http://www.thealternativedaily.com/
Gluten is always the bad guy. Even people without a diagnosis of gluten sensitivity or celiac disease find a gluten-free diet seems to be the cure-all for their gastrointestinal distress. But what if you aren’t allergic to gluten, but instead another carbohydrate — fructan? A new study indicates that more of us who believe we’re […]
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Even if you’re not that into watching sports, it’s nearly impossible to resist the thrill of watching the Olympics. And for these two weeks, while I’m glued to the screen watching world-class athletes do their thing, my meal plan is taking a bit of a detour. While watching the Olympics I plan to try my hand at some Korean-inspired recipes, whip up a few weeknight all-stars, and set out snacks made for sharing. Here are 10 recipes to get you inspired.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Food waste is something I think about a lot. I just hate throwing food away that has gone bad, whether it’s leftovers no one’s eaten or something that wilted before we got to it. Even when I look at the bits and bobs in my compost bin, I wonder if I shouldn’t be doing more with them.
Beyond just being wasteful, food waste can be a budget issue, too — if you’re throwing away food, you’re throwing away money that could have been better spent. So we reached out to our readers to hear their best tips for reducing food waste. Here are 11 of the best suggestions we got.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
It’s hard to imagine a feeling worse than watching someone you love suffer and not be able to help. When our cuddle-pup Truffle, a then-12-year-old fluffball Pomeranian, began slowing down early last year, my husband and I were worried, but attributed it to his age. Then he just stopped moving, period. My heart cracked in two the day I left him in the kitchen and came back 30 minutes later to find him in the same spot, sitting stock still.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
Last week’s Q&A about cultivating wildness was a lot of fun, but there were some questions I didn’t get to in the original post. Today, I’m going to answer some more. From stirring stories of a father and son pursuing and living their dream after experiencing extreme tragedy to how to go barefoot more safely to the balance between creativity, progress, and Primal values to accepting the reality (and beauty) of having work to do to the value of sun exposure in winter to circadian entrainment. In short, we’re covering a ton of ground today.
Let’s go:
First I’m going to include Jonno’s comment, even though it wasn’t a question, for reasons that become obvious once you read it:
Being thought of as a weirdo can be a mark of success. The last thing my wife said to me before she died of cancer was that our then infant son and I should live a free, fit, healthy and fun life, the opposite end of the scale to what society norms dictate and very different to our previous 10 years where we worked every hour to pay for things we didn’t need with which to impress the friends we didn’t have. Watching a loved one die young inspires you to do all in your power to learn how to live an optimum life. So my son and I moved to the other side of the world so that we could maximize our sunshine hours, surf lots in warm, clean water, walk and run barefoot on the beach every morning, sleep outside in fresh air all year and grow our own organic food. Keeping our overheads to a minimum means we don’t have to earn so much money and reduces stress – our living accommodation is very basic and pollutants are minimal. No sprays, no WIFI, no power lines. We home-school so learning is continuous, for both of us! No school means maximum surf time, freethinking, free imagination. Simple but not too simple: LCHF; Intermittent fasting; HIIT; Functional strength. Yes it’s a long and winding road with plenty of pitfalls and yes it takes courage and risks to make a stand and be different but the health and fitness results for both body and mind are fantastic. And yes, everyone thinks we are weirdos!
I mostly wanted to highlight Jonno’s incredible story. There isn’t much more to say about that. Moving on after your wife dies, being present for your child, bearing the suffering and turning it into a positive force in your lives—that’s incredible. You honor not just your late wife, but everyone else as well. Thanks.
Gertch asked:
Calls to simple cleanliness to reduce impediments to creativity and activity are always good. With a large family, I could use hearing them hourly!
There are many posts I haven’t read, but something on working into more barefoot time would be good. Is barefoot good for everyone, or how does one determine if it is not ok for them? Is sock-footed of the same benefit? Is a painful adjustment period normal? etc.
Barefoot is good for most people, but not everyone. There are no absolutes here.
The longer you’ve spent wearing shoes, the longer it’ll take to acclimate your feet. Shoe-wearing (particularly thick-soled, stiff, prominent-heeled shoes) atrophies the musculature and weakens the connective tissue of the foot. It’s like placing your feet in casts—casts that you wear almost all day, every day. Most of us who try barefooting are coming off years of wearing a cast. It just isn’t smart or feasible to immediately launch into full-blown barefootedness.
