A Primer on Intermittent Fasting

Readers, once again, thanks for indulging me while I take a short break from writing, and please enjoy this post from CK's archives. See you next week with (finally) a new post!
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One of the more interesting dietary topics I’ve been learning about over the past several months is the concept of the fasting window, and how intermittent fasting can help you achieve weight loss, eliminate body fat, and improve your body’s overall health and fitness.

Remember, humans only started eating three square meals a day relatively recently. And it’s only over the past century that humans began eating three carb-heavy meals a day.

In contrast, consider a Paleo-era human, genetically identical to humans today, yet built to survive, even thrive, in an environment where food was periodically scarce. A Paleo-era human would periodically go many hours, sometimes days, without eating at all. Which brings us to some of the key central concepts behind intermittent fasting:

1) Our bodies were not designed for the consumption of regularly timed, full-size meals.

2) Our bodies are actually designed for occasional periods of fasting.

3) Our bodies benefit from these occasional periods of fasting.

Bonus! 4) Based on my experiences, intermittent fasting actually isn’t all that bad or even all that hard to do.

A disclaimer. I am not an expert in these areas. Not even close. My goal for today’s post is merely to talk about my own experiments with intermittent fasting. If you’re curious about attempting your own intermittent fasting experiments, or if you’d like to learn more about this domain, be sure to look over the various resources at the end of this post. There’s plenty of reading material there to get you started.

A 17-hour fasting window
So, with that as background: what, then, is a fasting window, and what does it do for you?

Simple: it’s just a period of time during which you don’t eat. And this fasting period causes your body to burn its own body fat through a process called autophagy, where the body in effect metabolizes itself in a way that helps our cardiovascular health, our fitness and our body composition.

Like I said, I’ve been experimenting with intermittent fasting, and I’ll share an example from my own experience of a recent 17-hour fasting window. And while it may seem like a really long time to go without food, it’s actually not as big a deal as you’d think.

First, I had an earlier than normal dinner, finishing eating at about 6:00pm, perhaps an hour earlier than typical for us here at CK. I also made sure the meal was predominantly protein-based. I did my regular post-dinner things: reading, relaxing and so on, but didn’t snack, consume alcohol or ingest anything other than water. Then, I went to bed around 10:00pm.

The next morning I got up at 6:30am, but instead of eating breakfast at my normal time (around 8:00 or 8:30am) I deferred breakfast until after my workout. At 9:30am I went to the gym and did my usual workout, which lately includes things like squats, deadlifts, some light running and other weightlifting exercises. When I got back it was just after 10:30am. I then waited about a half hour, and at 11:00am, I ate two eggs and a dollop of peanut butter, a meal containing about 30 grams of protein and plenty of satiety factor to carry me well into the afternoon.

So, with my simple breakfast at 11:00am, I had just completed a 17 hour fasting window--the time difference between 6pm the night before and 11am the next day.

During this time, my body first obtained fuel from my meal from the night before. At some point, however, it began extracting the fuel it needed from my body’s own stores of body fat. Which is the whole point of all of this in the first place.

What was most striking about this 17 hour fasting window, shocking even, was that I was never hungry at all, thanks to two things:

1) a high-satiety, low-carb meal the night before,
2) the fact that working out makes your hunger temporarily disappear.

I only really started to think, “hey, it might be kind of nice to eat something” at around 10:45, just a few minutes before I actually ate.

One more thought. Every time you sleep through the night, or at least avoid creeping downstairs and raiding your fridge in the middle of the night, you execute a fasting window of around eight hours. Which means the easiest way to apply intermittent fasting is to incorporate your sleeping period, but then add a couple hours of extra fasting on either side. Start by eating a slightly earlier dinner and deferring breakfast a little the next day. This can get you to a simple ten- or even twelve-hour fasting window quite easily with minimal changes to your routine. Try it.

Once again, we humans weren’t designed to eat every few hours--as much as we tend to get hungry with that kind of timing and think we need to eat. We certainly weren’t built to eat regular, full-size meals consisting of carb-heavy processed foods. And, in an unfortunate case of dietary circularity, it’s the carb-heavy foods themselves that put us on a hunger roller-coaster, making us think we need more food every few hours.

Finally, I’ve repeated this intermittent fasting experiment many times in the past few months, with fasting windows ranging from 12 hours to 19 hours, to see what the results would be. At what point I feel unwell? Would I ever experience severe hunger?

The answers, shockingly, were never and no. I experience some modest sensations of hunger once my fasting window gets beyond 16 hours, but nothing severe and nothing I couldn’t handle. Further, it was interesting to have a chance to observe those mild-to-moderate sensations of hunger. If anything, they were good tests of my Stoic principles, which made me all the more grateful and appreciative of the food I later ate.


Read Next: Minimum Viable Progress


Resources/For Further Reading:
1) The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Arthur De Vany, a pioneering thinker of Paleo eating and fitness.

2) Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha by John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein. Extraordinarily useful (though male audience targeted) book on fitness and diet with excellent discussions on fasting techniques.

3) Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the entire book is useful, but specific to fasting see pages 365-369).

4) Highly useful four-part series on various aspects of intermittent fasting at Inside Tracker: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

5) See also CK’s ragingly positive review of Arthur De Vany’s The New Evolution Diet

6) CK on how to apply “Antifragility” to our diets--and eat better for a lot less money.

The Old Lie: Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day

Everybody knows the saying "eat breakfast like a king, eat lunch like a prince and eat dinner like a pauper." And we've all been told that if we want to lose weight we should never skip breakfast.

Unfortunately, neither "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" nor "you should eat a big breakfast" are true! Both are pieces of once-widely-believed dietary wisdom that, largely, turned out to be lies--lies that only recently collapsed under the weight of many, many major discoveries in the domains of human metabolism and nutrition science.

