comes off the belly (the most conspicuous place for adipose tissue).
Like the best exercise regimen, the best diet is the one you’ll stick to—the one you’re excited about. Diets seem to fail so much in the literature because people can’t or won’t adhere to them. But those big early victories on the scale—even if it’s “just” water weight—and along the waistline motivate dieters to keep carbs down and keep losing body fat.
When you go low-carb, you ask for salad instead of the dinner roll. You load up on sautéed spinach instead of French fries. You eat kale chips instead of potato chips. These subtle alterations don’t just reduce the amount of carbs and calories you eat. They increase the density of micronutrients and phytochemicals you consume, many of which have favorable metabolic effects. There’s also evidence that increasing the micronutrient density of your diet can improve weight loss.
The most self-perpetuating macronutrient combo, the one you can’t stop eating, is fat plus carbs. Cheesecake? Tons of fat and tons of sugar. Potato chips? Fat and starch. Reducing carbs takes this combo out of the equation entirely. It’s much harder to overeat fat without carbs. And even if they mistakenly refer to high-fat-and-carb foods like chips and donuts as “carbs,” it doesn’t matter. They’re still eliminating the problematic foods that are the most obesogenic. A huge plate of fettucine alfredo probably has as much fat as carbohydrate, but “avoiding carbs” avoids the pasta just as well as “avoiding large boluses of carbs and fat in the same meal.”
Some would say that you could just as easily remove fat to make carbs less addictive. That’s true (although I’m not sure how “easily” that’s accomplished). But we’re talking about why low-carb diets work today.
That’s what I’ve got today. What about you guys? Why do low-carb diets work so well in your opinion?
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Much of what goes on in your kitchen is actually more science than art. From baking to braising, knowing the why behind the technique can help you be more confident in the kitchen. Here are a few lessons we learned this year that will help you be a more confident and informed cook.
Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss
Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….”
Every time those words pop up on a screen, my spine tingles. Excitement swells in me as the text fades to a starlit sky.
That fraction of a second before the horns blare the Star Wars theme… my heart skips a beat.
And then it happens.
Trumpets blare and I’m instantly transported to another galaxy.
Any time I watched Star Wars as a kid, it was like hitting the pause button. The homework I had due or the big Little League game I lost disappeared. The complexities of junior high (and figuring out how to navigate awkward hormones) took a back seat. The acne and braces stopped feeling so overwhelming.
This past weekend, I was one of the millions who saw the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, and life paused again. I was giddy through the entire movie. Several scenes filled my arms with goosebumps and I’m not afraid to admit I even teared up once or twice. Sitting there watching at 31 years old, I felt five again sitting on my living room floor. For a brief moment, nothing else mattered. I was on an adventure in galaxy far, far away.
Here’s the thing, though: my relationship with Star Wars is more than just a boyish crush. This saga has helped shape and mold the person I am today. It’s made me a better person.
Today I want to share this magic with you.
In my research for my book Level Up Your Life, I stumbled across something that is now tattooed on the wall in my brain.
In the book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, the #1 regret voiced by those on their deathbeds, having the ability to look back at what they had done or not done in their lives, is that they wished they’d had the courage to live lives true to themselves, as opposed to the lives others expected of them.
Let that sink in for a moment.
These are not philosophical or hypothetical ponderings, but rather real-life reflections from people who know they’re down to their last quarter in the arcade, so to speak. These people didn’t live the lives they wanted to live; they felt a call to adventure or a call to a path that challenged and fulfilled them, and yet refused the call because they didn’t want to ruffle any feathers or were scared of what that path might reveal. They were the Lukes who never left home.
They chose the easy, safe, non-conflicting path; a life that others expected them to live, and they would give anything now for an extra life to try again and take the more adventurous route.
Until we develop time machines, older folks at the end of their lives will never have the luxury of trying again, but you can certainly learn from the wisdom of their words.
Start with this: stop thinking of what others want for you, and instead start asking what you want for yourself.
Regardless of where you are now, you have a choice. No matter how old you are, or far down a path you think you might be, you can always turn back or change course.
Whether or not you realize it, YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE:
Remember, Luke was initially considered too old to be trained as a Jedi according to Master Yoda.
Han Solo bailed on the Rebel Alliance before coming back to save Luke on his trench run.
Vader’s redemption at the end of The Return of the Jedi was only possible because he realized no matter how far down a path he had gone, he could change.
You might be overweight and in a job you hate and a relationship that sucks, simply because you’re worried that this is the best it’s going to get. Or that you should be thankful in this economy.
Choose to take care of yourself and live the life you feel you deserve. And you deserve better. I promise you.
You might think you’re too old for adventure. That you’re too out of shape to ever do the things you want to do. That you’re too far down a career path to ever change, even though it stopped being fulfilling a decade ago.
Be honest with yourself. What’s the life you really want?
