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From Apartment Therapy → If You’ve Always Wondered Why Anthropologie Smells So Good, It’s Because of This Candle

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Welcome to a column from The Financial Diet, one of our very favorite sites, dedicated to money and everything it touches. One of the best ways to take charge of your financial life is through food and cooking. This column from TFD founders Chelsea Fagan and Lauren Ver Hage will help you be better with money, thanks to the kitchen.

When’s the last time you really thought about what you spend on food? Maybe you wing it and just buy everything that’s on sale that week. Or maybe you set a grocery budget years ago, but haven’t adjusted it, despite the fact that your life has changed drastically. Or maybe you don’t even remember the last time you made a grocery list.

Food spending obviously varies; a particularly enthusiastic home cook may prioritize expensive meats, while someone who sees food as nothing more than a necessity may be fine subsisting on beans and rice. With all of our different lifestyles, diets, and interests, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to food budgeting.

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Autumn is a time of harvest and gathering to celebrate the cornucopia of America’s bounty. Despite this, vegetarian mains on the Thanksgiving table are usually a sad substitute for the classic roast turkey. This year choose to embrace the variety of textures, flavors, and colors found at the fall farmers market by preparing a vegetarian stuffed pumpkin, impressive enough to intrigue the entire table. Build the stuffing with hearty greens, earthy mushrooms, savory herbs, toothsome cornbread, and nutty Gruyère cheese, and then bake it inside a fairytale pumpkin for a stunning holiday centerpiece.

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Are you looking for an additional 20 to 30 percent off discount from Whole Foods Market? Well, you’re in luck because the company has recently announced they’re hiring for 6,000 new jobs nationwide. There are seasonal, part-time, and full-time positions available around the country.

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When my nerves are shot, my anxiety is at a fever pitch, or I’m just generally stuck in a quagmire of existential malaise, I go to my kitchen. Routine cooking almost always helps me feel better. It helps my brain stop spinning and forces me to slow down, even for just the short time it takes to chop an onion. At the very least, it separates me from a screen for a while. (The built-in aromatherapy is helpful, too.)

But when I really feel like life is out of control, I’ll spend an entire evening or a Sunday afternoon up to my elbows in an immersive, labor-intensive and time-consuming “project recipe” that requires my attention, my patience, and maybe a little bit of my creativity, too.

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For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering 5 questions from readers. First, are there differential mortality effects of mortality on men and women? What role do social networks play? Second, is ketosis muscle-sparing? Yes, and here’s why. Third, which of the recipes in Keto Reset can be made ahead of time and frozen? We’ve got some busy parents here, after all. For the fourth question, I clarify my stance on net carbs and whether or not to count vegetables. And last, I explain how is is not necessarily ought.

Let’s go:

Sheila asked:

I noticed that the retirement paragraph was about men. I’m betting that women do better in retirement than men. Perhaps because women often have a better social network??

Great question. Turns out that you’re right—women suffer no hits to mortality with early retirement, whereas men do.

In one study of blue collar workers, each additional year of early retirement increased the risk of early death by 2.4 points in men. Women were unaffected.

You may also be correct about the effects of social networks in retirement. One study tracked a group of retirees with two social group memberships for 6 years. Those who retained both group memberships had a 2% chance of dying. Those who retained one group membership had a 5% chance of dying. Those who lost both group memberships had a 12% chance of dying.

I don’t have any research to cite, but from my extensive dealings with that segment of the population, I’d wager a guess that women are better at maintaining social networks. Just a hunch.

Pcskier followed up from last week:

So there is less risk of accessing lean tissue for energy when in a ketogenic state, since the body is ‘better’ at accessing fat stores and that becomes preferential to accessing muscle stores….?

Precisely. Ketosis evolved as a way to counter lean mass degradation during lean times. Lean mass—muscle, bone, connective tissue, organ—is essential for physiological function, resource acquisition, and general robustness. If the first thing your body starts to do after a half day without food is break down your muscles to convert into glucose, you won’t last very long and you won’t be very good at acquiring food.

Ketosis provides an alternative fuel to glucose. You’ll still need and make glucose, mainly for brain function, but the amount required is much lower than normal. A lower glucose demand means you can get by without eating so much and your body won’t be compelled to break down lean tissue to make it.

Meghan Shaw asked:

Hi Mark, First time caller, long time listener. Just finished reading Keto Reset. As a mom with two young kids I’m going to need to prepare a lot of stuff for the first 21 days in advance. Do you know how well the recipes in the book do if frozen after they are prepared?

