http://www.thealternativedaily.com/

[…]

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

Let’s say goodbye to comparisons and forget about not feeling enough. This year, let yourself off the hook: Here’s your permission slip to not feel guilty about these things this holiday season.

From Apartment Therapy → Let Yourself Off the Hook: Things You Shouldn’t Feel Guilty About This Holiday Season

READ MORE »

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

You’re standing in the checkout aisle of the grocery store and have to choose the healthiest item between a package of Pop-Tarts and a Kind bar. Chances are you go with the fruit- and nut-filled bar. Ask that question of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and you’d get a different answer.

READ MORE »

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

For seven years we’ve been building a Rebellion.

We started in our small corner of the internet, quietly exchanging messages, trying to figure out how to get healthy on our own.

In this humble HQ, our Rebels began to stir. Our forces grew. A Rebel Army formed.

Now, everything is about to change. And yes, obviously I’m partly talking about the impending release of the new Star Wars film.

But maybe more importantly (gasp), the Rebellion’s time to strike has come. Our team has been furiously working behind the scenes to prepare a multi-stage battle plan to strike at the heart of the Empire.

And I need your help.

The Big Announcement: The First Nerd Fitness Book

Team Nerd Fitness has been working in secret on a plan for world domination – to spread the message of the Rebellion far and wide and help those living unfulfilled, unhealthy lives find their path again.

What’s phase one of this battle plan? It’s a book (a real one!), called Level Up Your Life. 

So what’s the book about? Simple: It’s a strategy guide for life that teaches you, step-by-step, how to turn yourself into a real-life superhero. I wanted to quash the conventional wisdom that says fulfilling lives full of adventure are only for the superheroes in movies and video games.

So, our first strike into Empire territory will start here: giving people a chance to follow a blueprint and become the hero of their own story. The book draws on real-life stories from our community here, and will be available in bookstores nationwide and online on January 12th, 2016. Hopefully, by the end of this post I will have convinced you help me spread this message (no Jedi mind tricks needed), to pre-order this sucker, and maybe even recruit a friend to join your cause.

I’m not going to lie, I’m really freaking proud of this book. It’s the culmination of the last eight years of my life, and I poured everything I have into it while writing it behind the scenes for the past two years.

It’s an instruction manual for people who are skeptical of the personal development and self-help industry. All tactics in the book are backed by behavioral psychology, research, and studies (of course, with a healthy dose of video game lore, nerd culture, and my corny sense of humor).

Regardless of whether you’re young or old, single or married, kids or no kids, in shape or out of shape, this book provides a framework to build a life of goals and achievements that make you happy and help others.

The whole book is framed around the concept of the Hero’s Journey – the idea that every great story in history (from King Arthur up through Star Wars and Harry Potter and The Hunger Games) follows a specific path:

A person of humble beginnings:

• receives a call to action
• finds a mentor
• enters an extraordinary land
• recruits allies
• defeats enemies
• finds the treasure/rescues somebody
• returns home a changed person

The way I see it, this book is the call to action to help you start your own Hero’s Journey. Which is great, because that means I get to be your mentor. In addition to helping you use your favorite games, books, and movies as inspiration and motivation instead of just an escape, it also helps you gamify your life.

For the past year, we’ve been secretly developing an online framework that allows you to create your Nerd Fitness Avatar. From picking your class (warrior? monk?) to writing your origin story, and even crafting your own Epic Quest list of missions to complete (with experience point values and all), I can’t wait to share this feature with you guys.

This is something that will be available to all members of the Rebellion starting in 2016, but it ties very heavily into the book too. I’m pretty excited to see how this impacts lives and helps people start to build their own story.

Book News Bonanza!

We need your help! And we’re willing to bribe you!

If you head on over LevelUpYourLife.com RIGHT NOW, you’ll be able to:

• Check out a sneak peek of the first chapter of the book.
• Learn about all the awesome bonuses (loot) you get for pre-ordering one or more copies!
• Learn about the Rebellion Book Tour in early 2016.

Life is a multiplayer game, and if you’re ready to start making changes, I would encourage you to start building your team of people to level up with you. Which is why I’m bribing you to pre-order the book and maybe even buy multiple copies. I would have gone with flattery over bribery, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do that virtually.

