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havingacrisisabtdeanw · 3 years

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I guess this is where I’m going to drop all my messy ass shit. TW related to food/eating, etc.

I am just hungry like, a lot of the time. When I was Really Depressed it was kind of hard to notice because my physical perception of my own hunger is really weird - like it’s rare that I straight up feel hungry. More often I just get very anxious. Now I feel pretty good most of the time, and when I don’t it’s usually because I’m hungry.

I was raised vegetarian from the time I was born. Not for religious reasons, my mom was Catholic and my dad was Protestant and they brought up me and my sister in the proud tradition of atheism. My mom was a product of 80s diet culture and decided that the Right Way to raise her kids was to raise them both vegetarian. She cooked very bland vegetarian food with little oil and basically no salt, which was pretty miserable to grow up on. She did not buy snack food that much, and from the time I was about 11 she sort of forced me to be responsible for what I ate, which turned into a “scrounge up whatever I possibly can from our not very well stocked kitchen.” To this day, my mom will eat a half cup of peas, some mashed potatoes, and 4 squares of tofu and be satisfied. My dad is not vegetarian. Apparently he tried it for about six months around the time I was born and it didn’t work for him. I think I might be more similar to my dad in this respect.

Here’s the thing, I EAT. But also I’ve gone to bed hungry more than half the nights for the past several months, then I wake up and feel like shit. The only chance I have I think to not feel this way is to just stop being vegetarian. And I’m working on it!! I am learning how to cook and eat chicken. It’s just such a slow process: for the longest time, my brain did not perceive chicken - or any meat - as being food. That’s starting to change as I associate the consumption of meat with more long-term satisfaction, but again, slow process. I’m not in the habit of cooking or eating meat, and when I default to vegetarian I start to go hungry again. I’ve surveyed my friends for chicken recipes and have quite a stock right now, it’s just a matter of actually cooking them. Ugh.

This doesn’t *not* matter so I figured I’d add it, but veganism/vegetarianism is very In Vogue right now. There are a lot of problems with the diets in terms of colonizer mindsets and etc, but I feel like it’s pretty accepted that these are “healthy” diets that, if you can abide by, are still good for your body. And like... No? Like I’ve eaten vegetarian for 25 ish years and have struggled with hunger like, the whole time. I get that different people have different bodies, it might work for some and not others, but that’s my point. The messaging in today’s culture is So Much like “everybody should be vegetarian.” To the point that I’ve talked about wanting to become not vegetarian to some of my friends and one was like “Why not just try other sources of vegetarian protein?” Like bitch, do you really thing that in the span of 25 years I haven’t tried and gagged on every fucking protein supplement on the market?? (They invariable make me throw up, to the point where protein bars that use supplements are often a no-go for me.) It’s like, COMICAL how many more grams of protein meat has than any non-meat source. Which! Makes sense! And guess what! Some people fucking need that much protein and don’t have 1 million dollars and a perfect gag reflex to shell out for expensive vegetarian substitutes!

I’ve also pretty much always been pretty active, and also have ALWAYS been frustrated by how hard of a time I have building muscle. Like I see people do certain things and it just seems impossible that I could ever get there. And again, whenever I tell this to people, they’re like “Yeah, it takes time, you probably need to tweak your workout routine or something.” It makes me insane. No. I don’t need to change my workout routine. I need to EAT MEAT. “Oh, I don’t really think it would make that much of a difference.” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Anyway, I’m going to try finding a nutritionist and hope it’s covered under my insurance. I’m so frustrated and tired. I woke up this morning and just wanted to fucking die because of how hungry I was and how miserable I felt as a result. I ended up buying myself a chicken flatbread for breakfast and now I feel Revived but I’m still so fucking Exhausted by all of this shit.

#tw eating #vegetarianism #veganism #meat #im just so fucking tired

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biohackerblogger-blog · 4 years

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Biohacking and Science: A solution for most of your problems

In this article I’m going to be discussing biohacking—what it is and the different aspects of human biology an individual can improve (or “hack”, if you want to call it that) to optimise their life and cognition. In the next blog I’ll discuss the specific improvements I’ve made in my life and their scientific justifications—with an in-depth focus on nutrition, supplementation and cognitive-enhancement.

Biohacking as defined by merriam-webster is “biological experimentation done to improve the qualities or capabilities of living organisms especially by individuals and groups working outside a traditional medical or scientific research environment”.

While that sounds dramatic, the term could also be described as do-it-yourself biology—making small, incremental changes to your diet, habits and life to optimise your cognition and life expectancy. This hobby likely originated in Silicon Valley, a place popular in many trendy self improvement hacks: The keto diet, intermittent fasting and microdosing to name a few.

We are living in an era of excess. Western supermarkets are packed full of processed, sugary, fatty products that people cling to as comfort food. Social media and smartphones have been tweaked to be as addictive as possible. Even television has been replaced by on-demand streaming services that provide countless hours of mindless oblivion to addicted viewers—so much so that “binge-watching” is now a recognized term in many dictionaries. This combination and more has led to the shortening of the average attention span.

Coincidentally, it feels like every other person in recent generations seems to suffer from some form of ADHD, depression or other mental health issues.

Me, technically a part of generation z, am no exception.

I’ve been an underperformer most of my school career, with every parent-teacher meeting ending the same way: “Alexandru is a very bright boy but he doesn’t seem to be reaching his potential in class.”

I daydreamed, lost focus often and was often unmotivated when tackling complex tasks. My mom has practiced psychiatry for 2 decades and during my last year of high school I saw one of her colleagues who eventually diagnosed me with ADHD.

This shook me. I had believed that I was just a lazy person, not working hard enough but now this doctor was basically telling me that it wasn’t my fault; That I had a learning disability that would always put me at a disadvantage to other “functional” people.

As I made my way through university the same issues kept coming up over and over again and I started feeling hopeless. Medication seemed to act as a bandaid on the problem, working as intended inconsistently. Is this what the rest of my life was gonna be like?—Craving achievement while lacking the motivation to acquire it?

Nahhhh, I wasn’t going to let some abstract diagnosis prevent me from prospering in life.

Enter biohacking:

In my spare time at uni I began researching ways of “curing” my ADHD. The goal: Improving my attention, motivation and cognition anyway I could. I’m a scientist, so it only made sense to solve my problems with science. Little did I know I wasn’t so much as curing a disorder as I was just finding ways to optimise my life using scientific knowledge. I tried different lifestyle changes and recorded the positive benefits of each one—Basically running my own scientific experiments on a sample size of 1. Biohacking is basically tweaking your biology to improve your life.

Diet

As I mentioned before, supermarkets today are full of horrible, delicious processed food. It’s expensive eating healthy and it’s difficult to resist the allure of a greasy portion of chips. Regardless, I think a large percentage of the population seriously underestimate how much your diet impacts your day-to-day life as a human being. A heavily debated study found that judges tended to give harsher sentences just before lunch due to hunger (This study has argued about for years). If even people who practice being impartial for a living are at the mercy of their own biology—that means so are you.

Your body is a complex machine, requiring certain amounts of macronutrients (protein, carbs, fats) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals) to carry out all of it’s processes efficiently. If any of these numbers are skewed, the machine won’t run smoothly. You can optimise your diet in a number of ways depending on your goals, but the FDA and similar organizations provide recommendations as to how much of each nutrient an average individual requires in a day.

Many of the micronutrients have important roles in our day-to-day lives which becomes apparent when we are deficient. Magnesium plays a huge role in good-quality sleep while vitamin D is important for healthy bones and mood. The world health organisation provides guidelines for what they consider a healthy diet which contains healthy doses of all these nutrients. Obviously, we’re human, not superhuman and we can’t always have a perfect diet all the time. There’s no shame in supplementing your diet artificially, just don't use pills as a replacement for healthy eating habits. Getting blood work done can help you identify which vitamins and minerals you're deficient to inform your dietary changes or supplement purchases.

If you're looking to improve cognition, omega-3 fatty acids are a well-researched staple supplement that is found in high quantities in fish. I could write a whole article on cognitive enhancement and supplements—so I’ll save it for the next one.

If weight loss is your goal maybe consider reading up on the science of the keto diet (a fat heavy diet that pushes metabolism into burning fat) or experimenting with alternative eating habits like intermittent fasting. Hell, I hear great things about going vegan nowadays and you’d be saving the environment while you’re at it.

Play around with it, optimise it for your goals and give supplements a try.

