Things Are Important Before They're Important

When does something become important?

Consider the life domain of exercise and fitness. For some of my friends and acquaintances, back in our twenties, "being fit" simply wasn't a priority. It just wasn't all that important at that point in life. However, now that they're in their forties and fifties, not being fit is a having a significant negative impact in their lives. Perhaps they've developed high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or maybe they're just not all that happy with how they look in the mirror.

All of a sudden, fitness is important.

Except now they've got 40 and 50 year old bodies that struggle to handle the training required to get fit. Many struggle with obesity--ironically, a stealth product of years of "training" in the habit of not exercising. Many will earnestly begin an exercise program, only to hit a wall of knee, ankle or other joint problems.

Not making fitness a priority turned out to have a cumulative impact. It compounded over the years. Each year it got harder to build a habit of regular exercise and harder to train without injury. Which made it harder still to build a habit of regular exercise.

So, when did fitness really become important?

Apparently, it became important well before you thought it did.

Consider another major life domain: retirement. I'm sure all readers here at Casual Kitchen have friends or acquaintances who didn't really begin thinking about retirement until they were in their forties or fifties--after many years of never really building a habit of saving money.

When someone never builds a habit of regular savings, that person, by definition, runs a high expense line relative to income (think of the exact opposite of my Extreme Savings post). Worse, many of these expenses are likely to be fixed expenses in the form of a large mortgage, car lease payments, other debts, etc. These are difficult-to-escape expenses, and they make adopting a serious savings habit still more difficult. Jacob Lund Fisker calls this "the lock-in" in his book Early Retirement Extreme.

Of course, the cumulative cost of postponing retirement savings is enormous. We've all seen those retirement compounding charts showing how much less a younger person needs to save per month compared to an older person in order to reach a certain money goal. A 25 year old saving $1,000 a month at, say, a 6% average annual return, will accumulate a million dollars by age 55. A 45 year old, however, needs to save $6,000 a month to get to a $1 million by age 55.

That 45-year-old needs to save six times as much every month, without having built any history of regular savings, and with a likely high and largely fixed expense line. A person considering retirement for the first time at age 45 faces a profound challenge--a far greater challenge than the 45-year-old considering exercise for the first time.

So, when did this life domain become important?

Once again, well before you thought it did.

Readers, share your thoughts!

Read Next: Tips vs. Strategy


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.

"Welcome the Disagreement"

Readers, a bonus post this week: I stumbled onto the following striking excerpt in Dale Carnegie's seminal self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People. The ideas here are simple, yet relevant to the sometimes controversial issues we discuss here at Casual Kitchen. There's help here for any instance where we're in disagreement with others. Read on and please share your thoughts.
**********************************

How to Keep a Disagreement from Becoming an Argument

Welcome the disagreement. Remember the slogan, "When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary." If there is some point you haven't thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake.

Distrust your first instinctive impression. Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best.

Control your temper. Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

Listen first. Give your opponents a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Don't build higher barriers of misunderstanding.

Look for areas of agreement. When you have heard your opponents out, dwell first on the points and areas on which you agree.

Be honest. Look for areas where you can admit error and say so. Apologize for your mistakes. It will help disarm your opponents and reduce defensiveness.

Promise to think over your opponents' ideas and study them carefully. And mean it. Your opponents may be right. It is a lot easier at this stage to agree to think about their points than to move rapidly ahead and find yourself in a position where your opponents can say: "We tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen."

Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.

**************************************
The advice above seems incredibly simple, doesn't it? Almost too simple, like much of what you typically find in run-of-the-mill self-help literature. In reality, however, this passage asks you to do something fairly sophisticated: it asks you to reframe disagreement into something more powerful and useful.

Most of us instantly put up barriers when we bump up against disagreement. Imagine if we repatterned that instinctive reaction and instead viewed disagreement as an opportunity to learn and collaborate.

A final thought: I'm always surprised by how much value I get each time I return to Dale Carnegie's book. How to Win Friends and Influence People is an innocent book from another era, not really the kind of book that would much get traction in today's era of rampant irony, snark and hipsterism. And yet the ideas in this book--listening first, seeking areas of agreement and common ground, giving honest praise and approbation and so on--are more true today than ever. Highly recommended.



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.

Five Laughably Easy Timesaving Tips in the Kitchen

Here at Casual Kitchen, we're all about making cooking at home as easy and efficient as possible. My goal is to show that even the most time-pressed family can cook great meals at home and literally save a fortune over restaurant meals or takeout.

In today's post I'll share some of our most useful tips and techniques to save time in the kitchen--with some unintended bonus sarcasm thrown in for free. Which of these tips do you use, and what additional ones would you suggest?

1) Be Coarse.

If you're making a recipe that requires a lot of chopping, you can cut back on a ton of prep time if you don't worry so much about the beauty and elegance of your knifework.

An example: With my popular Groundnut Stew post, does it really matter if the tomato is cut carefully or not? (Nope.) Does it matter if the cabbage is in uniformly-small, bite-sized pieces? (Nuh-uh.) Skimping on steps like these can save as much as half of the prep time in a recipe, making a significant dent in the amount of time you're forced to spend cooking.