I've addressed many other examples of now-debunked consensus diet ideas elsewhere here at Casual Kitchen, where I've talked about the Big Lie of the Food Pyramid, in my discussion of the logic behind paleo-style eating, and in my discussion of some of the counterintuitive insights in Gary Taubes' excellent book Why We Get Fat.

The Big Eating Window
Here's the problem with breakfast: depending on when you eat it, it can massively expand the number of hours of potential eating time available to you during the day. If you eat at, say, 7:30am or earlier and then go to bed at, say, 10 or 11pm at night, you will have an "eating window" of as much as 15-16 hours over the course of the day. That's a lot of time to eat--and a lot of time to feel hungry if you're trying not to.

An axiom: the longer your eating window, the shorter your your fasting window. And vice versa. Remember, you fast while you sleep, and your body burns fat while you fast. Therefore, if you can extend this fasting period by eating breakfast later, or not eating breakfast at all, you will accomplish three incredibly beneficial things for your body's long-term health:

1) You'll burn a lot more body fat,
2) You'll ingest meaningfully fewer calories over the course of the day,

...and, more importantly (and counterintuitively!):

3) You'll feel less hungry.

Meals beget meals. The moment you start eating food, you prime your body to expect still more calories in the (near) future. How often have you eaten breakfast only to be hungry again just an hour or two later? Of course you only compound the problem further eating a typical (and carb-based) breakfast of grains, branded boxed cereal, fruit and juice.

Finally, it's worth noting that all of these insights slot comfortably into place with many of the various ideas we've discussed here about intermittent fasting and how to expand your fasting window, ideas I've borrowed (stolen?) from Arthur De Vany's excellent book The New Evolution Diet to help me improve my body's metabolism and reduce my body fat levels. (Note to readers: I reviewed De Vany's book here, and I highly recommend it.)

So, push back your breakfast until later in the day, and shorten up your eating window by a few hours. Or, skip breakfast entirely and shorten your eating window by a lot. Whatever you do, make the first meal of your day protein- and fat-centered. Combine these easy dietary tweaks with a healthy, balanced diet, take your exercise up a notch or two, and you'll be extraordinarily happy with the results.

Some of the ideas in this post come from the strikingly useful diet and fitness book Engineering the Alpha by John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein.


READ NEXT: The Scientific Study That Cried Wolf

AND: Minimum Viable Progress










How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Carbs and the Feeling of Hunger

Another factor that I believe plays a huge (yuge!) role in the psychological experience of hunger: The proportion of carbs in your most recent meal.

The problem with carbohydrates is they generally offer very little satiety per calorie. This is entirely separate from all the other problems carbohydrates present to our body: insulin production, hunger roller-coaster, a quick hit of blood glucose followed by cravings for more, and so on.

Years ago, I used to eat a much more carbohydrate-centered diet. Unsurprisingly, I was hungry--a lot--and that hunger was often accompanied by all sorts of physical and psychological symptoms: I would get nervous, my stomach would growl at an astounding volume, I'd get the jitters, sometimes I'd even get even fearful... sometimes I'd even start sweating. I believed I had to have something to eat, right away! And preferably something starchy or sugary, because I thought that was what my body needed to get my blood sugar "up."

Little did I know I was just getting right back onto the proverbial hunger roller-coaster.

After enough years of this went by, I'd become trained, Pavlov-like, to connect the feeling of fear with the feeling of hunger. Yep, fear. Because I knew what was coming, soon, after I experienced the feeling of hunger--that weak, dizzy, jittery, low-blood sugar feeling I would get if I didn't eat something every three or four hours.

Today, I eat a diet much more heavily centered on fats and proteins. Unlike carbs, proteins and fat offer far more satiety per calorie, take longer to metabolize, and they don't put the human body on an insulin/hunger roller-coaster. And on this less carb-centered diet, I regularly execute fasting windows of twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours with no fear and no problem, and only occasional, passing emotions of hunger. And even these passing feelings don't always happen to me all the time.

Of course, I didn't know any of this back years ago when I followed the government's completely upside down Food Pyramid and ate a heavily carb-centered diet. I was hopelessly naive about concepts like satiety or the hunger roller-coaster. So when I experienced "hunger" I actually thought it was the real thing... and feared it.


READ NEXT: "Learn to Live on Lentils..."


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Psychological Hunger... Compared to the Real Thing

And.... we're back! I'd like to thank readers for indulging CK's one-month hiatus while I spent a month in Poland attempting to learn my first Slavic language. Dziękuję bardzo!
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If you've ever heard someone say "I'm starving!" take three minutes to watch this monologue by comedian Louis C.K.

Let's start off by just spitting out the truth: Hardly anyone is ever really "hungry" in the genuine sense of experiencing starvation. Like Louis C.K. says, if you ate today, you really shouldn't say you're hungry.

But then again, we do feel hungry. It's a feeling, and it feels real. In fact, it feels so real that we almost always obey it by eating! Come to think of it, one way to think about obesity is to see it as an unlucky intersection of three things: wide food availability, our survival instinct, and the strong emotional experience of the "feeling" of hunger.

So, if you want to really learn about the feeling of hunger, if you want to learn how to sit with the feeling--even to get comfortable with it, instead of reacting to it or fearing it--I urge you to experiment, gradually, with intermittent fasting techniques.

We all know, in the logical part of our brains, that humans can easily go days without eating. Days. Now, we're finding mounting evidence that occasional fasting is actually healthy for the human body. And the entire discipline of intermittent fasting is built around this steadily growing body of evidence.

What I've found surprising in my experiences practicing intermittent fasting is how fasting helps you explore the emotional side of hunger. Over the past several months I've felt a lot more around the edges of the "feeling" of hunger. I've learned it simply isn't what I thought it was, and I've learned to differentiate it from true hunger. The two are most definitely not the same.

Even when I've really pushed myself and attempted fasting windows of twenty or twenty-one hours, the psychological feeling of hunger has become an interesting experience for me, and not something I react to with fear or panic, like I most certainly would have in the past. (Hang onto that thought--I'll talk more about it in next week's post.)