I have a post from several years ago explaining how to transition to barefoot walking, running, and training.
Socks are fine. They may slightly blunt the proprioceptive feedback you receive from the soles of your feet interacting with the micro-topology of the ground but not enough to make any real difference.
David wondered:
The suggestion to increase the create:consume ratio resonated with me, in part because I think of creativity as a core element of human nature. I am curious how to fit that idea within a primal perspective. On the one hand, there is evidence for very early creative activity among humans and pre-humans, so there are reasons to say that a primal lifestyle is a creative one. On the other hand, civilization seems to be the accumulated product of human creativity, an ongoing movement away from wildness. It’s as if the lifestyle of our ancestors contained the seed of its own undoing.
I like that: “the lifestyle of our ancestors contained the seed of its own undoing.” That’s a fairly common theme with human endeavors. We get so good at things that we go overboard and end up swinging back around to realize our error of overextension. Many religious scholars, for example, propose that Christianity’s focus on truth seeking led to the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the materialist world view that ended up undermining it.
You shouldn’t be concerned though. Primal isn’t about clinging to the past. It’s about going back and sifting through the past for valuable knowledge, wisdom, and hypotheses about diet, fitness, and health—then bringing them with us into the future. And yes, we often butt up against the future as it unfolds, but we also shape it. I’m convinced the ancestral health community is partially responsible for the increased awareness of the dangers of digital addictions, the perils of excessive sitting, the rise of standup desks, and all the other stuff sweeping the high-tech world. That’s not even mentioning the effect we’ve had on the way people think about food and exercise.
Creation isn’t always about bringing tangible objects into the world. There are thousands of ways to be creative, especially given the tools at our disposal.
Besides: The future is happening. We’re here, we’re in it. There’s no escaping it. We might as well try to make the best of it. We certainly shouldn’t make it worse by disengaging and throwing in the towel. That’s no way to live.
Kelli wrote:
Thank you for mentioning a messy house. My house isn’t messy but life gets busy & we spend so much energy cleaning up.
That reminds me of the story of Sisyphus, the guy eternally relegated to pushing a huge boulder up a hill only to have it reach the top and roll down back the other side. Many people reference Sisyphus as a tragic reminder of the utter pointlessness of most human endeavors. I see it differently. I see it as motivational commentary on the undeniable.
Your job is never done. Not as a parent, a citizen, a friend, a lover, an employee, an entrepreneur, a human. There’s always something to be done. That’s why we all have that kernel of discontent simmering within, no matter what we accomplish or how much money we make.
When I’m writing a blog post, I focus entirely on that post. Nothing else exists for those hours I’m writing. When I finish, I’m relieved. But the next day, there’s the blog waiting for me all over again. Back to square one.
If I try to hold on to that relief, it vanishes. I can’t help but worry about the next project hanging over my head—the one I’m trying to ignore and deny. The trick is to not do that. The trick is to accept my responsibility, to willingly embrace it.
I can either accept my fate, the lot in life I’ve built for myself, the fact that my work is never done and there’s always something else to work on, some task to complete. That’s actually a beautiful reality, isn’t it?
Or I can build up to a crescendo of false contentment—”It’s finally over; now I can rest!”—and crash every day when I realize I have to do it all over again.
I’d choose the first option every single time. You should too.
Karen asked:
About getting sunshine in the winter…it’s plenty sunny out there but it’s also cold.
(You’ve seen the new work on Vit. D and sulfonation, yes, no?) Do you uncover head and neck, or unwrap legs. Or bravely unwrap arms and legs? Is one better for exposure?
If it’s vitamin D you’re after, it’s really hard to make any appreciable amounts through sun exposure in winter time. Don’t rely on it.
But wait: There’s still a great reason to get outside in the cold sunny weather. Natural light exposure entrains your circadian rhythm—it helps tell your body that it’s daytime, so that the millions of circadian clocks we house in our cells, organs, and tissues know the time.
You know what? Expose your skin to the air anyway. It’s a good way to build cold tolerance and force your body to upregulate its own temperature regulation, which may activate brown fat and improve metabolic health.
Wendy requested:
More on resetting the circadian system, please. I’ve been trying without much luck on mine.
I’ve done a few posts on the various circadian entrainers, but perhaps I’ll do another post in the future summing up everything we’ve learned. It’s a big topic.
Thanks for the idea!