Exercise

The NHS recommends 75-150 minutes of exercise a week for the average individual. Obesity continues to be a huge issue in this country and others so more still needs to be done to encourage public fitness. It seems that many people make the mistake of thinking of exercise as a distraction from more important things like careers and making money, especially as they get older. They say they’re simply too busy and can’t find the time but in reality they’re decreasing their potential to excel in other aspects of their lives. There’s no point in making money if you’re too fat and achy to enjoy spending it.

Exercise is important. As Socrates eloquently puts it:

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”

Deep.

Endorphins produced by exercise make us feel great, we sleep better, we have more energy, we are more engaged with our work—Not a whole lot of downsides. For men in particular weight training is a very well-researched method or raising testosterone levels. A hormone my generation seems to be in significant lack of but in need of due to its important properties. Testosterone has anxiolytic properties, lubricates social interactions and is involved in providing an array of physical health benefits too.

Exercise is free, there are no downsides and a plethora of benefits. It doesn’t so much matter what type of exercise you’re doing so much as you’re doing it on a regular basis. It will suck, especially if you’re not accustomed to regular exercise but once you make it a habit (takes around 21 days to make something a habit), you’ll stop thinking about it and it’ll happen automatically.

Biohacking sure sounds a lot like self-improvement eh?

Sleep

In today’s day and age a good night’s sleep has become a rare treat. It’s like taking a gamble every night and hoping you wake up rested. As a student studying in the UK, I feel like I’m probably the most qualified person to say that. Sleep is very important for humans as pretty much all of our physical processes are regulated to some extent by our biological clock. A clock set by our circadian rhythm (Aka sleep cycle). Small perturbations to our sleep can seriously knock our daily rhythm out of line. Memories are written into your long term memory, waste products are flushed from the brain and the body readies itself for the new day. Everyone is aware their performance drops after a poor night’s sleep.

Here are some things you can do:

Humans need to go through about 4-6 sleep cycles per night to function adequately.

Sleep cycle = 90 minutes +/- 5 * 90m = 7.5 hours

Try to wake up after sleeping a multiple of 90 minutes. If you wake up during the middle of a cycle you’re more likely to feel groggy. 6 hours, 7.5 or 9 hours between bed and wake are what you’re looking for.

Avoid blue light before bed. I’m sure you’ve already heard this one but blue light from screens inhibits sleep. Try a blue light filter on your laptop—Flux is the free one I use and recommend.

Avoiding caffeine, sugar and carbs before bed works wonders for your sleep. A magnesium supplement does too.

Going to bed and waking up at the same time consistently will make sleeping easy and soon your whole body will adjust itself to the routine. The human body loves routine.

Anything else worth mentioning

Yes, meditation is a big one. Specifically mindfulness. If you haven’t already been preached to on the internet about the numerous benefits of meditation, it seems to improve pretty much everything about people.—The ultimate meta-habit for improving all aspects of living. It shows promise in ameliorating depressive symptoms, anxiety, self-control and a lot more.

The mobile app headspace provides a great starting point and for those that want a challenge and want to try their hand at a monk’s life check out Vipassana meditation. Their free week-long retreats are a crash course in mindfulness with lifelong benefits. I tried one this summer and was convinced it was a cult for the first 3 days.

I’ve seen huge improvement in my life after I started applying science to fix my problems. I hope I’ve managed to give an effective overview of my experience in biohacking and given you some well-researched places to get started. If you have a biological background I think it’s a shame not to use that background to optimise your life in every way you can.

Thanks for reading,

Alex

P.S. here’s a short rant:

I think (not all, but a lot) of the recent diagnoses of ADHD and depression could be “cured” by not treating it as an isolated malady caused by some bad genes and poor luck—but as a culmination of lifestyle choices and habits that could be improved upon. Exercise and diet should be the FIRST CHOICE intervention when it comes to treating things like ADHD and depression.

I believe diet and exercise should always precede a chemical solution to these ailments. There are hundreds of supplements and activities that have proven psychological benefits that could hugely benefit humans. Thanks again.

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martymango0 · 5 years

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Come On and Slam! Because We’re Making Jam!

Continuing with Christmas in July, let me tell you about my new skill I acquired this holiday past!

Y’all have no idea how hard it was to not make Space Jam jokes while I was actually doing this, but it was a surprise so I couldn’t and I was dying

[Image Description: two bags of sugar, a handle of burgundy, four boxes of pectin, and five flats of 8 oz mason jars laid out on a table]

My mom used to make jam pretty regularly, but it takes time & space - neither of which she necessarily had - so it’d been more than a decade since she did it last. However, I wanted to learn & we try to change up the contents of our Christmas gifts somewhat each year (it’s always foods, a mix of favorites & new stuff) so we decided to go for it!

We send Christmas boxes to over a dozen households every year plus we give to my mom’s coworkers & make sure we have a little left for ourselves, so even giving people only one jar of each flavor we made (and some larger households got more than one) it adds up to a whole bunch of jam! Mom taught me her two tried and true jams - strawberry & triple berry - plus we tried a new recipe for wine jelly!

Rest under the cut because I always take LOTS of process photos

SIDE NOTE: the difference between jam, jelly, preserves, & marmalade is what part(s) of the fruit you use. Jelly is just the juice. Jam & preserves are both crushed fruit but preserves have a higher proportion of fruit. Marmalade uses the rind, which is why you mostly see citrus marmalades.

One of the big things I learned about jam making is you get a lot of things dirty. Seriously, we used several bowls, measuring cups, the food processor (which, I think this was the first time we’ve used that in this house), both our pasta pots, and the canning pot plus spoons & whatnot.

Probably the hardest part of the whole process was getting the lids back out of the pot! See, you have to sterilize your jars & lids before you put jam in them, or else they won’t preserve properly and that way lies moldy jam & disappointment. The problem was the lids & rings stack into each other - especially the flat lids - and we don’t have particularly grippy tongs & the ones we have have an opening in them just big enough for the rings to slide into & get stuck, so getting just one of each out of a deep pot full of boiling water was... challenging, to say the least.

Other than that, making jam is mostly a matter of diligence & withstanding the heat.

[Image Description: three pots on a stove. the canning pot on the back left burner is very large, black, and has a lid. The pasta pot on the back right burner contains numerous mason jar lids. The pot on the front right burner is red and is empty]

[Image Description: recipes, a bowl, measuring tools, bags of sugar, and packets of pectin on a kitchen counter]

I’m not kidding about the heat. We did this in late November & we were in t-shirts & had the back door open & fans running and I was still overwarm. There’s just so much steam going into the air that with three burners on & two people working in a small space it got hot! I have so much respect for the women who did this sort of thing in more clothes in the summer before fans & air conditioning on a much larger scale without the convenience of modern equipment so they’d have food to survive the winter.

We used frozen fruits because it meant less waste since, except for the strawberries, neither Mom nor I are big berry eaters so we didn’t want leftover fresh fruit. It also meant we didn’t have to hull strawberries which saved us time & effort. Plus, using frozen meant we could do this whenever we wanted, not just when the berries were in season.

[Image Description: a woman running a food processor full of red berries]

You really get a sense of how much sugar is in things when you make it from scratch in a way you just don’t otherwise.

[Image Description: berries and sugar in a pot on a stove. Behind it is a pot of sterilized jar lids ]

One of the big things when making jam is foaming. Skimming off the foam while leaving the jam was one of my major tasks. It’s always going to foam up a little when you cook it down, but the more foam the less jam you get out of a batch. It’s not an issue with jelly because there you’re just using liquid & sugar, but the air pockets in the fruit pulp cause foaming.

The secret, I learned, to having less foam is to add a tiny bit of butter; the difference in amount of foam was staggering. The butter makes it harder for bubbles to form. We did one batch of each jam without butter because we had a vegan household amoungst our recipients, so I really go to see the difference!

I’ve since learned that processing your fruit & letting it chill overnight also apparently helps reduce foaming, so something to keep in mind the next time I try this.

[Image Description: a pot of jam midway though the process seen from above. Behind it is a pot of sterilized jar lids]

While you don’t need a canning pot to make jam - or even a food processor, for that matter - GET YOURSELF A CANNING FUNNEL! Seriously. I’m all up on the pro-multitasker/anti-unitasker train when it comes to kitchen tools (my goal in cooking is to make the best tasting food while getting the fewest number of things dirty) but this is an exception. Sure, you can fill jars without one, but you don’t want to. The canning funnel is a gift sent directly from God to save jam makers from hell & I will not hear otherwise. I did one jar without it & am never doing that again.