I've encouraged readers here to experiment with intermittent fasting, and I want to encourage it again. It doesn't just offer health benefits, and it doesn't just help you burn body fat. It teaches you not to fear the feeling of hunger. That alone makes it worth it.

Now, instead of saying, "I haven't eaten since 2:00. I'm STARVING," you might find yourself merely thinking, "I haven't eaten since 2:00." You won’t feel the need to tack on the (attention-getting?) phrase I'm STARVING at the end, because it doesn't merit being said.


READ NEXT: Book Review: The New Evolution Diet by Arthur De Vany


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Where Can I Find Low-Cost Sources of Protein and Fat?

As we continue to tilt our diets away from carbs and more towards protein- and fat-based calories, we're finding a problem: if you're not careful, a low-carb diet can cost a lot more money.

It's not all bad news. Remember the primary advantage of proteins and fats over carbs: they offer far more satiety. All else equal, you get a much longer-acting feeling of fullness from a calorie of protein or fat than you get out of a calorie of carbs.

This distinction is obvious to anyone who's compared the experience of eating a big bowl of cereal for breakfast versus eating, say, two eggs fried in olive oil. The calorie content of these two breakfasts is about the same, but the eggs have a far greater satiety factor. You'll feel full for hours on a couple of eggs, while a bowl of cereal puts you on a hunger rollercoaster... making you ravenous long before lunchtime.

In other words, protein- and fat-based meals offer us a win-win: we feel fuller, and thus eat less. This is one of the primary reasons people find it easier to lose weight when they cut back on carbs.

Another thing to think about: If it takes more carbs to get the same sensation of fullness, then this implies that a diet rich in carbs is very likely a diet with many more calories than you need. Put simply, if you eat a lot of carbs, it's a lot easier to eat more... and therefore spend more. So, the fact that you get a lot more satiety out of proteins and fats than carbs helps alleviate the cost issue.

Okay, let's get to the list. Here are the primary sources of the most cost-effective proteins and fats that we rely on here at Casual Kitchen:

Eggs: my primary staple food for a high-satiety, long lasting breakfast. But don't think of eggs just as a breakfast food! You can enjoy them in lunch/dinner recipes too, like Shaksouka or a delicious Frittata.

Meats:
* Ground meats, particularly higher-fat ground meats (80/20 beef is superior, both in cost and flavor, to 90/10 beef, for example)
* Whole chicken (see our Hilariously Easy Whole Chicken Soup)
* Chicken, bulk dark meat (drumsticks, thighs, etc.)
* Pork joints: pork shoulder/pork butt (perfect for a delicious and easy Pernil)
* Sausage (avoid sausages flavored with a lot of sugar or HFCS for obvious reasons)

A useful savings heuristic with meats: avoid the leanest meat cuts like the priciest cuts of beef for example. Contrary to dietary advice from decades ago, lean meats aren't "better" for you, and in my opinion they don't taste better either. They sure do cost a lot more though! A textbook example here is the price differential between so-called "healthier" 90/10 ground beef and 80/20 ground beef, or the price differential between a filet mignon cut and, say, a juicier, more delicious T-bone steak cut.

One more quick thought on meats: occasionally there will be "supply shocks" to specific meats. For example, over the past few years there has been enormous excess supply of lobster worldwide, driving prices down to the point where, over the past year or two, even casual-themed chain restaurants are rolling out things like lobster ravioli and other lobster dishes. I'm not suggesting lobster as a protein source per se here (it's delicious but not nearly as cost-effective as other protein sources), I merely bring it up as an example of how prices can fluctuate widely for various meats--offering savings opportunities for the open-minded consumer.

Legumes:
* lentils
* red lentils
* mung beans
* canned and dried (store-brand) beans

It should be no surprise to see Casual Kitchen singing the praises of legumes! We love to live on lentils. One tremendous savings hint: seek out ethnic grocery stores in your community for low-cost bulk legumes. In a local Indian grocery store near us, for example, we've found astonishingly good prices on bulk red lentils and bulk mung beans. Sadly, in the standard American supermarket, foods like mung beans or even red lentils are thought of as "aspirational"... and priced accordingly. In an Indian grocery store, they're just "food"... and priced far more reasonably.

Brown rice: Yes, brown rice costs more than white rice, but it also has a better ratio of carbs/protein/fat per unit of food. You can lower your costs here by buying in bulk, buying the store brand, or, again, seeking out deals at ethnic grocery stores in your community.

Nuts:
* Peanuts
* Peanut butter (watch out for and avoid HFCS- or sugar-laden peanut butters. Blech!)

This is a tough category, simply because many types of nuts are crazy expensive and/or sold as aspirational products. Peanuts, however, are seen by the grocery industry as a low-end commodity food and thus priced accordingly. We buy only store-brand unsalted peanuts and store-brand unsweetened peanut butter.

Canned tuna in oil: remember to field-test the store brand! Remember: it's likely from the same third party food producer as the branded tuna.

Basic oils: on many mornings, I consume 1-2 teaspoons of olive or canola oil in addition to 2-3 eggs (also fried in oil). This quick, satiety-boosting dietary tweak helps me stay feeling full from early in the morning until well past noon.

* Olive oil
* Canola oil

You can safely skip the idea of buying any of today's various trendy oils: coconut, avocado, pumpkin seed oil, etc. Like red lentils or many types of nuts, these are aspirational products in the eyes of grocery store retailers, and--no surprise--they're also priced accordingly. Don't buy. Generally, we buy one or two large jugs of commodity olive or canola oil, and only buy when on a significant sale (as in half-off or buy one/get one free). We keep an inventory in our pantry, which allows us to wait until the grocery store meets our price, not the other way around.

Readers, now it's your turn! What low-costs protein and fat-based foods would you add? What did I miss?