That’s it for today, everyone. Take care and be sure to add your comments or questions down below!
The post Dear Mark: More Embracing Your Wildness appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
The kinds of long-cooked stews and deep, rich dishes most people make in their Dutch ovens are hardly the type of foods most associated with the Netherlands. Nor is Le Creuset, the company best known for making the heavy, thick-walled pots, located in France. Yet, even as the tight-lidded, versatile, and iconic vessel is used to make everything from Mexican mole to no-knead bread, we call it “Dutch.” (Also, it isn’t anything like what we would consider an oven these days.)
So, how did the often-colorful, much-coveted pot end up being called a “Dutch oven?”
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
With everyone headed to PyeongChang for the Olympics, we thought we’d check out some local Airbnb spaces. Because many of the most popular Korean rentals are located in teeny-tiny apartments in the big cities, we were not surprised to find many smart storage and organizing features in their kitchens!
Here are a few lessons we can all learn from Airbnb kitchens in Korea — whether we’re Olympics-bound or not.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
When it’s chilly outside and all you want to do is hunker down with a steaming bowl of chili and some warm cornbread, turn to this trusty one-pot casserole. The best part of making chili and cornbread together in one dish is how the cornbread soaks up some of the sauce while still growing crispy on top. Pantry staples give this meaty beef and tomato chili a quick start. Cooking the dish in the Dutch oven means you can pour over an easy cornbread batter before popping it in the oven to bake. The Dutch oven does double duty as a baking dish that you can serve dinner right out of, plus there’s one less baking dish to have to wash later.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
While few if any of us get to choose everything that will happen in our days, the morning, in particular, has the power to determine who/what will be leading the way and how much we give to our own interests—versus simply responding to others’ as the day progresses. As psychologist Roy F. Baumeister suggests in his Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, our willpower is greatest in the morning before we’ve had to fend off the slew of issues and choices that come our way. In other words, if you struggle to keep a given commitment to yourself/your well-being, you’ll likely be more successful making it part of your morning routine as opposed to holding off until later in the day.
From a physiological standpoint, too, the morning hours offer some extra benefits. Working out in a fasted state, research shows, offers better benefits for fat burning and insulin sensitivity. There’s also the advantage of the natural a.m. cortisol surge. That means extra energy to offer the day’s workout or to tackle the most challenging tasks. How many of us postpone our exercise and certain responsibilities as long as we can—only to face them during our least energetic and driven hours of the day. By that point, it takes seemingly ten times the physical and mental wherewithal to make ourselves follow through (e.g. the thousand pound workout bag).
What’s more? You’ll be more invested in making healthier choices throughout the day if you’re already on a roll with an a.m. workout, meditation time and/or other positive behaviors. You’ll already have some skin in the game for living healthily that day. You also won’t be subject to that nagging sense of restlessness that can dog us all day. Our bodies are waiting to move and ready to stage an uprising at having to sit at a desk for eight hours first. Our minds likewise grumble at having to wait to get some personal time to do something they enjoy as opposed to what they must do to collect a paycheck and go along to get along.
Why should we put off everything we want in our day? Why should we come last and not first? With this and other posts’ messages, I know I come off sometimes as promoting a selfish revolution, but the solid fact is, life works better for everyone when our needs are taken care of. We work harder. We play better with others. We eat less crap and can be healthier for it.
Developing a morning routine allows you to assert your own authority over the day. You take charge of your own work-life balance by, in effect, paying yourself first. Too many of us do it the other way around and are left with no time and energy to invest by the time we get to ourselves. As a result, too many people end up feeling at the mercy of their work and family demands. Responsibilities overwhelm, and they end up continually stuck.
When you lead with your own peace and well-being, however, much more is possible. Something essential changes when you begin directing your day rather than responding to it. However we choose to design our morning routine (as long as it truly feeds our needs – and more than just the mundane logistical check-offs), we stake our claim on the day before anything/anyone else can. Our actions—and the pattern of action over time —can effect a powerful shift in our personal sense of self-efficacy and fulfillment.
What would it mean for the rest of life if you devoted a morning routine to your own interests? How would your relationships change if you began your day in ways that brought you joy and health? How would it impact your attitude at work if you started your job with a solid two hours of time invested in yourself? There’s some food for thought this morning.
For more on setting a morning routine, keep reading here.
The post Primal Starter: Drive Your Day—Or Your Day Will Drive You appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
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