Now I know there are some kooks out there who consider the chopping of an onion to be a meaningful, zen-like experience. I, however, consider it an obstacle standing between me and my dinner. If you can get yourself into a zen state while chopping onions, have at it. But for my part, I'd rather hack that onion to shreds as quickly as possible, get a healthy meal on the table and start eating. Then I'll be in my zen state.

2) Eliminate prep steps.

Even better than doing your prep work more efficiently, how about leaving it out entirely? If you're making something containing peeled potatoes, seriously, do those potatoes really need to be peeled? No! In fact, skipping that step not only saves time, it yields a more healthy and nutritious meal. After all, the skin of a potato contains lots of nutrients and fiber.

What about painstakingly peeling ginger before grating or mincing it? Not necessary. Taking the papers off of garlic cloves before putting them through your garlic press? Skip it.

Skipping steps like these can change some recipes from marathons to sprints. What types of prep steps do you normally leave out?

3) Get everything out first.

One of the least considered timesinks in cooking is the wasted time, motion and mental energy spent when you have to fish around in your cupboards and drawers for the items you need to cook, especially when there's food smeared all over your hands.

A classic example that I've faced with my Chicken Mole recipe: I'd be (coarsely) cutting up the chicken and then suddenly realize that I didn't have any of my spices out to season it. Guess what? In order to avoid getting chicken goo all over my kitchen, I'd have to wash my hands, dry them off, open the cupboard, pull out the spices, open the jars, remove the inner lids and then have them handy when it comes time to season the meat. My life is growing shorter by the year, and I've just squandered several minutes of it, needlessly.

Now when I cook, I always have spices, tools and anything else I need out and ready to go. When I want to season chicken or other meats, for example, I use my (clean) knife hand to shake the spices onto the chicken as I manipulate it with my (chicken goo-covered) right hand.

Any time you're working with doughs, batters, meats or other messy (or potentially unsanitary) foods, you can waste a ton of time when the things you need aren't at hand. Having everything out and within easy reach will speed your cooking process enormously.

4) Clean up at the end.

Most tasks can be done far more efficiently en masse, and cleanup is a classic example. Save all the cleaning and dishwashing until the end, and you'll avoid interrupting your cooking process with wasteful and inefficient time and motion. This can translate into big time savings.

Note, however, that there's a big exception to this rule: if you're cooking a recipe that has a natural lull in the middle of the cooking process, you can get the cleanup done during that lull, and thus make good use of idle time that would otherwise be wasted.

5) Double, Double.

One of the key factors I think about whenever I consider making a recipe is this: Can it be easily doubled?

A recipe that can be easily doubled offers an enormous advantage to the busy cook: the advantage of scale. For example, you can make a double-batch of my laughably easy Black Beans and Rice in literally the same amount of time it takes to make a single batch. Think about it: measuring out double the spices takes no extra time (uh, especially if you've followed tip #3). Cutting up a whole green pepper takes the same time as cutting up half, since most of your time goes towards washing it and cutting out the seeds. And how much time does it take to open a second can of black beans?

Each of these steps takes at most a few incremental seconds, which means doubling this particular recipe might cost you at most a minute or two in total. And yet you get double the food. Better still, you'll have laughably easy-to-prepare extra leftovers for the next couple of days! Remember, there is no easier way to get a low-cost and low-effort meal on the table than to reheat a delicious meal you've already made. Go ahead and choose your next few recipes with an eye for doubling, and sit back and enjoy the benefits.

A few final words:

Look, I still have readers who make the ludicrous claim that cooking healthy food at home is either a) too time-consuming, or b) too expensive. Spend 15 minutes perusing the recipe index here at CK, and you'll find dozens of easy and ridiculously healthy recipes that can be made in under 30 minutes, cost $1.00 a serving or even less, and yield days and days' worth of laughably easy to prepare leftovers.

Readers, what are your favorite time-saving tips in the kitchen?

Related Posts:
The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
How to Feel Less Hungry on Fewer Calories: Hacking the Satiety Factor of Foods
The Worst Lie of the Food Blogosphere
A Reader Asks for Help


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Resist Temptation and Increase Your Power Over Food

I've spent a lot of time over the past few months thinking about the concept of temptation as it applies to food, and this post is an attempt to organize some of my thinking.

And since this post is a bit on the long side, I'll start with the conclusion: We already have far more power over food than we think.

Yes, I know: some foods are irresistibly tempting (Doritos and dark chocolate are my twin demons for example). Moreover, it's obvious from just a cursory view of Western society that many of us have great difficulty restraining ourselves from eating far in excess of our needs.

But this doesn't mean we are hopeless victims of our temptations. On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. Food temptation is resistible--in some cases laughably easy to resist. And in today's post, I'm going to show you how the basic process of food temptation is nothing more than an easily breakable chain of events.

I'll begin my excursion into understanding temptation by taking a quick sidetrip to consider smoking, arguably the most tempting of all habits.