Read Next: The Consumer Must Be Protected At All Times

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

A Primer on the Fasting Window and Intermittent Fasting

One of the more interesting dietary topics I’ve been learning about over the past several months is the concept of the fasting window, and how intermittent fasting can help you achieve weight loss, eliminate body fat, and improve your body’s overall health and fitness.

Remember, humans only started eating three square meals a day relatively recently. And it’s only over the past century that humans began eating three carb-heavy meals a day.

In contrast, consider a Paleo-era human, genetically identical to human today, yet built to survive, even thrive, in an environment where food was often scarce. A Paleo-era human would periodically go many hours, sometimes days, without eating at all. Which brings us to some of the key central concepts behind intermittent fasting:

1) Our bodies were not designed for the consumption of regularly timed, full-size meals.

2) Our bodies are actually designed for occasional periods of fasting.

3) Our bodies benefit from these occasional periods of fasting.

Bonus! 4) Based on my experiences, intermittent fasting actually isn’t all that bad or even all that hard to do.

A disclaimer. I am not an expert in these areas. Not even close. My goal for today’s post is merely to talk about my own experiments with intermittent fasting. If you’re curious about attempting your own intermittent fasting experiments, or if you’d like to learn more about this domain, be sure to look over the various resources at the end of this post. There’s plenty of reading material there to get you started.

A 17-hour fasting window
So, with that as background: what, then, is a fasting window, and what does it do for you?

Simple: it’s just a period of time during which you don’t eat. And this fasting period causes your body to burn its own body fat through a process called autophagy, where the body in effect metabolizes itself in a way that helps our cardiovascular health, our fitness and our body composition.

Like I said, I’ve been experimenting with intermittent fasting, and I’ll share an example from my own experience of a recent 17-hour fasting window. And while it may seem like a really long time to go without food, it’s actually not as big a deal as you’d think.

First, I had an earlier than normal dinner, finishing eating at about 6:00pm, perhaps an hour earlier than typical for us here at CK. I also made sure the meal was predominantly protein-based. I did my regular post-dinner things: reading, relaxing and so on, but didn’t snack, consume alcohol or ingest anything other than water. Then, I went to bed around 10:00pm.

The next morning I got up at 6:30am, but instead of eating breakfast at my normal time (around 8:00 or 8:30am) I deferred breakfast until after my workout. At 9:30am I went to the gym and did my usual workout, which lately includes things like squats, deadlifts, some light running and other weightlifting exercises. When I got back it was just after 10:30am. I then waited about a half hour, and at 11:00am, I ate two eggs and a dollop of peanut butter, a meal containing about 30 grams of protein and plenty of satiety factor to carry me well into the afternoon.

So, with my simple breakfast at 11:00am, I had just completed a 17 hour fasting window--the time difference between 6pm the night before and 11am the next day.

During this time, my body first obtained fuel from my meal from the night before. At some point, however, it began extracting the fuel it needed from my body’s own stores of body fat. Which is the whole point of all of this in the first place.

What was most striking about this 17 hour fasting window, shocking even, was that I was never hungry at all, thanks to two things:

1) a high-satiety, low-carb meal the night before,
2) the fact that working out makes your hunger temporarily disappear.

I only really started to think, “hey, it might be kind of nice to eat something” at around 10:45, just a few minutes before I actually ate.

One more thought. Every time you sleep through the night, or at least avoid creeping downstairs and raiding your fridge in the middle of the night, you execute a fasting window of around eight hours. Which means the easiest way to apply intermittent fasting is to incorporate your sleeping period, but then add a couple hours of extra fasting on either side. Start by eating a slightly earlier dinner and deferring breakfast a little the next day. This can get you to a simple ten- or even twelve-hour fasting window quite easily with minimal changes to your routine. Try it.

Once again, we humans weren’t designed to eat every few hours--as much as we tend to get hungry with that kind of timing and think we need to eat. We certainly weren’t built to eat regular, full-size meals consisting of carb-heavy processed foods. And, in an unfortunate case of dietary circularity, it’s the carb-heavy foods themselves that put us on a hunger roller-coaster, making us think we need more food every few hours.

Finally, I’ve repeated this intermittent fasting experiment many times in the past few months, with fasting windows ranging from 12 hours to 19 hours, to see what the results would be. At what point I feel unwell? Would I ever experience severe hunger?

The answers, shockingly, were never and no. I experience some modest sensations of hunger once my fasting window gets beyond 16 hours, but nothing severe and nothing I couldn’t handle. Further, it was interesting to have a chance to observe those mild-to-moderate sensations of hunger. If anything, they were good tests of my Stoic principles, which made me all the more grateful and appreciative of the food I later ate.


Read Next: Minimum Viable Progress


Resources/For Further Reading:
1) The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Arthur De Vany, a pioneering thinker of Paleo eating and fitness.

2) Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha by John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein. Extraordinarily useful (though male audience targeted) book on fitness and diet with excellent discussions on fasting techniques.

3) Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the entire book is useful, but specific to fasting see pages 365-369).

4) Highly useful four-part series on various aspects of intermittent fasting at Inside Tracker: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

5) See also CK’s ragingly positive review of Arthur De Vany’s The New Evolution Diet

6) CK on how to apply “Antifragility” to our diets--and eat better for a lot less money.

Waiting Until We Are Hungry Before We Eat

We can (as Diogenes observed) greatly enhance our appreciation of any meal by waiting until we are hungry before we eat it and greatly enhance our appreciation of any beverage by waiting until we are thirsty before we drink it.
--William B. Irvine, from A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

In the modern world, nearly all of us can eat and drink whatever we want, whenever we want.

But wait: isn't food all the more delicious when we wait a little while for it? Even a simple glass of cold water becomes delicious when we're deeply thirsty.

Voluntary Discomfort
In his exceptional book A Guide To the Good Life, William Irvine explains how the Stoic philosophers sought different forms of voluntary discomfort as exercises of discipline, gratitude and pleasure. Yes, you read that right: pleasure. There are many modern misconceptions the Stoics, and one of the biggest is the inaccurate belief that the Stoics were "stoic" in the modern sense of the word, meaning unemotional or Spock-like. On the contrary, they knew how to enjoy the good things in life, and they frequently sought them out.