[Image Description: a red cooking pot of jam next to an open, filled 8 oz mason jar of berry jam and a canning funnel on a counter ]

The final step is processing! Gotta cook all those proteins into tasty, tasty gel.

[Image Description: four 8 oz jars of jam on a rack in a large pot of boiling water]

[Image Description: about two dozen processed 8 oz jars of jam cooling on towels on a table]

We did the jams first because they took the most work & because we knew those recipes were good. The last thing we did was the wine jelly. It’s made with table wine, specifically burgundy. As someone who doesn’t drink I had no idea who it was going to turn out. Also, buying that large a container of wine was weird.

[Image Description: an almost empty handle of burgundy]

I actually quite like how it turned out! It’s basically grape jelly (duh) but with a bit of a bite to it. I have made the most decadent PB&Js from this stuff; brown bread, peanut butter, & wine jelly make the best sandwich, y,all.

[Image Description: two stacks of sealed USPS flat rate boxes on the floor]

The verdict from my friends & family was overwhelmingly positive, so while we might not do this again this coming holiday, we’ll probably do it again sometime. Plus, I know how to make jam now; I will use these powers for evil good!

#cooking #food #jam #Marty cooks

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kindandketo-blog · 5 years

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Keto Diet For Vegetarians

What is a vegetarian keto diet?

We get asked quite often about a keto diet for vegetarians. Funnily enough, many years ago before I became a full-blown vegan I was basically, unknowingly vegetarian keto. It’s a great diet for a vegetarian, really effective and so much easier to reach the magic state of ketosis with the increased protein and fats.

Now, with a little Kind & Keto collective knowledge we can help you out with some killer keto diet for vegetarians info - served with some friendly advice, and a little vegan sprinkle in the mix.

Unlike the strict nature of the vegan diet when it comes to animal products, vegetarians do eat some animal products . Dairy and eggs are go to’s for vegetarian and many vegetarians will add fish occasionally to get their omega 3s.

Typically though, like a traditional vegan, the vegetarian diet is packed with carbs. If you’re a vegetarian with a high carb intake it’s my guess that you experience some, or all of the below gripes...which is why you’re here seeking out a better way - good for you!

Tired & lethargic Bloated & gassy Difficulty losing weight Craving carbs & sugars

Why is it so? You think you’re doing the right thing trying to eat all the ‘healthy’ foods right?

A nice balanced diet of all fruit and veggies, legumes, rice and pasta, eggs, dairy and soy products. Our bodies break down carbs into glucose to create energy. Apparently our system can be lazy as it’s easier to burn carbs and glucose if they’re around, rather than breaking down our fat stores. The ketogenic diet principle employs a high fat, low carb diet to encourage your bod to burn fats rather than carbs.

But wouldn’t high fat consumption make you put on weight?

Isn’t fat bad for us? If your goal is to lose weight, feeding your belly with fuel that would discourage it from burning fats isn’t likely to work. The low carb high fat keto diet aims to enter the body into a state of ketosis, where it metabolizes fats for energy.?

Ketosis is not only effective for losing weight, when reached and maintained correctly, it feels amazing.

In a ketogenic state your body changes, insulin levels reduce and fats are broken down. Your liver supplies energy to your brain via ketone production which can result, incredible clarity, increased energy and alertness. Which is really handy for a writer!

The right balance of fats, carbs and protein

The trick is to load your fork with good fats - as you likely have been trying to do as a vegetarian. Think avocados, good dairy (more on that below), nuts and seeds.

?Avoid processed, chemically altered trans fats altogether such as margarine, bakery goods and junk/fast food. Burger King veggie burger - Na Ah, no way..

When we consume good fats we feel satisfied for longer - sugary food, fruits and carbs simply make us crave more sugary foods, fruits and carbs.

What has to go? A vegetarian keto diet cuts out a lot of sweet high carb fruits such as bananas, apples, oranges and grapes. Most berries are here to stay - hooray!

You’ll need to bid farewell to starchy high carb veggies such as Potatoes, yams (sweet potato), beets and other below-ground growers. But lovely leafy greens, mushrooms, broccoli and cauliflower are all good guys.

Bread, pasta and grains. “WHAT?!” Says the vegetarian; “That’s three of my favourite foods!” Yep.

Hello vegan/keto bread, zucchini noodles and cauliflower rice, goodbye bloated gut and lethargy

Is soy good or bad? I’m soy confused Typical veggie diets are very high in soy. It’s a great source of protein, and who doesn’t love a stir fry? Tofu, soy milk, miso, tempeh and edamame are all veggie staples but some research suggests that woofing down the soy can wreak havoc on your hormones and gut health?. ?To avoid this, read more about Soy Free Vegan Keto Diet.

?The reason for this is to render the crops resistant to Roundup, so it can be sprayed with more Roundup in order to battle the bugs, without killing the bean. Makes sense - sounds suspect for us.

Unless you have a diagnosed allergy or reaction to soy, it’s a keeper in your meal plan. But the most important thing is to ensure your soy products are “Non GMO” organic. Our advice is to stick to minimally processed soy forms and cultured soy products - that is organic tempeh, tofu, miso and edamame.

Soy proteins to avoid or consume very sparingly are highly processed soy bars, yoghurts and meat analogs.

Check the labels closely - no soy bacon for you! Good news though, coconut bacon to the rescue ??

Egetarian Keto With Dairy? Here’s where you should be wary with your dairy. You know all that GMO soy we were talking about earlier? Corporate cattle are stuffed with GMO feed. How could it not wind up in their milk and cheese? If you love your cow’s milk you can find varieties made from humanely raised “no GMO” grass fed cows.

There are plenty of tasty Kind & Keto approved milks you could try. Almond milk and hemp milk are always on my shopping list. There’s also coconut, cashew, flax milk and many more keto-friendly varieties.

Cheese is a tricky one. .Mass produced pasteurized cheese kills all the good bacteria. In an ideal world (we’re working on it), try to find unpasteurized full fat cheese from a local farmer, made from humanely raised grass fed cows minus the GMO feed.

Then you can confidently keep the cheese and crackers! We have a cracking keto vegan flax cracker recipe. Remember to keep your eye on the carb intake. Harder cheeses generally have fewer carbs.

Alternatively, you could look at some vegan cheese alternatives that are super tasty. Just like milk, we can make cheese from nuts and seeds such as cashews, my personal fav macadamia, and coconut oil. Just check the labels for GMO soy or nasty additives.

So, Are You A Vego Ready To Go Keto? ?It takes a bit of trial and error and careful planning to get the balance just right. Due to the change in how our body creates energy we also lose a considerable amount of water stores - this causes us to lose electrolytes rapidly in ketosis and feel rather grim.

So you really need to concentrate on this diet, keeping up your fluids and salts. Listen closely and respond to your body along the way. Like every epic journey, there can be some twists and turns. Food is a blessing.

The most important things is to enjoy and be thankful for the earthly gifts we are so lucky to have access to.

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paleorecipecookbook · 5 years

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RHR: What’s the Best Diet for Diabetes?

In this episode, we discuss:

Why there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to your diet

Why quality always matters more than quantity

How to choose the right diet for you

The Functional Medicine approach to diabetes

Show notes:

The Paleo Cure, by Chris Kresser

“Carbohydrates: Why Quality Trumps Quantity,” by Chris Kresser

“Why Quality Trumps Quantity When it Comes to Diet,” by Chris Kresser

“Effect of Low-Fat vs Low-Carbohydrate Diet on 12-Month Weight Loss in Overweight Adults and the Association With Genotype Pattern or Insulin Secretion,” published in JAMA

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[smart_track_player url="http://bit.ly/2U77X72" title="RHR: What's the Best Diet for Diabetes?" artist="Chris Kresser" ]

This is Chris Kresser. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. This week we are going to answer listener question from Patrick, let's take a listen.

“Hi Chris, my name is Patrick. I'm really confused about a recent podcast and website. I’d be checking on mastering diabetes with low fat, high carb, vegetable diet, whole vegetable diets, and it's really annoying to see that this is completely opposite to what we have been following for the last years checking on you and different people. So, I'm really confused as I am sure a lot of people are, and I don't know if you're familiar with that, but I would like you to comment on that and see what we can get out of all these. Thank you.”

Thanks so much Patrick for sending in that question. It's a great question and I completely understand why you'd be confused. There are both sensible reasons for that, I think, and there are some frustrating reasons for that as well.