Not that you would fall for that anyways; you’re too smart. And also ridiculously good looking. And funny. And good looking.

So, whether you’re buying a copy or multiple copies to share with close friends, picking up copies to give to coworkers or your students, or just looking to support the Rebellion and planning on DONATING the books to hospitals, schools, libraries or prisons… whatever you’re doing and for whatever reason you’re doing it, thank you.

The Next Big Steps for Nerd Fitness

2016 is going to be a big year for The Rebellion, my dear Rebel friend.

In seven years we have come a long way, and I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished as a community. The scary part (for the Empire) is that we have only scratched the surface, and we’re just getting started! 2016 is the year Nerd Fitness strikes back.

Below is just a small sample of what we have in store for The Rebellion, almost all of which will be completely free for anybody in the community:

• Your Nerd Fitness Avatar: Finally! After dreaming about it nightly for the past seven years, you’ll finally be able to create a Nerd Fitness Character and start leveling up your life, literally. From crafting your origin story to selecting your class (complete with epic artwork), we’re building the basic foundation on which we expect to expand greatly. This will be available once the book launches.
• Build your own epic quest list! We’ve added functionality to the character creation process that allows you to create categories, craft missions, and add experience point values to them so that you can start to gamify your fitness, travel, work, and more.
• More quest lines, badges, and more. We’ll be adding a kickass badge/achievement system to your NF Avatar in early 2016. When you complete certain tasks, pass certain milestones, or even attend certain events, you’ll be able to earn special achievements and badges to display proudly on your public character page. We’re also going to be expanding parts of the quest line feature currently available only in the NF Academy. We’ll be bringing some of the basic functionality to ALL free accounts on Nerd Fitness!
• More in-person events. We’re starting with six Rebel Meetups to promote Level Up Your Life, we have Camp Nerd Fitness in September 2016, and we’re going to look for more ways and opportunities for Rebels throughout the world to get together with each other. Stay tuned for more news on ways you can be a part of Rebel meetups!

These are just the things I can reveal now, but it’s quite exciting, isn’t it? At this rate, I assume we’ll have reached our goal of complete world domination by 2017 and will be taking our Rebellion intergalactic by 2018.

Party on Endor?

Your Mission, If you Choose to Accept it

For the next month, I’m going to be doing everything in my power to get this book into as many hands and in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Thanks in advance for putting up with my excitement about this book I’m like a kid at Christmas and I can’t really contain myself.

Now, there are three major ways you can help if you’re up for it:

1) Pre-order the book (or multiple copies). I don’t normally ask you to spend your hard-earned money, but today I am. I know this book will help you live a better life, and it’s finally something you can hold and share when people ask “What is this Nerd Fitness thing you do?”

I’m not gonna lie, I have another goal with getting you to preorder. The more pre-orders we have, the more copies of the book the publisher will print, the more the book stores will buy, the better placement it can get on shelves and tables, the more likely it will be to impact somebody’s life.

If you plan on grabbing a copy (or copies) of the book, it would make my day if you took the time to pre-order it as soon as possible. Today would be nice, but by the end of the week works too. We’ve created some really fun bonuses to thank those who preorder the book too, including special badges and recognition for those who buy 10+ copies to share.

Mostly, I just want it to have the best chance possible to impact as many lives as possible!

2) Spread the word: Send an email to three friends with a link to LevelUpYourLife.com! I’ve had many instances where purchasing a book has altered the path of my life, and I’m hoping my book can be the “call to action” for people to rethink how they attack each day too. If you know somebody this book or this community would be perfect for, please share with them, buy them a copy as a gift for a birthday or holiday (we even have a fun document you can print out to put under the tree!), give them out to random strangers on the street (which is what I plan on doing).

3) Help promote Level Up Your Life to your network. Do you run a podcast or blog? Do you know somebody who does? It can be health, finance, travel, fitness, gaming, personal development or anything in between. I’m trying to do as many interviews as possible to spread the word, and I’d love to speak to you about the book if we can make it work!

Email us at media@nerdfitness.com with some basic info about your site/podcast, etc:

• Number of listeners or site visitors.
• A link to your site and/or podcast.
• Why I would be a good fit for your audience!