But the Stoics weren't hedonists. Yes, they sought enjoyment, but they also sought the understanding and acceptance that the things that bring us pleasure can also be lost. And they practiced voluntary discomfort by "going without" from time to time in order to better understand this concept. After all, knowing you can lose something--or worse, that it can be taken from you--helps you appreciate that thing even more.

Of course, eating and drinking is something we often taken entirely for granted. We do it every day, repeatedly, often with little enjoyment and sometimes without any thought at all. Which, if you think about it, is not only unhealthy but a little depressing too.

So, why not, periodically, wait a little bit to eat? Why not experience an hour or two (or more?) of hunger from time to time, and therefore turn that meal you waited for into a significantly more satisfying experience?

Stoic Kurtosis
Interestingly, this plays right along with some of Arthur De Vany's ideas about kurtosis: the concept of introducing variability, randomness and even occasional meal-skipping into your eating and exercise schedule. Our bodies were built for varying meals and varying caloric intake. Despite all our modern cultural programming, we were not built to eat three predictably-timed square meals a day.

Of course, just the mere act of waiting until we're hungry to eat is practically unknown for many modern people. Just look around. Judging by our society's obesity rates, we eat mindlessly, all the time, and whether we're hungry or not.

Isn't this typically ungrateful First World behavior? Maybe we could take a page or two from the Stoics, and wait until we're hungry before we eat.

Readers, what's your take?


Read next: Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Food Pyramid: Industry Conspiracy?

I'd like to offer one more perspective on the Broken Food Pyramid, one I'm guessing won't be a popular one: I don't share the seemingly widely-held view that the reason we have a carb-heavy Food Pyramid is because "industry" influenced it.

Don't get me wrong: industry did have influence on the Food Pyramid. Most government guidelines, recommendations and even regulatory actions are made in collaboration with many organizations, including industry. What I'm disputing here is the conspiracy view that the Food Pyramid was made deliberately carb- and grain-heavy in order to enrich the food industry. Note the difference.

Remember, this is the same government that issued the Eisenhower dollar, invaded Iraq (twice) and can't seem to regulate its own banking system. Could our government really engineer a multi-decade, grain complex-enriching conspiracy by issuing false dietary guidelines meant to fool us into eating more carbs?

It would be a lot easier--and far more profitable for everyone involved--to simply export our extra grain (as the grain industry did, interestingly, throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s), rather than create some complex dietary scheme to make sure American citizens ate everything up here at home.

Further, while some industries might have benefited from the Food Pyramid, other politically powerful industries got severely shortchanged. The beef/meat industry is quite powerful, as is the dairy industry, and both punch well above their weight in political influence. So why does the Food Pyramid give them a mere 2-3 servings each when the grain group got 6-11? The sugar industry is powerful too: So why does sugar get a desultory "use sparingly" recommendation?

Each of these industries on their own should have been powerful enough to sway things, and certainly the collective political power of all of them was orders of magnitude greater than the grain industry’s power by itself. So how did Big Grain get so lucky and win the lottery here? It just doesn't add up.

Careful students of logic should note the leap involved between the appearance of someone benefiting and the default presumption of a conspiracy. If this were all a conspiracy to satisfy industry greed, the Food Pyramid would have come out looking quite a bit different: it would contain a lot more meat, more fat, more dairy--and far fewer breads, grains and pasta. Ironically, it would be far healthier!

It's not a conspiracy nor industry greed that drove the Broken Food Pyramid. Rather, there's a far simpler and more rational explanation: our government, based on a once-faulty and now-changing scientific consensus, arrived at a misdirected set of dietary guidelines. Guidelines it's only lately coming to correct.

So let's keep correcting them.


Read Next: But What If Your Farmer Doesn't Want To Know YOU?

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Broken Food Pyramid

Marcia at Frugal Healthy Simple recently wrote an excellent, heartfelt post about the Food Pyramid, and how, basically, it's just wrong. It contains too many grains, not enough proteins and fats, and far too many carbs. It's an improper mix of dietary inputs.

But it's worse than just being wrong. When the Food Pyramid came out some twenty years ago, people followed it. Marcia included. And with reason: after all, isn't the government here to help? It has our best interests at heart, right?

Right?

Now that more and more of us know the Food Pyramid's wrong, many of us can't help but wonder: were all our efforts to lose weight, and all those years struggling with our diet and with excess body fat... were we sabotaging ourselves all along by eating too many carbs? As our own government instructed us?

I think you'd be completely justified for being angry.

Granted, people--and governments--make mistakes. And the scientific consensus on many, if not most, issues is in a constant state of flux and iteration. In fact, I'm working on a post right now about the various health and dietary myths that have been thoroughly debunked over the past few decades (the Food Pyramid's "six servings of healthy whole grains per day!" is just one of many), and it really makes you wonder: how many things out there do we believe are true that we just haven't debunked yet?

Think about this for a few minutes and it will make you very humble, not just about government dietary guidelines, but about most the things we think we know. This is the reason Marcia's post--and the entire Broken Food Pyramid debate--resonates with me.

There's often a process of consensus-building that makes some subject domains, dietary science included, appear more "decided" than they really are. In fact, we see consensus thinking in many areas: economics, investing, the social sciences, and not to mention in ideologically contentious domains like climate change, environmental policy, trade policy, tax policy and so on.

But just because elite "experts" reach a consensus and hand it down to us doesn't mean things are as conclusive as they appear.

Worse, even after thinking begins to change in a given domain, the overall scientific consensus lags this change in thinking--often by years, even decades. And since government policy recommendations are determined by whatever consensus is in effect at the time they're created, it's the very last to adjust.

We're seeing this right now with the Food Pyramid. And the process is glacial, to put it diplomatically.

