http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Summer wouldn’t be complete without a steady stream of perfectly charred, meaty meals hot off the grill. And when it comes to making better barbecue, the secret isn’t in the sauce, but rather in an unsuspecting appliance: the slow cooker.
It may sound like an unlikely pair, but the slow cooker and grill are a dynamic duo that have a knack for cooking up even better meat.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Once you nail the classic recipe for sloppy joes, you can continue to customize it by adding flavor and swapping ingredients to make this weeknight staple just what your family wants. In this rendition of the sloppy joe, we used light and lean ground turkey in place of ground beef, and made a few ingredient swaps to ensure the filling was Paleo-friendly and gluten-free.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
(Image credit: Samantha Bolton)
Patrick Janelle is an entrepreneur that specializes in creative pursuits that probably didn’t exist a few years ago. For one, he’s a total Instagram star. His photos of cortados and trendy travel spots are just so insanely beautiful. He also started an underground supper club (Spring Street Social Society) and created an app (The Liquor Cabinet) that will help you make a better cocktail. Basically, he’s the kind of person you want at your next dinner party.
For someone so in tune with food trends and hosting, I had to know: What is Patrick’s favorite pint of ice cream?
Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/
Yesterday, we talked about why participants of the show The Biggest Loser aren’t exactly role models or inspiring figures for our own efforts. Actually, they might be examples of how NOT to go about getting healthy permanently.
Many contestants regained the weight immediately after the show, and these strategies that were held up on the show as shining examples of health were nothing more than a house of cards – theatre to trick us, entertain us, and unfortunately set unrealistic expectations that cause us to look poorly at our own situation!
According to the show’s doctor, the recommendation for show contestants is to exercise at least 9 hours per week to maintain their weight loss. That is a tremendous amount of time to exercise for somebody who is also trying to live a normal life and do regular people things.
I read that number and made this face:
Nine hours of exercise per week is a lot of freaking exercise for someone who is just starting! For reference, I exercise about 5 hours per week.
Why is exercising more and more NOT the solution to a permanently healthy life, but a set up for failure?
Let’s say, for example, that you choose to exercise 9+ hours per week, which results in a net loss of a few extra thousand calories per week. Setting aside the fact that it is incredibly challenging to build or maintain the habit of exercising that much each week while living a normal life, advocates for this sort of routine expect you to keep this up every week, for the rest of your life in order to stay “fit.”
That’s right. They might sell you on a 30 or 60 day workout plan – implying you’ll shed the pounds, be healthy, and look great… but time won’t freeze over. Things won’t stay that way forever.
That, my friends, is the greatest trick lie the devil ever told.
Instead, when you stop burning these calories each week and don’t change anything else, you inevitably regain the weight. And that’s why 99% of people fail to keep the weight off: they’re fighting this battle with one hand tied behind their backs…
After all, we have LIVES!
What’s the solution for those of us in the real world?
In addition to strenuously exercising for hours each day, the doctors also gave contestants all sorts of specialists and coaches to support them. What happened?
“Unfortunately, many contestants are unable to find or afford adequate ongoing support with exercise doctors, psychologists, sleep specialists, and trainers — and that’s something we all need to work hard to change.”
The idea that we all need a personalized team of experts to change our life sounds both amazing and incredibly unrealistic. It’s not only mentally detrimental to the show participants, but to everyone watching. It subtly sends us the message that this is a Herculean task, only accomplishable by the these “special” people.
Oh what’s that? You don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw away? Sorry!
Fortunately, we’re here to tell you that this thesis is wrong. Our success stories, and thousands of others getting healthy in the NF Rebellion every day prove it wrong.
Regular people, with regular jobs and regular responsibilities (kids, a social life, etc.), can implement a simple yet long-term solution that really works. It involves looking at your life and the changes you will make through the lens of permanence and balance.
As you make change, we need to start thinking of it as “this is what I do now” instead of as “I’m going to do this for a while until I go back to what I was doing.”
It’s true: what got you HERE won’t get you THERE. If you want to have real change, you can never live like you’re living now: something fundamental has to change permanently.