I don’t know if I’ll be able to do them all, but I’ll do as many as humanly possible!

Do you work in media? Does your father’s uncle’s brother’s niece’s former roommate work at IGN or The Today Show? Is your brother’s cousin Wil Wheaton? Does your sister’s friend’s boss play D&D with Chris Hardwick? If so, I’d love to try and make a connection!

4) Participate in our 3-week “Join the Rebellion” video contest! We want to make sure we’re heading into battle to face the Empire’s forces with every Rebel on our side as possible. That’s why we’re launching a recruitment campaign, starting with a video contest. You can view more details here, but here’s the short of it:

Create a video with two big things. First:

• Why you think others should join the Rebellion; and/or
• One way the Rebellion/NF philosophy has impacted you; and/or
• Your favorite thing about the Rebellion

Second, in the spirit of Level Up Your Life, and setting ourselves up for an epic next year, let us know about two things on your epic quest list that you WILL achieve in 2016. This could be as simple as going into a gym for the first time, completing a mile or three mile run, or a new adventure in a foreign country. “Epic” means whatever it means to you.

PRIZES:

• The first place winner will win free membership to either the Academy or Nerd Fitness Yoga. In addition to a that, they will win a video game of their choice (up to $60).
• Second and third place winners will receive a video game of their choice and a personalized, hand-drawn caricature from Steve.
• The next three people will win a personalized hand-drawn caricature from Steve.

Enter the contest by recording a video and uploading it however you want (YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc.). Paste the link into this google form. Winners will be chosen randomly. You can get an additional entry by posting on social media with the hashtag #jointherebellion. (Details in form.)

Finally, I wanted to say thanks and give you a high five. Seriously. Regardless of whether or not you buy Level Up Your Life, thank you for being part of Nerd Fitness. This site is nothing without its community members, and I’m so proud to be a small part of it. 2016 is the year we strike back, so thank you for everything you do to live the Rules of the Rebellion and level up your life.

Over the next month I’ll be sharing bits and pieces of the book here and there, teaching you how to level up your life, and telling stories about how we can all live like superheroes.

Remember to check out the first chapter, book tour information, and all of the pre-order bonuses you can claim over at LevelUpYourLife.com.

-Steve

###

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Vegetable Jambalaya

Pin it

Tell me if this sounds familiar: I went grocery shopping yesterday and came home with a stash of candy for stocking stuffers, frozen appetizers, cold cereal, and a lone jar of pasta sauce. My meal-planning and shopping habits are shot to bits, clearly, disarranged by the press of the holidays. Hanukkah is behind us, and Christmas is ahead; and in the midst of parties, end-of-year work deadlines, and travel, normal healthy cooking can fly right out the window.

So what do you do and how do you cook during the holidays? I don’t mean cookies and fruitcake; how do you nourish yourself and your family? What are your go-to weeknight meals for these nights at home, before and after festivities? Do share — we’ll round up all your good ideas later this week!

READ MORE »

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

Open Slideshow

Dinner party plans stressing you out? Puff pastry cheese straws are here for you. These crispy, flaky, cheesy twists require just two ingredients and a few minutes of your time, and yet they deliver big — real big — out on the buffet table.

READ MORE »

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

Open Slideshow

Christmas morning is always a feast for the senses. The smell of the tree, the hum of holiday music, and now, the rich and welcoming smell of a fresh-out-of-the-oven casserole.

From an updated ham and cheese casserole — filled with fluffy eggs, pancetta, and Gruyére cheese — to a sweeter take, like lemon-scented baked French toast — here are 20 breakfast casseroles to make and serve at this year’s Christmas brunch.

READ MORE »

http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Pin it

This recipe makes a crinkle cookie just like the ones I spent my childhood baking and eating. They’re soft, tender, and just a little bit chewy, with a delicate exterior that’s coated with a thick layer of powdered sugar.

READ MORE »

http://chriskresser.com/

This post is sponsored by the Paleo Recipe Generator, which features over 700 Paleo recipes personalized to meet your unique needs.