And in the meantime, citizens like Marcia and many, many others are coming to realize: they wished they'd never seen these guidelines when they came out twenty years ago.

Read Next: Who's Watching the Watchdogs? Ethical Problems in the "Ten Riskiest Foods" Report By the CSPI


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Review: The New Evolution Diet by Arthur De Vany

"There is no failure, only feedback."
--Arthur De Vany

Readers, I'd like to recommend an extremely useful and insightful book to you: The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Art De Vany.

I'll start with the author's three central dietary and fitness principles:

1) Do not count or restrict calories.
2) Do not starve yourself, but do go hungry episodically, for brief periods.
3) Exercise less, not more, but with greater playfulness and intensity.

Interesting. Now granted, I know people who have had exceptional success counting calories. And I've seen (and have myself followed) advice to do extended exercise, particularly extended cardio workouts like distance running.

The thing is, most of us hate doing these things. Which is why a book that suggests you do neither is pretty intriguing.

Early on in his book, De Vany offers what I consider to be one of the best brief explanations I've ever read of why we humans are literally built to overeat and underexercise:

"We humans evolved when food was scarce and life was full of arduous physical activity. Hence, our bodies instruct us to eat everything we can lay our hands on and to exert ourselves as little as possible.

That's right. We are, in essence, hardwired to be lazy overeaters.

This was a perfect strategy for success thousands of years ago. No human could survive in 40,000 BC unless he or she ate anytime food was available. Our ancestors knew that famine was always close at hand--feast now or suffer tomorrow. They were also careful to expend as little energy as possible, because burning more calories than absolutely necessary was a threat to survival."

In short, the human body was designed for an insecure food environment. Which is why it's so easy to get fat today, when we're constantly surrounded by an abundance of delicious, tempting and high-calorie food. And it's not like we need to chase down any of this food either! In the mechanized, modern era you can go your whole life without intense exercise. It's easy to see why obesity is our primary health problem.

Thus when De Vany turns the standard diet/fitness advice on its head, it's with full awareness of this critical concept: our bodies are not designed for the modern era. Therefore, we need to imitate--as much as is practicable in modern day-to-day life--the food and fitness environment we are designed for. This is the central thinking behind paleo living. Not just paleo eating--but paleo exercising too.

De Vany tells you to mix your exercise routine up so you won't get bored, and to challenge your body in new and different ways to avoid repetitive stress injuries. Boring, repetitive exercise isn't a recipe for getting in better shape: it's a recipe for, well, getting bored. And quitting.

And De Vany's notion of avoiding boredom extends to eating too. Just as Mother Nature never intended us to exercise on a fixed, rigid schedule, she never intended us to eat on a fixed, rigid schedule either. The human body craves--and benefits significantly from--variation and randomness.

Which is why this book calls for a widely varied diet, not some self-parodying low-carb diet of slabs of meat and bacon. Carbs aren't forbidden: they're okay in moderation--usually in the form of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables. The author also suggests experimenting with brief and intermittent periods of fasting: "just remind yourself that your ancestors endured many episodes of hunger and that your metabolism is designed to handle brief fasts."

And while junk foods like processed chips, sugary cereals and soda are generally off limits, even the author himself indulges in a once-a-month piece of cheesecake. This flexibility and allowance for enjoyment is the central strength of De Vany's eating style. As De Vany says: "We are not trying to literally live in the Ice Age, just to emulate aspects of that diet."

Finally, The New Evolution Diet offers readers striking insights and new, healthier paradigms for how to think about food, fitness and the human body. Ideas like:

1) Focusing on building muscle instead of dropping pounds.

2) Using the 80/20 Rule and other non-linear paradigms (e.g., cascade effects, butterfly effects, even outright randomness) to think about the body and how it functions.

3) Adding "kurtosis" in various forms to your life. This might mean adding significant randomness to your workout routine, or varying your diet significantly. As we mentioned before, the human body craves variation. This is the kind of stuff that can make life fun, unpredictable and--most importantly--healthier.

Readers, I strongly recommend this book. It’s rational, practical, thought-provoking and an easy read. Have a look at it and let me know what you think!

Finally, a few things I'm planning to add to my life after reading this book:

1) Add some light exercise before dinner to raise my insulin sensitivity. De Vany explains that this helps train your body to turn food into fuel rather than fat.

2) Make my exercise routines much more varied and unpredictable. I'm the kind of person who craves steady routine, so this may be a challenge for me.

3) Add a few specific foods to my diet: canned salmon and canned shellfish. Both are great sources of lean protein, vitamins, minerals and essential oils.

4) I'm going to try some small personal experiments with intermittent fasting and see what the effects are.

Share your thoughts!





Related Posts:
Cookbook Review: Mollie Katzen's The Heart of the Plate
Ask CK: How Do I Find Good Books To Read?
Interview with Jayson Lusk, Author of "The Food Police"
Review: Wheat Belly by William Davis

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

30 Grams of Protein Within 30 Minutes of Waking Up

I know I've been kind of hard on Tim Ferriss in the past here at Casual Kitchen, but there's one idea that I got from him that changed my mornings forever:

Eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.

It's a great dietary rule of thumb because it's simple, flexible, and easy to remember. And this easy-to-employ diet hack drives three significant benefits:

1) You'll have a steady blood sugar level for hours after eating, which helps keep you in a calm, focused mental state. This is the ideal state for creative or knowledge work, and it's helped my writing immensely.

2) 30 grams of protein will give you complete satiety for up to 3-4 hours. You won't feel hungry and you won't need to eat.

3) Finally, this is an extremely flexible rule. The world won't come to an end if you eat 24 grams of protein one hour after waking up. You'll still capture all the benefits.

Contrast this with a more typical breakfast of fruit, or worse, starchy, sugary branded boxed cereal. These foods merely put you on a hunger roller coaster, leaving you craving still more carb-rich food within an hour or two of eating. Result? You eat twice as many calories and twice as often, yet you still feel hungry. Pointless.