Most of the main courses are very amenable to freezing. Many of the snacks and sauces and dressings, if not freezable, can be made ahead of time and stored for days to weeks.

The breakfasts and salads won’t freeze very well, but I don’t think most people expect foods from those categories to freeze well.

We’ll be offering a post in the coming weeks on making recipes freezer-friendly, so be on the lookout for that.

Finally, just curious as to how young? Kids as young as 2 or 3 can “help” around the house. You won’t want them wielding knives or flipping omelets, and they’ll probably make a bigger mess than you would otherwise, and it’s very likely that they’ll slow you down, but at least it keeps them occupied and participating, rather than screaming at you from another room to read the same book for the twentieth time. Get your kids involved in kitchen work as soon as possible.

April Lachlan asks:

The book mentions not counting some carbs such as those in leafy vegetables – do you have a list of items not to count – or is it just lettuce and kale? The book also advises to count all carbs and not calculate net carbs – but other info on primal blueprint mentions net carbs. I’m just looking for a bit of clarity on both of these points please.

Here’s how I see it.

Above-ground vegetables: ignore. They don’t count toward carb counts. You’re not carb loading with broccoli, nor will it knock you out of ketosis.

These include but aren’t limited to:

• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Kale
• Chard
• Brussels sprouts
• Broccoli
• Broccoli leaves
• Beet greens
• Tomatoes
• Cucumbers
• Zucchini and other summer squash
• Olives
• Leeks
• Green beans
• Mushrooms
• Peppers
• Scallions
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage

For other carb-containing foods, like fruits, starchy vegetables, winter squash, count the total carbs rather than net. Fiber’s great. Fiber doesn’t become glucose. This is all true. Still: count total carbs.

Do I think net carbs is a bogus concept? No. My aim is just to simplify things as much as possible. Having to count non-starchy vegetables and then also having to subtracting fiber from carbs every time you eat some butternut squash are unnecessary complications.

So I’m a liitle confused…, should we eat carbs within 2 hours after training or When Hunger Ensues Naturally (WHEN)?

If you’re trying to use dietary carbs to refill muscle glycogen, and you want to do so as efficiently as possible, eating them within 2 hours after training maximizes glycogen synthesis.

I’m not saying you should do it one way or the other. I was just explaining why some people might find it advantageous to eat carbs shortly after hard workouts. Physiologically, your body’s just better at turning those carbs into muscle glycogen in that time frame—and that means they don’t impact your ketogenic state.

Glycogen debt, once accrued, remains. You can pay it back at any time. There are just certain times and contexts where the payment goes through more quickly.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and leave a comment or question down below!

The post Dear Mark: Gender and Retirement Mortality, Muscle-Sparing Keto, Freezing Keto Recipes, Net Carbs, and Carb Timing appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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Store-brand products aren’t usually something to get excited about. They’re cheap and … that’s about it. But Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand of products are a bargain-hunter’s dream because they are not only economical, but also often top-of-the-line.

Now, not every Kirkland product hits it out of the park (Charmin still beats Kirkland toilet paper by a mile), but there’s a baker’s dozen of food products with Costco’s store label that often rank at the top of experts’ lists — and our list too.

Here are our picks for the best Kirkland label products. Don’t have a Costco membership? You can actually find some of this stuff on Amazon or Jet.com, but you may need to spend a few dollars more.

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For the first 31 years of my life, I thought turkeys were like toothbrushes, pens, and matches — just things you got for free. Dentists hand out toothbrushes like they’re candy (hehe!), hotels leave out pens for the taking, restaurants practically beg you to take matches on your way out the door, and turkeys, well, my mom had never paid a dime for any of our Thanksgiving turkeys.

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My husband and I have always loved hosting Thanksgiving. Even when we were in a teeny-tiny apartment that did not technically have a dining room, we were happy to jam in our family and friends and crowd around the table in (what we thought was) a convivial, Bohemian way. One year we didn’t have enough chairs so we used a love seat as a bench, which semi-effective. (Except only the tallest guests could sit there, and it was so comfy my brother-in-law fell asleep during dessert!)

Which leads me to the one thing all Thanksgiving hosts should check right now: How many chairs you have!

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If you have a tiny kitchen, you’re probably always looking for storage solutions that help free up your limited countertop space. That said, any storage solution you come up with still needs to provide easy access to often-used items like your toaster, your coffee machine, and, yes, even paper towels.

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