It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
--Mark Twain
***************************
When someone makes a statement like "I'm too busy to do X" or "I don't have time to do X" what they're really saying "I've chosen to not make X a priority in my life."
Long time Casual Kitchen readers know this already. In fact, readers--especially those familiar with various other articles here on excuse-making--might go even further and say that these statements say even more: something along the lines of "I've chosen to not make X a priority in my life, and my ego wants to protect me from true responsibility for this choice, so it concocted an authoritative-sounding statement about my not having time."
Thus we can see this genre of excuse scripts for what it is: an interesting mix of virtue-signalling (I'm busy! I've got a lot going on!) and passivity (I don't have time so it's not my fault!) all rolled into one quick sentence.
Okay. Now, imagine if you were talking to someone and they made one of the following two scripts:
1) You know, I really should cook some of CK's laughably cheap and easy recipes, but I don't have time.
2) I ought to open up a brokerage account and start learning how to invest, but I'm just too busy.
Further, imagine that instead of smiling and nodding and changing the subject like a normal person, you went full autist on that person and actually told them what they were really saying:
"You know, when I hear that pitiful excuse for an excuse, I hear a interesting mixture of passivity and virtue-signalling. Your ego is getting off on feeling busy, while at the same time it disavows agency in making an important and helpful change in your life."
Assuming the person doesn't slap you, most likely they'd instantly disagree. They'd completely deny they were being passive, they'd deny they were disavowing their agency. And certainly they'd deny they were virtue-signalling. After all, nobody ever thinks they're virtue-signalling when they virtue-signal. It's circular like that.
In other words, people don't really understand their own minds, and they often don't understand the full meaning of what they're saying.
A quick tangent before I go any further. Yes, I know, it is possible for someone to literally not have time to do something. It's not always an excuse. Note, however, that the more fragile our egos are, the more desperately we want this to be true in our case! What's also deeply interesting about verbal scripts like these is how quickly and autonomically our brain spits them out, and how little we really know about the various implicit and explicit assumptions underlying those statements.
And now, finally, two-thirds of the way through this post, we get to the concept of epistemic arrogance.
We "know" we don't have time to do something. And yet by virtue of the way our ego structures this very statement, it cannot be true. Yet we really think we know! We declare it, we state it, and we vigorously defend against it if somebody questions it. We don't doubt ourselves for a second.
That is what epistemic arrogance is in a nutshell. It's knowing we know when we really don't know.
Now, wouldn't it be interesting to take the excuse scripts above and "un-know" them, and articulate the exact opposite instead? If only to see what it feels like?
1) I have time to cook some of CK's laughably cheap and easy recipes.
2) I am not too busy to open up a brokerage account and start learning how to invest.
Hmmmmm. Interesting.
Of course, these are epistemically arrogant statements too! You don't know that these statements are true either... that is, until you attempt them and succeed or fail. But note: there are substantial elements of self-fulfilling prophecy in both the negative statements and the affirmative statements, isn't there? Which makes it pretty obvious which sets of statements are worth stating, and which aren't.
READ NEXT: Expediency and Treadmill Effects
The Best Food Is Peasant Food
Any intermediate-level home cook knows about the concept of deglazing. And if you're a student of French cuisine, you'll also know that the idea of deglazing was an insight from French peasantry: it was a way take very little meat--or meat of not the greatest quality--and get a lot of flavor impact out of it.
Likewise, dishes like Coq au Vin also reveal the brilliance of a resourceful peasantry: take a not-particularly-prized type of meat (in this case an old, tough rooster who, uh, can't quite do his job any more), cook it for a long time in cheap red wine, et voila: a delicious, hearty and healthy meal with amazing flavors. A meal like this didn't cost a lot to cook a few centuries ago in rural France, and it doesn't cost much today.
Consider the lowly catfish: a perceived low-end fish that Cajun cuisine adapted to produce astonishingly delicious meals. See, for example, Paul Prudhomme-Style Fried Catfish, an easy and out-of-this world delicious recipe we featured here two years ago during our 30 Days of New Recipes trial. Rich people a century or two ago would never eat catfish. Today, they line up for it at the finest Cajun restaurants.
When I spent three weeks in Medellin, Colombia earlier this year, I sampled morcilla, an incredibly delicious sausage made with rice, spices and various unmentionable parts of a pig. I couldn't get enough of it--it was the best sausage I'd ever had. Which is why morcilla is popular all over Colombia by all classes of people. Once again, a food made by peasants, and made from inexpensive ingredients, becomes a delicious and culturally prized dish.