Here's a fascinating quote from the exceptional book The End of Overeating, in which author David Kessler describes smoking in a way that gives us excellent insights into the psychological aspects of temptation:

By itself nicotine is only moderately reinforcing, but that begins to change with the building of layer upon layer of sensory stimulation: The sight of the packaging, the crinkling sound of the wrapper, the tactile sensation as you light a cigarette and hold it between your fingers, and the sensory characteristics of the first puff all bolster the reinforcement. Factor in the times of day and the location where you often smoke, and smoking becomes conditioned behavior.

Okay. Does all this talk about layers of stimulation, conditioned behavior and habit sound familiar at all?

It should. Because this is exactly what happens when we're tempted with food.

Your Favorite Pizza Is Just Like Smoking
Imagine your favorite pizza from your favorite pizza joint. There's that delicious smell that hits you when you walk in the door--it fills you with anticipation. There's the visual appeal of a well-made pizza--your favorite toppings, the bubbling cheese, the crispy crust. There's the familiar tactile sensation of picking up a delicious piece of pizza in your hands. And most importantly, there's the complex and intense sensory experience of eating the pizza--the salty-sweet flavors, the various textures, even the masochistic pleasure of searing the roof of your mouth with sauce and cheese. All of these things combine to make pizza an utterly irresistible food.

When you compare Kessler's description of smoking to my description of eating a pizza, the details may differ, but the complex interaction of stimulus, anticipation, habit and conditioning is utterly identical.

It's Harder to Tempt You Than You Think
"Wait," you say, "I thought you said I was going to have more power over food! Now you're telling me that pizza is as tempting as smoking? How can I have any power over food with all these stimuli and other factors collectively ganging up on me?"

Here's the encouraging part--and it's the crux of my entire argument: These temptation factors do not gang up on us. Rather, they must combine. One factor--heck, even a few factors of temptation--isn't enough to tempt us.

Instead, several factors have to be in place: The food has to be extremely palatable. We have to be both habit-based and entirely mindless in our eating. We have to eat quickly and pay little to no attention to the food as we are chewing and swallowing it. The setting and environment have to be just right to encourage overeating. We have to be oblivious to the many tricks our mind plays on us--or that we can play on our minds--to mismeasure our appetites and the amount of food we've eaten. Even our mood and psychological state have to be just right--we need to be in a negative or mind-identified mental state.

Break Just One Link in the Chain
Do you see where I'm going with this? There's an entire chain of events and a complex set of conditions and habits that all must be in place to cause you to engage in unhealthy eating behavior.

We've now arrived at the most important truth in this post: if you can take just one (just one!) of the habits, stimuli or elements of behavior conditioning that we talked about above, and replace it with a more mindful and healthy habit, you will break the stimulus/response chain that leads to overeating.

Here are some ideas to get you started: Select mental images that help you become a mindful eater--like imagining yourself looking like Mr. Creosote or imagining yourself stumbling into a walk-in angioplasty clinic. Build the habit of chewing more slowly. Drink water between bites, or select any one of a long list of healthy habits and techniques from my post on how to avoid mindless eating. Start every meal off with a large serving of raw vegetables. Remove offending foods from your home so they aren't around to tempt you in the first place. (If you have more ideas to share that you've used successfully, please share them in the comments.)

The point is for you to set your conditions and choose your habits. Choose your conditions--don't allow yourself to be conditioned. Select healthy habits of your choosing, rather than habits that are mindless, unconscious or blindly reactive to your surroundings.

If it requires an entire chain of factors to cause us to be tempted by food, it therefore follows that it only takes one habit change--one new learned behavior--to break that chain and make yourself powerful in the presence of food.

Think: what single change in your habits or circumstances could you make in your life? Make it! You'll surprise yourself with the results.

The edifice of temptation is far less sturdy than you'd think. And you are far more powerful than you think.

A note to readers: I've spoken before about the exceptional book The End of Overeating by David Kessler. Once again, let me take this opportunity to recommend it to readers. Finally, note that Casual Kitchen receives a small affiliate payment whenever any reader decides to purchase books or other merchandise from Amazon.com using links from this site. There's no extra cost to you, and yet you play a big part in supporting my efforts here at Casual Kitchen. Thanks as always for reading!

Related Posts:
Mindful Chewing: How To Cut Your Calorie Intake in Half--Without Feeling Hungry
Food Hacks: How to Use the "Satiety Factor" of Foods to Your Advantage
My Seven-Day Raw Foods Trial
The Priming Reflex: How to Control Your Appetite (And Turn Your Back on a Million Years of Evolution)

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

A Few Thoughts on Habits and Food

Habits are efficient. They save time and mental bandwidth, and if chosen well, they help make us more effective.

With food, however, habits can be our worst enemy.

They enable us to eat mindlessly, causing us to consume food without noticing or remembering. They cause us to underestimate (usually dramatically) the calories we ingest. And, by enabling us to eat without remembering, they blot out our enjoyment of food entirely and make eating into a superficial experience.

If badly chosen, your eating habits can and will subvert everything you try to do with your diet and health.

Readers, what damaging food habits will you break this year? And what helpful food habits will you build?

Related Posts:
Speed-Weaning: How to End Your Caffeine Addiction in Just Three Days
Four Steps to Put an End to Overeating
How to Whine About "Big Food"

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!