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The chances you and your loved ones will ever face a mass shooting are rare. Nevertheless, the heartbreaking news that a lone gunman killed at least 50 people by opening fire with a semi-automatic weapon at a country music festival in Las Vegas is a reminder that we live in very uncertain times. Increasingly, people […]

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Welcome to Kitchn’s Food Budget Diaries series, where we show you how people around the country spend money on what they eat and drink. Each post will follow one person for one week and will chronicle everything that person consumed and how much it costs them.

Name: Sarah-Ann
Location: Peterborough, New Hampshire
Age: 37
Number of people in family: 7 (my husband; me; 18-year-old son, Jason; 17-year-old daughter, Jocelyn; 14-year-son, Benjamin; 9-year-old daughter, Alyssa; and 8-year-old daughter, Ari. Note that my oldest child is away this week so we only have six people in our household this week.
Occupation: My husband is a health store manager and I’m a photographer (lots of school and sports-related things).
Household income: $68,000 (doesn’t include my income since mine is seasonal. Our budget is based on my husband’s income because it is steady, something we can always count on).
Weekly food budget: $125

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There are some things I never did before I became a mom, and one of them is pumpkin picking. (Or really any fruit picking, for that matter.) It just wasn’t something we did when I was growing up, but now I look forward to it every year because my kids love it so much. My 4-year-old has been asking to go for the last six months. It’s that much of an occasion for him.

Just like any activity with children, pumpkin picking can be stressful if you don’t plan ahead. And there’s one major key to our plan, which I learned from making the visit a few years in a row now: There is a best time to go.

Keep reading to find out when that is.

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Once December 1 arrives, it’s agonizing to wait the 24 days until Christmas. Those little chocolate advent calendars did the trick when we were kids, but boozy Christmas countdowns are making the month a lot more tolerable for us now that we’re grown-ups.

Last season we celebrated with beer advent calendars and “ginvent” calendars, earlier this month Aldi released a wine advent calendar, and now there’s one filled with everyone’s favorite winter spirit: whiskey.

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Dorie Greenspan bakes in three different kitchens (in New York, Paris, and Connecticut). She has a stand mixer in each, but the five-quart KitchenAid stand mixer in her New York kitchen has a special place in her heart. Purchased almost 40 years ago, it was an incredible splurge at the time, Dorie says. At a few hundred bucks, it’s still a major expense for many of us these days, too. If you can swing it, though, Dorie calls it a very wise investment.

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Trips to IKEA can be a wannabe designer’s dream — Ohhh, look at that sleek island and those immaculate chalkboard cabinets! — but getting home with the goods can be a nightmare. The company’s instruction manuals for putting together its affordable, pack-flat furniture is infamously complicated. There are no written instructions — just an anger-inducing cartoon man with a tiny hammer.

But the Swedish brand is about to change all of that with its recent acquisition of TaskRabbit, the on-demand service that completes your to-do list. This means you may never again have to struggle to read awkward instructions, worry about losing tiny screws, or make a mess of your living room while trying to assemble dining room tables, bookcases, and more.

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(Image credit: Charity Burggraaf)

It’s so easy when my husband and I eat without the kids. Preferences? We eat everything! Spicy food OK? Sure! Dietary restrictions? None!

Then there’s dinner with our children, aged 7, 10, and 14. All three independently announced a commitment to vegetarianism about as soon as each could articulate the concept.

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For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering questions from last week’s hormone normalization post. First I discuss a lack of purpose in the mornings affecting sleep and what to do about it. Next, I explore the prospect of sun and fasting as hormone modulators. After that, I explain the meaning of max aerobic heart rate and correct a mistake I made. And finally, I suggest to one reader that she may need to eat more calories to normalize her sleep and thus her hormones.

First, Jason asked:

Loved the article ! I have tried all this but it has become almost impossible for me to sleep on time. Not that i don’t sleep enough but the timings are way too off. Maybe because i don’t have anything in the morning to look forward to. Can anyone please help ?

I’m not entirely clear on the meaning of “timings are way too off,” but I’m going to give it a shot. I hope it helps.

You say you don’t have anything to look forward to in the mornings. This is a common problem. It’s also a very serious problem that you need to address ASAP.

In a very literal sense, the morning is the beginning of the rest of your life. Each morning, you wake up from a black void. You’re dreaming, and your brain is active, but you’re not conscious in the sense we normally think about consciousness. “You” don’t really exist when you sleep. For all intents and purposes, you wake up each morning an entirely different person.

To start your life each day without purpose or meaning or even a vague idea of what to do will never produce positive results.

Your disordered sleep is a product of this. Search within and find meaning. It doesn’t have to be grandiose. Maybe you join a CrossFit box for morning workouts or sign up for a yoga class or a martial arts class in the mornings. Maybe you sit down right now and plan your mornings.