What kinds of foods can you eat to achieve 30 grams of protein? Here are some ideas:

A dollop or two of peanut butter (7 level Tablespoons yields about 30g protein)
2-3 fried or boiled eggs (about 6-8g protein per egg, depending on size)
3-4 handfuls of nuts (almonds, walnuts, peanuts, cashews, etc.)
A few pieces of good quality breakfast sausage
1 can of tuna (about 40g protein)
A whey- or soy-based protein shake (a typical serving size contains 30g protein)
Canadian-style bacon or ham (5-6 oz yields about 30g protein)
Cottage cheese (½ cup yields about 15g protein)
Hard cheeses (yield: roughly 10g protein per ounce)
Unsweetened yogurt (roughly 10g protein per cup)

Obviously you can mix, match and combine any of the above. Best of all, none of these food items costs very much money--in stark contrast to branded boxed cereal, which is far more expensive, far less healthy and far less filling.

This protein-based meal technique is easy to remember and it easily solves the "what do I want for breakfast?" problem. Try it, and let me know what your results are!

Related Posts:
Eat Less, Exercise More Doesn't Work. Wait, What?
How Do I Follow the Wheat Belly Diet?
Why Box Wine Is Better
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Why It's REALLY Worth Weaning Yourself Away From Sugar

Today's 650-word post could save you tens of thousands of empty calories per year.

My lovely wife Laura is training for her first marathon, so she's carefully evaluating what she eats with an eye toward eliminating some of the lower-quality inputs into her diet.

It led her to a truly shocking discovery. She discovered she was eating more sugar than she realized. A lot more. And it was all just hiding there in a couple of innocuous daily beverages she hardly even thought about.

First of all, every morning she'd have one or two cups of half-coffee/half-milk, each with two spoonfuls of sugar. And then, on most evenings, she'd have a big mug of hot cocoa--with another two spoonfuls of sugar.

Hey, she's got a sweet tooth, and that's okay. I'm a black coffee guy and I've always thought sweetened coffee was kind of girly, but hey, that's just me. Vive la différence.

Of course, logically, Laura could easily see that the idea of pouring five or six spoonfuls of sugar down her throat every day wasn't exactly healthy (especially when you phrase it that way).

So the first thing she did was mentally reclassify her evening hot cocoa as an infrequent "special treat" rather than a less-than-special daily habit. Then, she cut back to just one cup of coffee per day. Then, she (actually me, since I fix her coffee most mornings) weaned herself away from so much sugar in her daily coffee.

How? Simple: I just gradually cut down on the sugar I added to her coffee. I worked down from two rounded spoonfuls to a spoonful plus a little. She never even noticed. Then I worked down to just a spoonful. She still never noticed. Then a little less than a spoonful.

Well, at this point, she noticed. But within a few days she got used to it.

Now, after a short couple of weeks, she's happily drinking her coffee with less than a full rounded spoonful of sugar. She likes it exactly the same as before, and she's experiencing no feelings of deprivation whatsoever.

And yet she's eliminated more than four rounded spoonfuls of sugar a day from her diet.

What we found was that your palate can be conditioned away from sugar just like it can be conditioned away from salt. Given time, you can teach your mind and your taste buds to not want quite so much sugar.

Okay. Here's the important part. Laura knew that it would be a good idea to cut this incremental sugar out of her diet. But then we did the caloric math. This is where it got disturbing.

Geek that I am, I actually weighed the amount of sugar in a "rounded spoonful" of the spoons in our kitchen, using my trusty EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale. We have typical, medium-sized spoons in our kitchen--not baby-sized, but not ginormous IKEA spoons either. And a "rounded spoonful" of sugar worked out to exactly 8 grams.

So here's the (mortifying) math: at 8 grams per spoonful, Laura's daily coffee/hot cocoa habit added up to 32 grams of unnecessary sugar per day. That's 960 grams (or 2.1 pounds) of sugar a month. Or an astonishing 25 pounds of sugar a year.

Expressed in caloric terms, the math is even more astonishing. Start with the fact that a gram of table sugar contains about four calories. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Until you realize that eating 960 grams of sugar per month works out to 3,840 calories. Nearly two full day's worth of excess calories every month, assuming an average woman's 2,000 daily caloric intake.

Just wait. 32 grams a day x 365 days works out to 11,680 grams. Which means this annual excess sugar intake works out to 46,720 calories per year.

Forty-six thousand seven hundred and twenty incremental and largely unnecessary calories per year. That's nearly twenty-four days' worth of unnecessary calories.*

All in the form of a couple of easily forgettable daily beverages.

Readers, where do you think your empty calories hide? Share your thoughts below!


* A quick footnote: As I was working through the caloric math in this post, I simply couldn't believe the total sums I was arriving at. It didn't seem possible that I could come up with over 46,000 excess calories from what seemed like such a small, innocuous daily habit.

I checked and rechecked (and even had Laura check) the math, and I even reduced some of the assumptions too (e.g.: Laura actually cut more like five rounded spoonfuls a day out of her diet, not four, but I used four spoonfuls in the calculations above to be more conservative, and because the evening hot cocoa was a nearly-every-day habit, not an every-day-without-fail habit).

But I guess the conclusion here is that the little things really add up. I mean really add up. And if you have a daily soda, frappuccino or other sweetened beverage habit, you may be ingesting way, way more pointless calories than you realize over the course of months and years.


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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Dispute This! Negative Self-Talk And Better Health

Susie* had been careful and disciplined with her diet. For the last three weeks, she'd been paying extra attention to what she ate. She cut out sugary drinks and reduced her between-meal snacking. And what little snacking she did do was on healthier foods like unsalted nuts, fiber-rich fruit, and so on. She was starting to find real success changing her eating habits.

Everything was going great.... until last Friday.