Fortunately, any permanent change, no matter how small, qualifies as different from normal:
I don’t care how small the change is – in fact, the smaller the better, in my experience! What’s important is that it’s a change you can live with, that you can do without breaking the bank, that doesn’t freak you out, and that is sustainable.
The best place to start?
It’s time to realize that exercise is only 10-20% of the long-term solution when it comes to sustainable weight loss. Your nutrition, your relationship with food, your cell’s relationship with food, your microbiome’s relationship with food, and your mindset about food make up the other 80-90% of the puzzle.
The simple truth is that if you want to lose weight and keep the weight off, you need to focus on finding a way of consuming less calories than you burn each day consistently.
If you burn 2,500 calories each day and only consume 2,000, over the short term you can lose about 1 lb a week. As you lose more weight, you burns fewer and fewer calories at rest (there’s less of you to have to “maintain”).
Exercising can burn a few extra hundred calories, but that work can be quickly undone with food choices.
For instance, you can eat a bag of Doritos and drink a Coke, and it would take about 5 miles to burn the equivalent amount of calories. Or, you could simply cut out the bag of Doritos and the Coke! Of course, we haven’t even talked about nutrients, being satiated, the evil influence of sugar, and fueling your body with the right food as reasons not to eat like crap. Just the pure weight loss math should be enough to get you angry and make a change!
That’s why we believe the true solution is building a healthy, sustainable relationship with the food you use to fuel your body. You aren’t just “skipping the Doritos this month until you reach a goal weight” – you’re “eating less Doritos on average, FOREVER.”
Through personal experiences and the results of thousands upon thousands of people here on NF following our path, we believe gradually changing your dietary habits in a healthy, sustainable way is the way to find lasting success. For many, going “cold turkey” and dramatically changing everything can also result in long-term success. The important part is that these these short term dramatic changes must be able to translate into long-term, permanent changes!
Long story short: stop trying to outrun your fork! (It’s one of our Rules.) Stop throwing more and more exercise at the problem. Stop rewarding yourself with unhealthy foods when you come back from the gym or a run. Stop beating yourself up if the idea of exercising for 10 hours a week is unsustainable for you for the next decade.
If you’re interested in learning more about this stuff, read the following:
Now, beyond nutrition changes, it’s time to change our mindset on how we implement these changes.
Now, although exercise is a small part of the puzzle, it’s still a part of the puzzle! Finding an activity you love is central to long term success. That’s why we wrote about how to exercise without realizing it. They found exercises that made them happy or motivated – they got hooked on how the exercise made them feel:
Hiking with friends, walking each morning, LARPING, rock climbing, geocaching, dancing, climbing on stuff, martial arts, parkour, adult gymnastics, yoga, playing on a playground, joining a rec league…
Building activities like these into your week on a regular basis is a great way to exercise without thinking about it. No more: “ugh, time to go do that thing that sucks that I hate and I can stop doing once I lose enough weight.”
Just like we need your food changes to be permanent, we need your exercise habit to be permanent too. And if you hate running, or you despise gyms, DON’T DO THOSE THINGS! Find something you enjoy and start small.
Now, I also wanted to talk about another way to permanently build that workout habit: falling in love with progress.
There’s a reason the tagline of Nerd Fitness is “Level Up Your Life, Every Single Day” – getting better, faster, stronger is addictive. We love progress as humans, even if the path is hard. You might think you could never fall in love with running, strength training, or yoga… but then you give it a try for a few weeks and you see yourself improving.
As you get good at a thing, it soon stops being painful and starts to becoming a challenge you enjoy. And then, *gasp* – eventually it’s fun. You can’t wait to get back into the gym or on the pavement to see what you can do. You start to yearn to exercise – it becomes a part of who you are.
If you’ve never had this relationship with exercise, don’t worry. It’s not something you either have or you don’t. It’s something you have to cultivate (and which many people fall into by accident). All of our success stories, people who have lost 100s of pounds, say the following: “I can’t believe it, and I’d never thought I’d say this… but I look forward to exercising now.”
What changed? They attacked the problem with the right mentality:
Whatever you’ve done up to this point got you where you are.
It’s time to make real, permanent changes. Avoid the flashy diets, with sensationalist promises.