Why There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Your Diet

The reality is that there are many different diet approaches that can be effective for treating diabetes. I think this points to a larger issue that I've talked about many times on the show and written about extensively all the way back to my first book Your Personal Paleo Code which was later published as The Paleo Cure. There really is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to diet. Everyone has different circumstances, goals, health, conditions, genes, gene expression and all of that and more will affect what the best dietary approach is for that given individual. This is why you can see studies indicating that:

A low-fat diet can be effective for diabetes;

A low-carb diet can be effective;

A ketogenic diet can be effective; and

A Mediterranean diet can be effective.

Of course the other obvious thing about this is that all of those diets are far, far better than the Standard American Diet which is what the vast majority of people in this country in the industrialized world at this point are following. If you take a highly refined and processed flour and other foods out of people's diet, you remove sugar, you remove industrial seed oils, and you replace that with some combination of whole food, nutrient-dense choices like fish or meat, various animal products, nuts and seeds, and fruits and vegetables and some starchy plants even, that is going to be an enormous difference regardless of whether you're talking about a combination of those foods that's even vegan or vegetarian, Paleo or a ketogenic, Mediterranean or some combination or twist on any of those approaches is going to be a vast improvement over what the majority of Americans are doing.

When it comes to managing diabetes, which diet is best? Should you go low carb, low fat, or ketogenic? Check out this episode of RHR to find out how to choose a diet that works for you. #nutrition #optimalhealth #chriskresser

The other question is, what is the time frame that is being discussed in terms of the therapeutic effect of the diet? There are many diets that can be effective in the short term. We know this. Most of the diets and randomized trials that are looking at the effectiveness of diets are short term lasting only a few weeks. But there are now some some longer-term studies that have shown diets to be effective over a six-month to one-year to even 18 months to two-year period. I think the low-carb diet overall performs a little bit better in those longer-term comparisons than a higher carb, lower fat approach for both diabetes and weight loss, but it's not a huge difference.

Why Quality Always Matters More Than Quantity

The other thing is, what is the quality of the foods that is being consumed? I think this is the most important factor and I've again written quite a bit about this. If you if you Google “Kresser quality over quantity” you'll see some articles that I've written in the past few years. Historically we have fallen into this trap of what some call “nutritionism” or nutritional reductionism which is the idea that a calorie is a calorie, a carbohydrate is a carbohydrate, a fat as a fat regardless of the source of those macronutrients. Carbohydrate coming from white flour and sugar is no different than a carbohydrate coming from a piece of whole food or sweet potato.

Now I think if you say that to most people though they’ll intuitively know that that's preposterous and not the case and it doesn't fit with their experience at all. But that's really the assumption that most nutritional research has has made and has based on for the last several decades really. It’s only been recently that we started to see some studies that are actually designed to measure the impact of changing food quality rather than just the quantity of micronutrients that are consumed.

One was the Gardner Study of Stanford and they it was a randomized controlled trial that lasted for a year. They assigned randomized people into two groups, one was a low-fat group and one was a low-carb group, only the difference with this study compared to others was that they gave people specific instruction on what types of food to eat. No processed and refined foods, focus on nutrient-dense whole foods so that they weren't just addressing quantity of macronutrients, they were addressing quality. What they found was that both groups lost weight after one year. It’s quite a significant amount of weight, but there was not that much of a difference between weight loss between the low-carb and the low-fat group. That was a phenomenal study that proved that quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to weight loss especially over the long term.

How to Choose the Right Diet for You

There's a ton of argument, controversy, and just heated discussions on the internet about whether low carb is better or keto or low fat or vegan or Paleo, it's really quite sad actually because when you look at the data, what you find is that many of these approaches can be effective at least especially with the shorter term but even long term and then the question of which one is the best fit for you to follow as an individual comes down to your own individual circumstances, needs, and goals.

Also, it comes down to other considerations. I believe that a vegan diet is potentially dangerous over the long term for many people because of the potential for nutrient deficiencies if supplementation is not being done wisely and blood markers are not being tracked to make sure that the supplements are meeting the nutritional deficiencies because in many studies for example up to 70 to 80 percent of vegans were deficient in B12 even when they were supplementing.

We start to get into other considerations for which of these diets is best over the long term that aren't necessarily related to their efficacy in treating diabetes in studies or especially in the short term and other considerations might be, does that person just feel better on a higher-fat, lower-carb diet which is certainly the case for many people or do they have another condition or set of conditions that might actually contraindicate a very high-fat, low-carb or ketogenic diet. For example, do they have Hashimoto's and HPA axis dysfunction or so-called adrenal fatigue? Are they pregnant or are they trying to get pregnant or nursing?

There are so many other considerations that go into what the best choices even if the person does have diabetes and addressing their blood sugar and weight issues is the primary goal, there are always or often other conditions that are present too. Many people with diabetes that's not the only thing that they have going on. You have to look at all of those other factors and then consider what the best approach is over the long term based on those factors.

The Functional Medicine Approach to Diabetes

It’s really no wonder you're confused. I think anybody who's been following me and just general internet headlines about diet would absolutely be confused because you see apparently contradictory headlines all the time, but when you get beneath the surface and you start to consider some of the nuances that I've been talking about and just comparing most dietary interventions they've used in studies versus the Standard American Diet that most people are following today, you can see how this is actually not confusing really. It makes quite a bit of sense that people would lose weight and improve their blood sugar when they go on virtually any diet versus the standard American approach.

I think that really brings us back to where we started with this show and what I've been kind of harping on about for years now which is the key to success over the long term for anybody no matter what condition they're trying to address or whether they're just trying to optimize their health and create an approach that works best for them is to individualize and customize what they're doing for their own circumstances and needs. I've been treating patients now for almost a decade and for over a decade actually and I‘ve been training thousands of healthcare practitioners from around the world and have a lot of exposure to their caseloads and what's happening with them and the more I do this work the more convinced I am of this fundamental truth that you really can't figure out the best diet for you by just looking at what other people are doing or listening to gurus who are really passionate about a particular approach. We see a lot of this on the Internet—people who are convinced that everybody should do a particular diet whether that's vegan, Paleo, low-carb or keto.

My advice to you is to run fast from anyone who makes that suggestion because I think those people are not being intellectually honest about what the research says or even their own experience if they're working—or they just haven't worked with a lot of clients or patients because as soon as you start working with real people, you quickly find that there is no-one-size-fits-all approach and there's no single diet approach that will work best for every single person.

Working with a nutritionist, a dietician, or a Functional Medicine practitioner who is up to speed with a number of different approaches that can be effective in certain situations and knows how to do a comprehensive evaluation based on your health history and do some initial testing blood work and other types of testing to create an individualized prescription for you is kind of the optimal approach.

That, I understand, is not available to everybody for various reasons, so another way to get at that same information is to do some experimentation, either on your own or under the guidance of a health coach or a nutritionist where through listening to this show and reading my articles and other people's work and listening to other shows, you basically come up with a hypothesis about what might work well for you given your situation.

For example, if you do have type 2 diabetes and you're overweight and that's the main issue and if you follow some of the research and work that's suggesting that lower-carb and ketogenic diets may be effective, you give it a shot, you see how it works, you see what symptoms improve and if any symptoms get worse and then you basically tweak as you go. I mean it's certainly easier to do with guidance but many people out there have been able to figure this out just by listening to podcasts and reading books and online articles. Although that isn't optimal, I think it's perfectly legitimate and sometimes the only way forward for some people depending on their resources and what they have access to.

The key thing that I want to get across here is just whether you're working with a practitioner who's helping you to create an individualized approach or whether you’re doing it on your own, really be rigorous about it and don't accept what your friend, your cousin, or even the healthcare practitioner that you know and trust or respect says will work unless you have tried it and you have seen if it works for you because ultimately your body is the final arbiter and will be the decision-making authority in terms of whether it works or it doesn't work.

I've seen so many people that have been harmed by standardized diet advice and prescriptions and these people often end up in my clinic a couple of years after they started a program that was totally not right for them. But they kept doing it because they were told to do it or they believed it was best based on what they had read. I would just love to save those of you listening to this from that fate because it doesn't have to be that way.

Thanks again Patrick for sending in the question. It's a great one. I know a lot of people are also confused understandably and I hope this was helpful in charting a clear path forward.

Thanks for listening everybody. Continue to send in your questions at chriskresser.com/podcastquestion and I'll see you next time.

Now, I’d like to hear from you. Have you tried a low-carb, low-fat, or Mediterranean diet to manage your diabetes? What were your results? Comment below and let me know.