That's when Susie went out with a big group of coworkers after work. It was fun. She had a couple of big, sugary frozen margaritas. Somebody ordered a big platter of chicken wings, and she ate... several. And then, for dinner, she had a huge burger and a ton of fries.

So when Susie woke up Saturday morning, this is what she said to herself:

Great job Susan. Really good. You really blew it with your diet, didn't you? Jeez, you are such a glutton. Absolutely no self-control. You've just ruined your diet.

Readers: what is Susie likely to do next? Do you think the odds are good that she'll return to her prior habit of cleaner eating? Or will her diet go off the rails?

Would you believe that Susie's own words play a gigantic role in determining the answer?

One of the most important insights in Martin Seligman's striking book Learned Optimism is the strong link between what Susie says to herself and her future actions. Let's take a moment and analyze her self-talk:

You really blew it with your diet
Jeez, you are such a glutton
Absolutely no self-control
You've just ruined your diet

What do these sentences have in common?

For one thing, they're judgmental and pessimistic. Deeply so. Dr. Seligman would say they are permanent, pervasive and personal. Sure, admittedly, Susie experienced a setback in her diet. But what she's doing here is taking a one-time mistake and extrapolating it into permanent negative traits. This is a single instance of poor eating, but according to her self-talk, she views it as "proof" that she's a diet-ruining glutton with no self-control.

Look, we all screw up occasionally. We're only human. And from time to time, we all use negative language when we're angry at ourselves for screwing up. Take it from me, an expert negative self-judger: it is really, really hard to avoid doing this.

The problem is, this negative explanatory style sets us up for future failure. Our negative explanations usually become self-fulfilling. With her negative self-talk, Susie is actually increasing the chances that she will revert back to her old, unhealthy eating habits.

So what's the solution? The solution is to train yourself to dispute these negative statements--and to do so instinctively. Here's an example of what Susie could say next:

No, wait. Stop. Just because I overate on a single Friday night does not mean I "blew it" with my diet. It does not mean I am a glutton. In fact I've eaten really well for three full weeks! If anything, that is proof that I do have a lot of self-control. I just had a one-evening letdown in my eating habits. There's no way my diet's "ruined." It's up to me to decide how I eat going forward.

Unlike the first set of Susie's statements, all of which are either false or cartoonishly exaggerated, these disputative statements have the benefit of actually being true.

In fact, it's usually quite easy to find evidence to support your disputations. As Seligman says: "most of the time you will have facts on your side, since pessimistic reactions to adversity are so often overreactions." We tend to catastrophize in reaction to our setbacks, and our minds reach for extremely negative conclusions. And once again, our negative internal explanations can lead us into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In Susie's case, it may mean actually behaving in the future like a glutton with no self-control. It's the exact result she dreads.

Okay. You've heard Susie's initial negative self-talk and you've heard her disputation of that self-talk. What do you think her most likely course of action will be now? I'd bet she gets right back to her established pattern of clean eating.

Our minds are always chattering away, constantly making predictions, judgments and explanations. And when we experience a failure or a setback, our minds instantly leap to the most dire negative explanation. Once again, the secret is to dispute that instant negative explanation. Change it.

Our observations of reality are both highly subjective and self-fulfilling. We owe it to ourselves to see ourselves in a positive--and accurate--light.

This post is gratefully dedicated to Dr. Martin Seligman and his book Learned Optimism.

* not her real name--in fact I pretty much made this person up.





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What Is An Antifragile Diet?

So if you agree that we need "balanced" nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal.
--From Nicholas Taleb's latest book Antifragile

The idea that every meal should consist of, say, a salad, a vegetable, a meat, a piece of fruit and a dessert is pretty much a complete fiction created in just the past few centuries of human existence.

Yes, you need a balanced diet. But you don't need every single one of your meals to be balanced. Moreover, your diet may actually be better balanced if you subject it to imbalances from time to time.

Roll this idea over in your mind and you'll arrive at some interesting implications. For one thing, it supports one of the fundamental pillars of the food philosophy here at Casual Kitchen: you don't need meat at every meal. Over a period of days and weeks, yes, of course, your body has specific protein needs you'll need to fulfill. But you do not need a fixed amount of protein every single day. In other words, consider that your body's protein and amino acid needs can be met flexibly, creatively and far less expensively without a daily helping of high-cost meats.

Further, we can find intriguing support for other central elements of low-cost eating. There's nothing wrong, for example, with building your diet almost entirely on low-cost, in-season fruits and vegetables. Don't worry if you eat mostly tree fruits, leafy greens and summer vegetables in the spring and summer--when, conveniently, these foods are least expensive. And don't worry if you completely switch away from these foods when they go out of season (and their prices skyrocket) in the fall and winter. After all, that's when you'll switch to those seasons' least expensive foods, like healthy cabbage, potatoes and root vegetables.

The idea that a "real" meal has to have a broad range of specific elements--that it must contain things like soup, bread and a salad of mixed greens with three and half grape tomatoes on it--is just an artificial expectation created for us by restaurants, the food industry and by our own presumptions of a proper life of modern convenience.

And of course, basing meals around these artificial expectations costs us an unexpectedly large amount of money, with little nutritional return. Long before the modern conception of a "balanced meal" ever came about, humans survived just fine. Your body will survive too.

We can go still further. There's nothing wrong with completely leaving out certain high-cost elements of our diet that we think we need. Consider your family's daily glass of refined, deoxygenated and overpriced Pure Premium orange juice. The idea that your day should start with citrus juice is nice, sure. But it's also an arbitrary idea created for you by modern society. Orange juice is just one example among many of foods and beverages modern eaters consume, most of which are heavily advertised, high-cost, and promoted to us to the point where we assume they are natural. You can safely eliminate these foods from your diet.

Thinking about food this way can be immensely freeing, not to mention immensely less expensive.

Here's the punchline: dietary variation is a positive stressor for your body and for your health. Try it. And remember: everything in moderation. Including moderation.

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter(follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.