What’s the choice you need to make? Yep, there will be consequences either way, but you always have a choice.
Here at Nerd Fitness, we don’t sugar-coat things. In fact, we DEFINITELY try to avoid sugar-coated things. So here it is:
Fighting back against the Dark Side is tough. There are no quick fixes, fad diets (that actually work), or magic bullets.
Being a member of the Rebellion isn’t an easy path, but the journey and the adventure is worth every ounce of struggle you will put into overcoming your own Dark Side.
For you it may be years of bad habits holding you back. It may be an addiction. It may be an unfulfilling career, a failed or unhappy relationship, overdue bills, medication, or depression. Yours may be mental… physical… professional… or personal.
And the faces of the Dark Side are always evolving. The Sith, the Empire, the First Order… you may have several hurdles to overcome on your adventure. This is a marathon labyrinth, not a sprint.
If Han Solo taught me anything, it’s where ever you are now, how far down a certain path you might be, you can redeem yourself and find a way to succeed, just never listen to the odds.
Now, one of the key principles we help teach people is to think of what we call the “Very Next Step.”
If you would’ve pulled Luke from Tatooine and told him to duel Vader immediately, starting today… he would’ve been struck down in the first few seconds of the fight.
That’s why I’ve learned to ask myself, “Steve, if you want XXX result in the future… what’s the Very Next Step you can do today that will start you in that direction.”
For some that’s throwing out the junk food in their house. For others it’s researching gym options on their commute home from work. It may be just making it to your martial arts class tonight when you’ve had a hard day.
For many it’s making a list of the people who will make up your Rebel Alliance and have your back as you continue your journey.
Figure out your Very Next Step, because fighting the Dark Side is daunting and challenging. You can’t take the Empire on all at once.
Star Wars captured the hearts and minds of the world because it had the power to stir something inside of us – hope.
Hope that a young boy on a farm could change the fate of the galaxy. That a scoundrel like Han Solo could surprise us and save the day. That an evil monster like Darth Vader could sacrifice himself to right the wrongs and save his son.
There was this magic to Star Wars that made it something more than just an epic action movie – the Force brought out a sense of awe and wonder. An idea that we CAN be what we want, that we CAN change the fate of the world, that no matter what, there’s hope.
I remember feeling the magic as a kid. The flashlight next to my bed was a freaking lightsaber. The tall trees in my back yard? Endor!
This feeling, this Force, it was magical. Filled with this child-like sense of awe and wonder, it felt like my possibilities were endless.
Then life happens, and we all know what happens when we age. We lose that spark. Our imaginations dull. The energy and the optimism become muffled. By the time we reach adulthood, this mentality is sucked out of us with each passing day of living a life we aren’t proud of.
Enter the REAL power of the Force – to wake us the @%#$ up!
Are you passively living an unhappy, unhealthy, unfulfilling life? Does life feel like it’s one big routine?
Sometimes we need to be shaken – pulled from the Dark Side and shown another option… shown that there is always hope
That’s what Star Wars means to me, and what The Force Awakens means for the Rebellion.
The new year marks a change – it’s time for the Rebellion to strike back at the Empire. And I’m giddy with being able to share that with you the tactics and systems I’ve used to turn myself and other Rebels in the community into real life Jedi doing big things.
This is what I love more than anything: helping people get to where they want to go. My upcoming book, Level Up Your Life, digs into all of this in great detail and I can’t wait to share it with the world. I know it’s going to help a lot of people and give you a plan to follow to start improving your life immediately.
It’s just the beginning, and I’m stoked you are along with us for the ride.
With Christmas in a couple of days, I want to give away three free copies of Level Up Your LIfe.
Leave a comment answering the two questions below before the new year, and we’ll pick three winners at random and I’ll send them signed copies:
1) What’s your first Star Wars memory you can remember as a kid? Be as descriptive as possible.
2) What’s a choice you’ve been running from for years, and you will commit to re-examine and take action on in 2016?
May the force be with you!
-Steve
PS: Speaking of the book, we’re doing an EPIC mini adventure tour so I can meet as many members of this community as possible and we can have adventures TOGETHER. It starts in NYC at a Ninja Warrior training facility on January 12th, and I hope to see you there (or at the other 5 stops where we’re doing some other amazing activities!)
If you happened to have already pre-ordered the book, make sure you go to LevelUpYourLife.com to get your pre-order bonuses!
PPS: Members of the Holiday Watch, you better be holding your post!
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photo source: Kenny Louie: Luke, Dale Jackson: Poe, Martin Hajeck: Droids, leg0fenris: storm troopers
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
• $9.99 for three tins
• Amazon.com
What do food-lovers like to find tucked into their stocking on Christmas morning? You really can’t go wrong with these little tins of flaky salt, and since they’re easy to ship overnight, voila — last-minute stocking stuffers are yours.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
Book your class NOW!
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