The post RHR: What’s the Best Diet for Diabetes? appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com January 22, 2019 at 12:48AM

#paleo #recipe #food #delicious #healthy #yum #diet

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monday4econlive · 3 years

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Plant-Based Popularizing

Name: Justus Ramos

SID: 77003156

In March of 2020, little information was known about what COVID-19 was. Before it was declared a pandemic, there was a lot of skepticism of how this disease could be transmitted. Rumors were even going around about how poultry could carry the disease. I remember hearing and seeing on social media that the corona virus could be transferred through meat. Being the gullible person that I am, I decided that I did not want to eat meat due to the unknown risk factors. Soon after, I started to realize that other people started to do the same thing. While the CDC and FDA later on did confirm that there is no evidence to support food transmission being associated with COVID-19 – I still saw a significant change in other people’s diets as well as my own.

These changes with eating healthier show positive externalities for those who choose to change their diet to being more plant-based. However, because many consumers chose to eat plant-based foods over meat, the market changes have gradually declined within the poultry industry.

POSITIVE EXTERNALITY – Plant-based

Personal Dietary Changes

With more people being on social media, I observed how friends, family, and other individuals were able to challenge their self-growth by changing their diet to being more plant-based. The idea of the upbringing of plant-based diets is seen as a positive externality because it decreases the demand for meat. Which is beneficial in the sense that this productivity will grow into farming plants rather than progressing animal cruelty.

Plant-based Industry

Considering the demand for more vegan meals grew – this allowed prices to drop. According to Forbes, plant-based foods are getting cheaper. The Impossible brand began to lower their prices by 15%. The relevancy to decrease prices helps slowly initiate wiping meat out as a commodity. The goal is to slowly decrease prices of plant-based meat in order for the supply and demand to go up. Oftentimes, people may not see the price of vegan food fair; therefore, making the vegan market more affordable grows a broader audience. As shown in the graph below, the quantity has increased while price has decreased. The demand curve has shifted to the right, while the supply curve has shifted downward to mediate the consumer’s needs. In this case, the increase in demand and supply is beneficial for those on a plant-based diet.

Yet, these results form a market change on production in regards to the poultry industry. Each external cost varies on consumers, producers and geography. Therefore, an increase in high demand for vegan products has also contributed to the decrease in demand for poultry products. Additionally, this affects trade as well as the process of imports and exports.

NEGATIVE EXTERNALITY – Poultry Industry

In August 2020, The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, “The Impact of The COVID-19 Pandemic On Food Price Indexes and Data Collection.” The report mentions that there is a decline of importing meat due to the demand in Asia dropping 8.9% from January 2020 to April 2020. This has been the largest 3-month drop from importing prices since 2015. This then resulted for the U.S. declining export meat prices, in which packaging products declined 22.5% from March 2020 to May 2020. However, considering all these factors are not solely due to a high-demand in plant-based products. It is important to take into account that monthly percentage changes may have also decreased due the stay-at-home act and people losing jobs. It may have been difficult for others to afford/obtain the food products that they would normally get. Nonetheless, the negative externality is becoming more apparent as veganism and/or being vegetarian grows more popular as well. Individuals are acknowledging that their health is at stake, and promoting healthier ways of eating is growing more prevalent.

Analysis/Predictions

Overall, this research showcases that a gain in one industry can be a loss for another. In the near future, jobs will considerably decline within the poultry industry if the high consumer demand continues to grow for vegan products. At the same time this means that more jobs will open up within the plant-based market.

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kellyp72 · 4 years

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Plant-based diets: can they help reduce chronic inflammation and its associated diseases?

Globally, the incidence of end-stage diseases that are caused by chronic inflammation are on the rise. Many of the foods that are consumed daily in a typical Western diet, including processed foods, dairy, meat, and/or trans fats, cause chronic inflammation, which lead to life-threatening diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma and stroke. There is a growing body of clinical evidence that clearly demonstrates that switching to a plant-based diet can greatly reduce your chances of developing one of these end-stage diseases, although this does not mean that you have to give up meat or animal products altogether. In fact, the current landscape of debate on veganism, vegetarianism, and meat-heavy diets is muddied by polemics, making it difficult for the average person to make an informed choice. So what does the science actually say about the effects of plant-based diets on chronic inflammation and its associated diseases?

Diseases caused by chronic inflammation are globally on the rise

The clearest evidence, according to the World Health Organization, is that cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death globally, claiming an estimated 17.9 million lives each year. Heart attacks and strokes account for four out of five deaths from cardiovascular disease, and a third of these deaths occur in people under the age of 70. In the United States, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and most races and ethnic groups, with an incidence of one death every 36 seconds and 655, 000 deaths every year. This amounts to roughly 1 in every 4 people dying from cardiovascular disease annually. The figures for Canada are somewhat better but still high; there, roughly 1 in 12 Canadian adults (about 2.4 million) have been diagnosed with heart disease as of 2017, with 193 deaths per 100,000 Canadians as of 2018. The World Heart Federation records that non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, account for an estimated 89 % of all adult deaths in the UK, and among these, 31% are attributable to cardiovascular disease. Daily, about 425 people die of cardiovascular disease in the UK. The populations of Mexico, Russia, and China also suffer from a high incidence of from cardiovascular disease, with 20% of all deaths in Mexico, 29.4% in Russia, and 87% of deaths in China from non-communicable diseases, of which 45% of these resulted from cardiovascular disease.

In addition to cardiovascular diseases, the global incidence of diabetes, stroke, and asthma have increased over the past four to five years. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 425 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes, and this disease killed about 1.6 million people in 2016 alone. The number of diabetics worldwide is forecast to rise to 629 million by 2045 if the current trajectory of new cases holds steady. The WHO also estimates that around 15 million people worldwide suffer strokes each year, with 5 million among them dying from this disease and another 5 million being rendered permanently disabled. Finally asthma, which is the most common non-communicable disease among children, has a lower mortality rate than these other chronic diseases. Among the 339 million sufferers with asthma, less than 420,000 per year – mostly elderly – died of complications from it in 2016, and most of those deaths occurred in low - and middle-income countries and communities.

Can switching to a vegan or vegetarian diet eliminate chronic inflammation?

Although the evidence shows that switching to a plant-based diet can greatly decrease chronic inflammation and thus reduce your risk of developing one of the end-stage diseases associated with it, it doesn’t necessarily involve becoming a vegan or vegetarian to reap these benefits. In fact, the evidence on meat-heavy diets suggests that eating meat in itself doesn’t cause or exacerbate inflammation, but that doesn’t mean that a diet that is meat-heavy is healthy for you.

A vegan diet is one in which all animal products have been cut out: vegans don’t eat eggs, dairy products, or even honey. Most vegans will even avoid wearing anything made from animal products, such as fur and leather, and many will try to avoid actions in their day-to-day lives that cause harm or suffering to animals. The vegan diet is widely regarded to be better for the planet than those that include animal products, but not all plant-based foodstuffs have a small environmental footprint: the agricultural practices (including production, transportation, and storage) associated with some fruits, vegetables, and legumes (such as avocados, almonds, and cashews) require large amounts of resources to produce, or may be linked to deforestation (such as cocoa and palm oil). Moreover, vegans may experience health problems related to a lack of protein and certain other vitamins and minerals that are more easily absorbed from animal products. Pursuing a vegan diet can be worthwhile, but it will take a lot of effort to make sure you aren’t undermining your health or contributing to environmental problems.

There are several varieties of vegetarian diet, including, vegan, lacto-ovo vegetarian (i.e. consuming eggs and dairy products), pesco-pollo vegetarians (i.e. consuming seafood and poultry), pescatarians (i.e. consuming seafood) and flexitarians (i.e. mostly plant-based foods with occasional consumption of small amounts of meat). In many studies, vegetarians score much better than meat-eaters in terms of health outcomes ranging from blood pressure to weight. This is, however, due to the fact that vegetarians tend to make healthier eating and lifestyle choices altogether, such as minimizing their consumption of moderately- and highly-processed foods, and following a diet that contains a variety of the following food groups: fruits and vegetables, protein-rich foods, whole grains, beans and legumes and starchy tubers, and nuts and ‘healthy’ fats like olive oil.

On the whole, studies have demonstrated that vegan and vegetarian diets, when pursued carefully and with other healthy lifestyle choices such as avoiding or minimizing highly processed foods, do greatly reduce chronic inflammation.

What about meat-based diets? Are they really that bad?