With the right strategies, permanent change isn’t nearly as scary as you might think.
We can hack our environments to help with that, we can surround ourselves with the right people, and we can make adjustments that are seemingly so small that it seems like no big deal.
I’ve seen it happen thousands of times, and I can’t wait for it to happen to you. When you stop riding the boom-and-bust, diet-and-binge roller coaster, and instead accept that you’re building an upgraded version of yourself, you’ll look back a decade from now and laugh while saying “I can’t believe I used to eat like that!”
From people like Staci who used to chain smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day and now deadlifts 420 pounds, to Anthony who wears his loose skin proudly like a battle scar from the 200+ pounds he’s lost, we have a community of people who will never ‘go home again,’ because they have no desire to.
They like their new home.
So I leave you with this: what is ONE change you can make permanently to your life today, be it your nutrition, mindset, environment, or exercise strategy?
Get a little bit better every day, and I can’t wait to share your “before/during” photos down to road.
-Steve
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photo: Nathan Rupert: Runner, Rosa Say: Calendar, Reiterlied: Yoda
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
You can tell a lot about a person based on their favorite flavor of ice cream. We’ve already determined personality type based on your ice cream choice, and today we’re going to take it one step further and guess your age. Are you ready? What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? Keep it simple and we’ll tell you what age you truly are.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
(Image credit: Kelli Foster)
The first time I used my electric pressure cooker, I hit the start button and ran out of the room. Of course I’d read that modern pressure cookers were perfectly safe when used correctly — fear, however, allows no room for logic. My grandmother had once tried pressure-cooking, and I grew up listening to her tell the story of scrubbing tomato sauce off the ceiling after the ill-fated attempt. So I was fairly certain that my pressure cooker would malfunction.
Eighteen months later, my pressure cooker has earned a prized spot on the counter. Today, instead of making me nervous, I speak about it with Oprah-style enthusiasm, “You need a pressure cooker! And you need a pressure cooker! Everybody needs a pressure cooker!” But the biggest change? My slow cooker now sits collecting dust in the basement. Come to think of it, I really should KonMari that bad boy since it no longer brings any joy into my life.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
After years of committees, debates, panels, “consensus-building” retreats, and literature reviews, the FDA has finalized the new nutrition label guidelines. Packaged food companies have two years to incorporate the new labels. At that point, anything in a package that humans eat must have labels that reflect these changes. You’re probably skeptical. I was. The FDA doesn’t have the strongest track record. But before we condemn the new labels sight unseen, let’s take a look at what’s actually changing and what the implications are.
“Carbohydrates” will now contain a subsection for “Added Sugars,” which includes all sugars that do not naturally occur in the food.
Adding “Added Sugars” is a great move. Natural sugars are different than added sugars because they come packaged with the nutritional elements that mitigate their damage. A blueberry contains glucose and fructose, yes, but also anthocyanins, fiber, and other micronutrients. It used to be that you’d have to guess where the sugar was coming from in a packaged food. You’d have to see where an added sugar source lay on the ingredients list and estimate its degree of contribution to the total. With the new label, you get actual numbers, no guessing.
Serving sizes will reflect what people typically consume in a sitting.
Using realistic serving sizes is a no-brainer and I welcome it. Nobody drinks just half a bottle of Coke or scoops a neat half cup of salted caramel ice cream from the pint. The labels should reflect how people actually eat.
The food’s vitamin D and potassium contents are required to be displayed.
I also like the inclusion of vitamin D and potassium. They’re both important nutrients that most people are deficient in. Of course I’d like to have seen magnesium added or, heck, all the relevant micronutrients like manganese, zinc, chromium, choline, vitamin K2 (especially iodine, about which I can never seem to get accurate data), but this is better than nothing.
Vitamin C and vitamin A are no longer required to be displayed.
If label space was a premium and it came down to potassium and vitamin D versus vitamin C and vitamin A, I’m happy the former pair won out. Otherwise, I would have included both. Vitamin C and vitamin A are important vitamins that people assume they’re eating enough of.
Instead of only listing the vitamin or mineral content of a food as a percentage of the daily value, the new labels will also list the absolute amounts of those nutrients in milligrams or micrograms.