Type of dish: breakfast, lunch
Servings: 4
Equipment: medium sized, nonreactive pot, large heavy skillet

Ingredients:

Directions:

For more recipes like this, and meal plans that can be customized just for you, check out the Paleo Recipe Generator.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

Throughout the years, I’ve rolled out several recipes for Primal Energy Bars on Mark’s Daily Apple—do-it-yourself treats packed with energy, protein, and healthy deliciousness. I want to thank you for experimenting with me, because it’s brought us to TODAY…the official launch of my latest PRIMAL KITCHEN™ creation—Dark Chocolate Almond Bars.

They are everything you’d expect in a bar that bears the Primal name. And they boast 15 grams of protein, just 3 grams of sugar and 8 grams of net carbs per bar, and 170 milligrams of potassium. Those are some impressive stats if I do say so myself!

The Taste: I don’t go for the sickly sweet bars that are really just Snickers disguised in a “healthier” package, but I did like the idea of combining nutty crunch with decadent rich chocolate and chewy caramel. So, I whipped together dark chocolate, Turkish almonds, roasted pumpkin seeds, a caramel coating, and a touch of coconut for a subtly sweet but totally satisfying taste.

The Ingredients: Like all PRIMAL KITCHEN™ products, you can rest assured there are no artificial ingredients in my Dark Chocolate Almond Bars. Just: Almonds, Roasted Pumpkin Seeds, Grass-Fed Collagen, Isomalto-Oligosaccharides (Cassava Root), Water, Coconut Flakes, Honey, Natural Flavors, Coconut Oil, Bitter Chocolate, Cocoa Powder, Himalayan Pink Salt, Monk Fruit Extract, Tocopherols (Vitamin E).

Let’s break that down in terms of nutritional benefit.

Grass-fed Collagen: The ancestral diet was loaded with collagen protein. Primal humans ate the odd bits and tougher cuts of beef that made up the connective tissue of animals, but nowadays, these parts of the meat get thrown away…because who wants to eat tendons and skin raw? Well, some of you hard-core Groks maybe…but, we can cook them.

PRIMAL KITCHEN™ protein bars are made with grass-fed collagen protein from bovines pasture-raised in Brazil. This type of grass-fed collagen has been shown to help reduce joint pain, improve sleep quality, support skin, hair and nail growth, and enhance digestion.

The grass-fed collagen protein that’s in my protein bars is packed with glycine, and studies have shown that glycine can counteract the effects of methionine. Why do we care? Because animal foods like muscle meat, eggs and dairy get a bad rap because they’re high in the amino acid methionine, which animal trials have shown can decrease life span. With as much collagen per bar as in a cup of bone broth, now we Groks can enjoy all the benefits of a protein-rich diet.

Inulin: Primal Kitchen’s Dark Chocolate Almond Bars are a terrific source of fiber in the form of inulin. Inulin is a prebiotic fiber that feeds the trillions of foreign cells in our digestive tracts. In other words, it’s food for your gut flora, and trust me, you want your gut flora fed and happy! Your gut microbiome controls factors into nearly every aspect of your health—your digestive, cognitive, emotional, psychological, immune, metabolic and liver health.

Inulin is also being studied as a possible weight loss aid. Eating prebiotic fiber in the form of inulin helps you feel fuller, faster—so you don’t go overboard on calories—and it won’t spike your blood-sugar levels. Preliminary research supports inulin’s effectiveness as an appetite suppressant.

Monk Fruit: Also called Luo Han Goa, monk fruit is a Chinese herb cultivated for centuries by Buddhist Luohan monks. Much like stevia, it’s a delicious and natural sweetener without all the calories of sugar.

Nuts: We’ve added calcium-rich almonds, and pumpkin seeds, a terrific source of omega-3 fatty acids, carotenoids, magnesium, and zinc.

Paleo Plus: My Dark Chocolate Almond Bars are paleo approved, and gluten, grain, dairy and soy free!

I’m sure you’ll want to be on of the first in the community to taste these bars. Order today and you’ll receive FREE domestic shipping from PrimalBlueprint.com. Or, if you prefer, you can order PRIMAL KITCHEN™ Dark Chocolate Almond Bars from Thrive Market.

I hope you enjoy my bars as much as I do. They’re a hit at the office and my family is loving them. Please let me know what you think in the comments below.