Meat-based diets have come under a lot of fire in recent decades, both because of the perception that they are unhealthy and because of the environmental impact of large commercial animal husbandry practices. The claim that meat causes cancer is apparently overblown, and the scientific evidence does not support this conclusion; in fact. While it is true that meat-based food systems require more resources of energy, land, and water than plant-based diets, and that in this sense, a plant-based diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet, this does not translate into the equation that eating meat is inherently unhealthy, or that it is destroying the environment.

On the contrary, existing studies have shown that the Paleo diet, which includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, meat, and organ meats, has beneficial health effects. In one study of 25 participants published in 2015 in the Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases, in which 14 were on the Paleo diet and 10 were on a diet based on recommendations from the American Diabetes Association (ADA), both groups had improved metabolic indicators, but the Paleo group had greater benefits in terms of blood glucose control and lipid profile. Other meat-based diets, such as the Carnivore Diet, which excludes foods other than meat, fish, and animal products like eggs and dairy, were associated with poor health outcomes.

The data on meat, therefore, is mixed, and the problems with meat-based diet seem to be associated more with the fact that people who eat meat-based diets tend to make unhealthy eating and lifestyle choices, including eating highly processed meat products (such as jerky, hot dogs, or lunch meat, which contain several potentially carcinogenic compounds) and not eating enough fruits and vegetables. It is for that reason that meat-based diets are associated with a higher incidence of chronic inflammation.

Science confirms these three things…

There are three things the science confirms about how plant-based diets can reduce chronic inflammation and its associated end-stage diseases.:

One, eating more plants and less animal protein correlates with reduced risk of coronary heart diseases and diabetes. This is also likely because people who follow a mostly plant-based diet tend to engage in other behaviors that are characteristic of a healthy lifestyle such as exercising more, eating smaller portions, and minimizing or avoiding highly processed foods.

Two, plant-based diets correlate with longevity in older adults. In other words, plant-based diets (and the presumed healthier lifestyle choices that tend to go along with them) help us to not only live longer lives, but live longer lives that are healthier, more energetic and of an overall higher quality.

Three, the quality of plants you eat is very important. For example, fruits, vegetables and whole grains have been proven to lower the risk of diabetes. Consuming nuts, vegetables and soy products on a regular basis reduces the risk factors for stroke (even processed soy milk, which according to Chinese medical studies, does not seem to have the same kinds of negative health effects as other processed foods). Finally, consuming beans regularly has been shown to reduce the incidence of bad cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

Overall, plant-based diets have been clinically proven to have beneficial health outcomes. This doesn’t mean that you need to become vegan or fully vegetarian to reap these benefits, however. Instead, controlling the proportion of plant-based to animal-based products seems to be key to greatly reducing your risk for developing chronic inflammation and its associated end stage diseases.

#healthy eating #plant-based diet

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kateemmerson · 4 years

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Malaga Momentos - My City of Healing

This is my tribute to a city that held me tight while I grieved a part of my life no longer real or relevant, cried a whole river of tears, let the sun warm my bones and fell in love with me again. Like L’Oreal says …‘cos I’m worth it, baby!

I have lived my entire life believing that certain places call out to my soul. They whisper quietly and then if perhaps I don’t listen timeously, they yell a little louder. It always feels like threads of energy are attached to my heart and they start tugging gently at me. I have never been able to adequately explain it, suffice it to say that I am a gypsy-traveller-nomad at heart, and love to move. Often. I also understand the innate value of a home, a base, and roots, but I have danced and moved between these two extremes all my life.

The way it happens varies – it might be the first time someone utters the name of that place and it feels like the words leave their lips and send a cupid’s arrow straight to my heart; or an image lands on my retina for the first time, or the words jump off the page in a book and just…won’t… let…go…!

Sometimes it’s just a whispering deep inside…that inevitably becomes stronger and stronger. Having traveled alone on a plane at the tender age of 8, that bug bit early. Many times I have literally sold up everything I own in order to make a trip to follow the strings that are pulling the hardest. The yearning that will not quieten down. 4 years ago I even took it a bit further, and as a ‘late-in-my-40’s’ year old, packed up again and went #LocationFree with my business still intact and growing. I have just written about that journey for my 5th book, due for release later this year.

For 4 years I have had no fixed home of my own, simply following the strings pulling at my heart; combining retreats, talks and coaching work around the world – and LOTS of online work, along with many visits of the heart to South Africa. One suitcase and a large armful of dreams. But now, I am finally looking for my next home. A little place to call mine – a nest to return to. Roots to plant and lavender to pick. Listening once again to the stirrings in my heart. I’m also getting clear about where I DON’T want to be, which can pave the way for where I do. There is a very loooong back story as to how I landed up coming to Spain – my business partner Sarah walked a part of the Camino in 2018 and together we decided it would be a spectacular way to combine writing and walking. So we did. Another whole story layered on top of that was that in my personal relationship, Spain seemed like somewhere to explore as a potential home for us in the future.

But where to explore? And where to explore for my heart?

Choosing Malaga was easy. My mama-bear lives in a beautiful retirement village in the UK and I have gotten to know many of her lovely neighbors. Cue a wonderful couple who spends a LOT of time in Spain and own homes here. So I popped across for tea asking for some necessary advice. I was presented with a good old fashioned map and a destination. They know my age, my interests and I just said – “where do you think I should spend the winter to write my book?” “MALAGA!”

“Where?”

“Malaga – you will LOVE it. Lots of culture, museums, history, art, expats, locals, awesome food, warm etc, etc.

“Where? Oh there, on the coast – I see it.”

“But not to the West Kate; Malaga or East.”

Got it. Done. That’s all it takes for me sometimes. A clear directive delivered at the right time. Apparently, many people I know have already been to Malaga, including my parents (and Hemingway of course); but I didn’t know that at the time (in my active brain). Go figure.

So I duly went into my trusted housesitters profile (click link if you want a 25% discount) and started looking for a Malaga based house-sit for the winter. Mmmmalaga. A 2.5 month house-sit for one kitty popped onto my screen. Looks easy peasy. And warm – just like a Durban winter. If you are not from South Africa just think cozy, sunny and warm, a bit like Florida in the winter. Where all the human “swallows” might go in search of thawing out. You just need a light jacket in winter, no serious heating and can soak up plenty of vitamin D.

Well, yes, that beats the dreary UK over the winter, dunnit?

Fast forward – we facilitated the Walk ‘n Write Retreat in Northern Asturias region; my partner doesn’t join me as originally planned; Sarah and I visit Madrid for 4 nights; I plonk Sarah on the plane and then I head South. Alone. I like the way Malaga rolls off my tongue. Sounds exotic – I’m spending winter in Malaga. Tra la la – like I’m some millionairess with a house on the hill. Ha – If only I knew what was in store.

The potential house-sit didn’t pan out, after all, so while in Madrid I had booked 6 weeks in a glorious modern Air B‘nB New York type loft, thinking I could get writers to join me for a residency while I wrote over winter too. Or perhaps friends could pop over from the UK? It was gorgeous and trendy and just a short walk from everything. The morning after I arrived, I walked the 18 minutes across the “dry river” bridge into the historic city center to go and sign up for Spanish Classes. After all, I needed a total immersion if considering living in Spain. I thought it best I scrub up a bit and take the language plunge. Plus it would get me to meet people in a city where I knew literally no one and I could use it with my significant other.

I fell in love. INSTANTLY. Everywhere I looked made me beam from the inside out.

I have three innate questions when visiting a new place: Do I love it? Will I ever come back? Could I live here?

It was an instant YES to all three. It took me by surprise actually. These questions get asked and answered internally for me, without having to actively process them the moment I arrive somewhere. Most places I visit I generally tend to really like, or even love. Some, I definitely know I’ll be back to visit again and then a few grab me and my heart almost instantly. Malaga was an instant cupid moment and it has stayed with me. Four months later, I still absolutely love this city, and I absolutely could live here – but I also have come to realize that Spain is somehow not my next home. It’s a hard one for anyone else to fathom what I am saying – but that is how it feels for ME. It’s been a really interesting concept for me to lean into. I could live in Malaga but not in Spain. Mmm ok – so it’s off the list as a permanent base then.

I am still on the hunt for my next country! How exciting!

Malaga will 100% be a place I return to. It feels like home even though it won’t be my permanent home. Does that make sense? The first Air BnB apartment turned out to be inappropriate ‘cos I couldn’t sleep, thanks to the neighbor’s TV on till 3 am. Thankfully I managed to cancel the rest of my booking and moved straight into the center of the historic town. There is a fabulous brand called ILOFTMALAGA – great curated apartments of very high standards. Funky, modern and minimalist – me to a T. My quiet apartment looked onto a bustling street in the heart of the olde town. Bliss.