Getting absolute amounts of the micronutrients is huge. Not everyone eats the 2000 calorie diet the daily values are based on, reducing the utility of the “percent of daily value,” but “400 milligrams of potassium” applies to everyone equally.
The daily values for fiber, sodium, and vitamin D have been updated to reflect new scientific consensus. Whereas 4 grams of fiber used to comprise 16% of your DV, it’s now 14%. Sodium DV was previously based on a 2400 mg daily limit; now it’s 2300 mg.
“Scientific consensus” can be iffy, but some of these changes appear for the better. Sodium limits have been tightened (unfortunate, given the mixed evidence for salt restriction), fiber recommendations increased (good, given what we know about the microbiome), and vitamin D recommendations increased (good, because most people could use more).
“Calories per serving” is front and center, with a larger font and more bolding. “Servings Per Container” has a similarly elevated emphasis.
Calories are probably overemphasized. Everyone “knows” how important calories are for weight loss; further accentuation on the label may lead folks to ignore everything but them when making choices. That said, using realistic serving sizes does increase the utility of “calories per serving.”
Servings per container deserves the extra emphasis. It’s the reference point from which everything else on the label proceeds.
The new label no longer lists the amount of calories derived from fat.
YES. Since fat is more calorically dense than other macronutrients and most people assume calories are the most important aspect of a food’s healthfulness, using calories to represent fat’s contribution paints fat as the bad guy. Eliminating the “calories from fat” encourages consumers to evaluate the food on its merits.
You know what? I’m really impressed. These are actually positive changes. But what would I add, had I supreme power?
ORAC
Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity; the antioxidant activity of a food. Higher is generally “better” and indicates the presence of polyphenols.
Added micronutrients
I’d include magnesium, manganese, iodine, chromium, choline, betaine, all the B-vitamins, vitamin K2, all the good stuff we talk about.
Added clarity
I’d specify which forms of vitamin A (beta-carotene, retinol, etc), omega-3 (ALA, DHA, EPA, etc), fiber (soluble, insoluble, fermentable, etc). I’d distinguish between synthetic and natural forms of the nutrients.
Sugar represented by “teaspoons”
In addition to using grams, using teaspoons would provide a strong visual for consumers.
But that’s in a perfect world. Being a producer of foods that require a label myself, I know how onerous and expensive it can be to expand the standard label to include more information.
Maybe in 10-15 years, we’ll have “living labels” with touch screens and augmented reality capabilities. Touch “Minerals” or “Vitamins” and the full breakdown pops up. Touch “Where I’m From” and get a video showing the production process. That will be very cool.
Hardened Primal veterans won’t see their lives or behavior change much directly from the new labels, but you’re not the main audience. What I foresee happening is the general population realizing they’ve been eating terribly (“How much sugar is in this low-fat yogurt?”). We’re already trending in that direction; these label changes indicate the broader shift. When people realize that, no, a third of a bottle of Coke isn’t the true serving size and yes, they have been regularly consuming 65 grams of added sugar when they pop the 20 ounce Coke at lunch, they’ll realize that the way most people eat is insane and maybe that guy in the office who eats his steak and greens lunch out in the sun and takes frequent walking breaks and lobbied to get standing workstations for everyone isn’t so crazy after all.
All in all, I don’t see any big drawbacks here. It’s mostly a positive shift.
Scoff all you want. Realize that you folks who know the magnesium content of each spinach varietal by heart, can rattle off the specific non-curcumin phytonutrients present in turmeric, and are able to place a single droplet of liquid on your tongue and divine its sugar content by weight with perfect accuracy are in the minority. Most people can use the information provided on the new labels. Most people will see their food choices improve.
That’s a good thing.
What do you think, folks? Are you for or against the new label changes?
Thanks for reading.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
(Image credit: Johnna Holmgren)
Dads get a bad reputation for keeping out of the kitchen, or, if they do cook, only being responsible for things like (ahem) manning the grill. But there are, in fact, whole communities of baby-wearing dads who are taking cooking (and shopping and dishwashing) with their kids to a new level. Here we celebrate 10 Instagram dads who are the definition of #momporn.
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