These are all simple examples, but they illustrate a truth we often state here at Casual Kitchen, a truth easily forgotten in our always-striving, always-craving culture: Really good food does not have to be expensive. It never was true, and it's not true now.
READ NEXT: Checkers... and Chess
Likewise, dishes like Coq au Vin also reveal the brilliance of a resourceful peasantry: take a not-particularly-prized type of meat (in this case an old, tough rooster who, uh, can't quite do his job any more), cook it for a long time in cheap red wine, et voila: a delicious, hearty and healthy meal with amazing flavors. A meal like this didn't cost a lot to cook a few centuries ago in rural France, and it doesn't cost much today.
Consider the lowly catfish: a perceived low-end fish that Cajun cuisine adapted to produce astonishingly delicious meals. See, for example, Paul Prudhomme-Style Fried Catfish, an easy and out-of-this world delicious recipe we featured here two years ago during our 30 Days of New Recipes trial. Rich people a century or two ago would never eat catfish. Today, they line up for it at the finest Cajun restaurants.
When I spent three weeks in Medellin, Colombia earlier this year, I sampled morcilla, an incredibly delicious sausage made with rice, spices and various unmentionable parts of a pig. I couldn't get enough of it--it was the best sausage I'd ever had. Which is why morcilla is popular all over Colombia by all classes of people. Once again, a food made by peasants, and made from inexpensive ingredients, becomes a delicious and culturally prized dish.
These are all simple examples, but they illustrate a truth we often state here at Casual Kitchen, a truth easily forgotten in our always-striving, always-craving culture: Really good food does not have to be expensive. It never was true, and it's not true now.
READ NEXT: Checkers... and Chess
Are You An Al Gore Environmentalist?
Al Gore Environmentalist: noun; Someone who tells everybody else how to save the environment from his air-conditioned 10,000 square foot mansion.
*************************
Over the past few months I've been paying closer attention to virtue signalling behavior. And in the domain of environmentalism we see lots and lots of it.
There are studies for example, that show that people make green purchases primarily to signal their status and "morality" to others. Or worse, when people feel they're being observed, they are significantly more likely to buy an environmentally-friendly or green product, but when not watched they default to a standard product. And worse still, they make their environmentally wasteful and consumerism-based purchases quietly, at home, online, where nobody can see.
True virtue is practiced in private, out of sight of others. Virtue practiced in public is always compromised, at least to some extent, by the fact that you get credit and status by your "virtue" being seen. And of course this becomes pure pseudo-virtue if you practice contrary behaviors when you think no one's looking.
Al Gore's problem lay in the fact that it's awfully tough to conceal a gigantic mansion. Or the fact that at one point he had the single highest residential electric and gas bill in the entire state of Tennessee, at some $30,000 a year in power usage. Practicing pseudo-virtue at this level is extremely risky: eventually someone's going to discover the inconvenient truth and point out the yawning chasm between what you preach and what you practice.
Al Gore-ism is perhaps the worst form of hypocrisy. But even more galling is the implicit truth that some people get to make the rules, but rules that are somehow totally optional for them. Not for us though.
Read Next: Peat Village: A Parable
*************************
Over the past few months I've been paying closer attention to virtue signalling behavior. And in the domain of environmentalism we see lots and lots of it.
There are studies for example, that show that people make green purchases primarily to signal their status and "morality" to others. Or worse, when people feel they're being observed, they are significantly more likely to buy an environmentally-friendly or green product, but when not watched they default to a standard product. And worse still, they make their environmentally wasteful and consumerism-based purchases quietly, at home, online, where nobody can see.
True virtue is practiced in private, out of sight of others. Virtue practiced in public is always compromised, at least to some extent, by the fact that you get credit and status by your "virtue" being seen. And of course this becomes pure pseudo-virtue if you practice contrary behaviors when you think no one's looking.
Al Gore's problem lay in the fact that it's awfully tough to conceal a gigantic mansion. Or the fact that at one point he had the single highest residential electric and gas bill in the entire state of Tennessee, at some $30,000 a year in power usage. Practicing pseudo-virtue at this level is extremely risky: eventually someone's going to discover the inconvenient truth and point out the yawning chasm between what you preach and what you practice.
Al Gore-ism is perhaps the worst form of hypocrisy. But even more galling is the implicit truth that some people get to make the rules, but rules that are somehow totally optional for them. Not for us though.
Read Next: Peat Village: A Parable
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!
********************************
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.
********************************
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.
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