I started looking for another house-sit. I also found the awesome website GUIDE TO MALAGA and reached out to it’s founder, Joanna Styles, and joined a networking session to meet like-minded business women. Bliss! Her guide really is the GO-TO for anything that you want to know about. Be sure to grab it when visiting Malaga.

“Why a house-sit Kate”, you may ask?

Mostly because I love to feel like I’m really IN a city, living there like a local, with animals to look after and using local transport – rather than being a visitor looking from the outside in. Can you believe that the same housesit from my initial search, was back in play on the membership site, as she had been seriously let down by anther house-sitter? Only this time I was already IN Malaga and could meet the “pussycat’s slave” in person. I got to visit the exquisite property just to the East of Malaga, and it instantly felt like Cape Town – Camp’s Bay to be precise. With a sweet black ’n white kitty to love and vice versa. I needed some animal love! It was a done deal. I had a winter home and a base from which to write my next book and heal my heart. The Cat slave, Melanie, is helping shift people’s perceptions to become Vegan through her recipes and coaching.

This might be another whole blog post one day, but at a very personal level, suffice it to say I was walking into the “Devil’s Den” by wondering if I could actually LIVE in Spain. It was part of another story of my potential future that was rapidly changing before my eyes– a future that it seemed was sadly not coming to fruition. And yes, I am being a little cryptic on purpose. If you know me, pick up the phone and call to chat for a more personal update! But, sometimes we need to face the fire. Spain was that for me. Healing, writing, walking, crying, yelling at the universe, sleeping, laughing, walking, reading, writing, creating a new community. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Malaga Momentos.

After about 2 weeks of being in Malaga – already with some favorite spots under my belt, an innate understanding of all the cobbled streets, local coffee shops where locals hung out, many, many beach walks, clients taken care of, and my resonance with the city deepening, I realized I needed to really LIVE and CONNECT and be less of a hermit. I was spending too much time alone if this was going to be my home for a few months. Working mostly online can be deceptive that way. I am always connecting with coaching clients, mastermind folk, writer’s and my mentorship groups and always interacting with people, friends, and family. But I needed more connecting IN THE FLESH. I knew I was going to be staying for a minimum of 3 months and I thought I best get to work on building a community of people. Playmates, colleagues, connections to yackety-yack with. Solidarity and friendships. The best way I know how to do that is to do it via something I love. I looked at dance classes, but they started at my bedtime. So what about writing?

I had decided it was the time to start writing my 5th book and had lodged that in my heart as my “winter” project. It’s about the past 4 years of living location free. So I searched for and joined the local Facebook group for Expats, and put up a post about how I was writing a book and asked who fancied joining me for some writing sessions? A simple post. I often do these writing sessions with our writers in our mentorships and regularly sit in community with writers. I was bowled over by the responses, especially a lady from Scotland who lives here all winter who started pointing me to all sorts of people she instinctively thought I’d like to meet. Instant networks and threads for me to explore.

I wasn’t starting the Malaga group as a paid membership or community –simply more to meet people and anchor myself in front of my computer. In the first meeting, there were 5 of us – and in 2 short hours, I had planned my whole book in 13 pages of hand-written notes. I always have a rule that every time you sit to write you need a goal to aim for. I offered this one rule to the group to get everyone to set minimum word count/goals for the writing session. Very little talking – lots of writing and lots of coffee. Word quickly spread. This week, as I leave Malaga, two other writers have taken over the group to keep the energy going and to keep writers writing! Thanks to a lovely young lad Matt from the USA and Marta from Scotland (a belt loving scriptwriter) who took over, I somehow feel as if I have managed to leave a little piece of myself here in the form of a committed writing group. That makes me so happy! I had been shown a PERFECT writing spot by my house-sit host. La Galerna is right on the beach in Pedregalejo, and we sit upstairs looking over the Mediterranean. I gathered folk who wanted to write together, once or twice a week. Within just 11 such writing sessions I had finished the first draft of my book. FANBLOODYTASTIC! Thanks to the regular committed folk Marc, Ruth, Carolynne, Eunice, Gian, Jan, Matt, Caroline, Marta and Lina. My regular writing tribe!

I have a small community here now, favorite places that call out to my heart, little back streets I always walk, bus drivers I know to greet, the place I buy my breakfast, an awesome physiotherapist, a weekly co-working meet-up with the fabulous Victoria Watson, a brand & PR expert, my regular pit-stop to the El Haman Turkish hot baths that soothe my muscles as I let the stress slip onto slabs of heated marble. I literally used to pray onto the slabs of marble while pouring buckets of piping hot water over my soul. The power of rituals. Then there is the powerhouse that is the incredible Nathan Manzaneque who runs the BTB networking club. I was also bowled over by the powerhouse of heartfullness, Victoria Ahlen who runs The Vilostrada Foundation doing phenomenal work in Morocco, and she is based between Morocco and Malaga. Or how about early morning Pilates with Ruth on the beach watching the sunrise.

I found a funky hairdresser and the best nail technician I have ever found anywhere. She’s called Angelica – go figure- and she is like a little butterfly on my nails. Or for the gals who need Frida type eyebrows – visit these two gorgeous Polish sisters who make this an unforgettable experience. Lashes and brows with love. I also have many other local coffee shops. I even get to tell established residents where to eat a certain food or entice them to a piano concerto in the magnificent Art Deco Concert Hall. And a guy I make sure I go and visit every time I’m near Plaza Constitution with his puppy called Kitty to offer an ear as he battles the streets. It’s a community for me. I know I will entice you to come and visit and …I already have plans afoot to host a Writing Residency in November 2020. Hosted at a gorgeous, brand new Retreat Centre called VegaHouseSpain run by Ana Capucho Maybe you get to explore this city with me soon?

I walk through it like a local. Smiling!

For me, life is usually about going TO something rather than walking away FROM somewhere else. I know it’s still Europe / Uk that’s pulling me. That’s what I know for now.

But I needed a blank page in between the old and the new. Malaga was my place. Officially leaving South Africa after to-and fro-ing for 4 years, I am in the place of – oh hell – so where next? Where is the place I let myself “pot”. You know- when you POT A PLANT? I have picked up my roots from the 50 years of being in SA, but am now dancing in the air waiting for the drumroll of ….YES, IT’S HERE. To feel the resonance of “This place wants me to stay.”

Malaga offered me a precious place to pause. To regather me to myself. Process and ponder life and where I am going. How do I want to truly live going forward, and how do I want to show up for my work and purpose. Where do I wish to create a proper home and retreat center? What does this new chapter look like and who joins me on it? Do you know what I mean when I say certain cities have the ability to help you heal – from the inside out? Malaga just mostly made me smile – or when I was grieving I could still smile through the tears as I stared at the ocean. It is an outrageously wonderful city to be in over Christmas and New year – the shops and Christmas lights and concerts are simply magnificent. I also had a dear friend and my mum come visit – and it was so easy to show them “my” city. Every time I spot the ‘Catedral’ I burst into a smile- she suddenly appears as you walk along a narrow street then BOOM – her majestic dome and “manquita arm” is right in front of you. Or walking past Octopus- the multi-million dollar yacht that was berthed in the Puerto all winter. I never did get an invite onto it. Rooftop terraces to bask in the sun sipping vino and tapas. Buskers playing everything from harps, to flutes to opera. A little Flamenco passion and “Naranja” lined streets. I also happened to have a fabulous Spanish teacher who lived in my complex – if ever you need a Spanish language immersion, she’s your teacher! I met many, many, amazing souls and you all know who you are, even if not mentioned in person here. Thank you for making my time in Malaga so precious.

I would really LOVE to know where you have ever found yourself doing some deep inner healing and re-assessment work? Or where you are right now? Was it a bustling city, a new country, or a wee village on a remote island? Was it summer and sun, or snow and shovels?

How long did it take you to come back to yourself – to find a sense of inner rhythm again? I feel like my winter sojourn to Malaga has revived me, and I know everything is gonna be just perfect, even though it’s totally different from what I had imagined unfolding these past few months. Life has a plan for us – we just have to show up and be present.

Drop me a line on [email protected] to connect- or leave me a comment

If you feel like you need to take some time to gather yourself towards yourself, be sure to come and grab my latest series about THE STRATEGIC POWER OF DISCONNECTING

Love Kate xx

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Malaga Momentos – My City of Healing was originally published on Kate Emmerson - The Quick Shift Deva

#grieving #healing #location free #malaga #new beginnings #p[urpose #write your book #writing #writing retreat

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tusoktusok-blog1 · 5 years

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What is authenticity?