What are you going to make for breakfast?

Is the coffee maker clean and ready to go?

What will you wear?

When will you brush your teeth?

Get all that planned out and ready to go.

A purpose in life can be mundane. If you’re just stumbling toward a purpose, the mundane is actually the best choice because you have to do mundane things no matter what.

Good luck.

Aklay offered up a couple other ways to normalize hormones:

Hi Mark…..Sunbathing and fasting might have been missed?

Sunbathing is a good one. It increases vitamin D synthesis, which is required to produce steroid hormones. It’s relaxing, which can reduce stress. Yeah, sunbathing will help.

Fasting is a trickier question. I certainly considered it, but found the effect too variable for general use. Reason being, fasting is a stressor. If you’re in good shape, fasting can be a hormetic stressor—a stressor that you recover from stronger than before. A stressor that forces you to improve yourself and your health.

If you’re in a bad place, fasting can simply be a major stressor—one that makes you worse, not better. One that you can’t recover from. One that weakens your constitution rather than strengthens it.

I always suggest that people add intermittent fasting to an already-solid base of health, training, and stress regulation. IF can help you burn more fat, slip into ketosis, control your appetite. All this serves to reduce oxidative stress and the overall inflammatory load.

If the wrong person starts fasting, they get worse. It becomes a major impediment to hormone normalization. For example, I would never suggest that a pregnant woman or a woman trying to conceive embark on an intermittent fasting regimen. It’s pretty clearly deleterious to fertility hormones. Women in general are more sensitive to the stress-related effects of intermittent fasting, so I’d be extra careful if I were a woman.

If I had to boil this down, fasting can solidify your control over your hormones if you already have control. It will make your normal hormones even “normaler.”

LlamaAnna asked:

I don’t understand the comment about ‘lowering his assumed aerobic base heart rate’. The way you say it sounds like he just decided one day to concentrate really hard and things changed. What are you actually talking about here? If the exercise didn’t change, what did and how?

Thanks for the question. I actually misspoke. When Brad’s T was low, he was treating 145 as his max aerobic heart rate—the fastest his heart could beat and still remain in an aerobic, or fat-burning, state. So during runs or any endurance training, he’d keep track of his heart rate, slowing down only when it exceeded 145 under the assumption that he was in the maximal fat-burning state. This was a big mistake.

His actual max aerobic heart rate was 130, a full 15 points lower. Instad of spending his training time in the fat burning zone, he was spending all his time as a sugar burner. Yet, he was living and eating as if he was a fat-burner. Don’t get me wrong. Brad was still burning fat. It’s not a binary on-off switch from fat to sugar burning. But he was burning significantly more sugar than he assumed, and it was wrecking his hormone levels.

The exercise “changed” in that it got easier. He went easier. Same movements, same runs, different intensity.

Wilhelmina wrote:

I like the sleep more part, seriously I do. But having the menopause knocking at my door it isn’t easy. I want to, but I can’t convince my body to do the same. Some nights I sleep easily up till 12 hours, but there are nights I barely sleep at all. I have a cold and dark room, since I easily get it too warm, I have magnesium before bedtime, I got dim lights in the evening, barely more than candle light, eat clean (Really Mark, your low carb diagram made me even lose weight, where most would gain, awesome!) . Any suggestions are more than welcome!

Are you eating enough calories?

You say you’ve lost, or are losing weight. The older you get, the harder it gets, and the more you have to restrict yourself, which increases the toll that takes on your body. The more you have to restrict yourself, which the body can interpret as a stressor. Assuming you’ve covered all the other sleep hygiene facets—and judging from your comment you have—you should look at calorie intake.

Eating the fewest calories you can while obtaining the most nutrients and avoiding the negative side effects of calorie restriction, like lack of sex drive, loss of muscle or bone density, and low energy levels, is the way forward, as far as I’m concerned. Sleep disturbance is a lesser known but perhaps more dangerous side effect of too low a calorie intake.

I’m not saying pig out. Just try eating a bit more. An extra serving of butternut squash with dinner, another egg at breakfast, that sort of thing. Slowly and gradually titrate up your calorie intake until it produces a change in your sleep quality. If it doesn’t help, at least you’ve eliminated a factor from contention and you can move forward in your quest.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care and be sure to chime in with your input down below!

The post Dear Mark: Hormone Normalizing Questions appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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Have you heard of a one-butt kitchen? That’s what my mom calls teeny-tiny kitchens, because there’s only enough room for one person to maneuver in there at a time. I’ve had my share of small kitchens, and there’s one thing I’ve learned to do over the years to keep them under control: edit.

If you don’t have room for more than one tushie, you certainly don’t have room for stuff you no longer use! In order to edit your kitchen, which is the single most important thing you can do for a small kitchen, you have to first know these two things.

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