We are constantly on the search for “authentic” food... whatever that means. And that’s just the thing, what exactly does authenticity mean? What kinds of standards are we searching for?

Authenticity has one major philosophy: simplicity. With simplicity, there is the image of food that lacks pretentiousness and all the other bells and whistles that are so prominent in high-concept, high-price restaurants. There is a belief in the simplicity of the people who participate in the food’s commodity chain, and the processes within it: simple non-industrial harvesting, simple cooking methods, simple modes of preparation. Simple food plays into the mythology of having a meal free of commercial, profit-oriented interests, and instead, having it be associated instead with sincere workers. A classic example of this is upscale farm-to-table restaurants, that make generous usage of the words “grass fed”, “old fashioned”, or “greenmarket” on their menus.

The word “authentic” in the context of Filipino cuisine seems to imply things that aren’t necessarily in the realm of vegan buzzwords. Often, we judge a food’s authenticity based on its experience and maybe even its venue (where we eat it and in what manner). For example, authentic adobo is the adobo recipe our lola cooks, and everything else is just a deviation from it or a mere imitation. Of course, these “imitations” can be delicious, but they are not the adobo we recognize as the adobo. Another example is the quintessential Filipino version of spaghetti, sweet, with chopped up red hotdogs in it. And when someone asks specifically for authentic Filipino spaghetti, we point them to the nearest Jollibee.

But it’s an extremely puritanical way of thinking, to assign the label of authentic over certain dishes or sub-cuisines. Maybe the label is helpful for context, but definitely not for validation. Our household adobo recipes aren’t universal – in fact, every family has their own adobo recipe. Filipino cuisine is special in the way it lends itself to a lot of experimentation, inclusion or exclusion of ingredients, based on the personal taste of the diner. There is no canon way of cooking a specific dish, even when the dish is steeped in family traditions. And on the example of Filipino spaghetti, we don’t see any Italians up in arms about “bastardizing” their bolognese.

I had also interviewed some people, asking them to describe Filipino street food in a few adjectives. Many of them used the word “authentic”. I further prodded, asking what authentic street food would look like. More often than not, the average response the the question was, the kind sold on the street by vendors and peddlers in carts. But any change from its context automatically made it inauthentic.

This almost seems like common sense. Of course the authentic street food would obviously be the kind sold on the street – anybody would be able to come to that conclusion. However, there is the subtle implication that this so-called authenticity in street food must, at any cost, resist any kind of change or development, lest it lose its figurative “authentic” badge of honor. When we start viewing the foodways (referring to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history) of the working class as something that is authentic, even picturesque and a representation of how street food should be, well… it runs the great risk of fetishization.

The blame shouldn’t be directed to the people I interviewed who equated authenticity with the current state of street food vendors and businesses, though. This is said with full seriousness: it’s the fault of the system! Filipino street food, despite its lack of proper support or tolerance from the government, has been regurgitated into a marketing scheme to attract tourists (primarily white tourists) to come taste our weird grilled chicken intestines and grotesque developing duck embryos – all in the name of exoticism! And this, at the end of the day, is advertised to be one of the primary authentic experiences one can have in the realm of Filipino cuisine.

But exoticism is much more loaded with things to unpack. Exoticness is something both desired and feared, but must always be understood as standing in opposition (May 1996). Prerequisites to exotic food seem to be qualities of unusualness and excitement. Unusualness is apparent in gourmet food writing, where food writers introduce obscure ingredients or dishes, framing this as a way of democratizing gastronomy, and broadening the definition of “good food”. But what makes food “unusual” in the first place is usually its link to foreign (in terms of ethnicity, race, and even class) non-white people and places. These people and places are both geographically and socially distant from the writer, and this re-introduction of unusual food merely provides a superficial image of the culture to which it belongs to, designated for the use and pleasure of the food adventurer. This way of eating is dangerous – it substitutes the authentic relations and connections we can have with food with the “quick fix” of exoticness, giving colonialism a friendly and more liberal looking face.

The issue with exotic food, or maybe this is its genius, is that it suggests the radical democratization of food, claiming that all food is equal and that the food world is borderless, but the fact that these exotic foods valued mainly for their foreignness inherently does nothing to demolish standards of differentiation or hierarchy. It does this while still avoiding offending these democratic sensibilities by steering clear of traditional snobbery and elitism.

So, authenticity is overrated. Cuisine lends itself to innovation, and nobody can change or ignore that; we cannot pin down a certain dish at a certain place and time and call it the authentic version over everything else. Food production and enjoyment are inevitably linked to political, economic, and cultural flux. The late, great Anthony Bourdain even said, there is nothing more political than food because what dictates who eats what, or more importantly, who can and cannot eat, is politics. The economy dictates what resources are made available, and to whom. And lastly, culture takes care of our tastes, what we like to eat.

Doreen Fernandez, a teacher and cultural historian who wrote extensively about Filipino cuisine wrote some time ago, “To be considered Filipino, culinary practices did not need to be Filipino by origin. Nor did they need to preserve some original or authentic form… The question is not ‘What is Filipino food?’ but ‘How does food become Filipino?’”

References:

Fernandez, Doreen G. “Culture Ingested: Notes on the Indigenization of Philippine Food.” Philippine Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 1988, pp. 219–232. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42633085.

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kikiauske · 7 years

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KIKI! 1,3, AND 7 FOR EACH OF THOSE OC THINGS! (I picked at random because Anything I can learn about Gyn is amazing AF tbh.)

omg prepare for long answers! XD

@zombbean

I’m putting this in a read more because this is gonna be a lot.

Gyneth is amazing AF tbh. I love her dearly.

A. Psychology

1. What of the Meyers-Briggs personality types they most fit into? INFP, ENFT, et cetera…

I took the test here and she’s apparently ENTP-A, the Debater.

3. Do they have any emotional or psychological conditions? Are they aware of it? Do they try to treat it?

I didn’t give her any specific conditions, but she has an increased level of anxiety during her second and third pregnancies. She’s well aware and takes several cautionary measures to try and reassure herself. Her husband is also a huge support. I didn’t give her anything because I was concerned I wouldn’t portray them properly, accurately, and respectfully.

7. Is your OC confident in their reactions to life in general, or do they get embarrassed or easily shamed for it? I.e., if something startles them, do they insist it WAS scary? When they cry, do they feel like they overreacted?

She will rarely be embarrassed over her reactions. If something startled them, she will admit she was startled, but it wasn’t THAT scary. When she cries she will apologize but thinks the tears are more of a sign of weakness than they are an over-reaction.

B. Social

1. Do they believe you have to give respect to get it, or get respect to give it?

You have to give respect to get it. If you don’t get it back, don’t give respect to them till they’ve earned it again.

3. Under what situations would they get angry at servers, staff, customer service, et cetera?

being someone who owns/manages/ and works at a bar, she has a really high patience for things like that. Unless the staff is being consistently rude, she understands how stressful it can be.

7. How do they respond to babies crying in public?

Her heart cracks a little every time a baby cries. She’ll look in the direction to see what how the parent/guardian is handling the situation. She wants to make sure that baby is getting the proper care it deserves.

C. Morality

1.Does your OC have a moral code? If not, how do they base their actions? If so, where does it come from, and how seriously do they take it?

She has a moral code. It comes from her Grandparents, and she takes it pretty seriously.

3. Is it important for them to be with people (socially, intimately, whatever) whose major ideological tenets align with their own?

I’d say it’s a bit important to her. It helps so she’s not arguing with someone all the time. that’s stressful.

7. Do they believe people change over time? If so, is it a natural process or does it take effort?

People rarely change over time, and for those who do it takes a lot of effort and work.

D. Religion / Life and Death

1.How religious is your OC? What do they practice, if anything? If they don’t associate with any religion, what do they think of religion in general?

as someone who has studied history & ancient cultures, she doesn’t have a particular faith. She loves learning about religion and how it impacted the cultures and societies that surround it. She’ll use curses like “by the goddess” or “ Shi’halli, I’m fucked.”

3. How comfortable are they with the idea of death?

Gyn has never been comfortable with the idea of death/dying. Sure, death is a inescapable reality, but she has so much to discover/learn before she can even be mildly comfortable with it, and with her kids now in the picture she doesn’t want to leave them until they are ready to survive & thrive without her. (which she wants to be able to provide for them as long as possible)

5. (there was no 7 for this one) Do they believe in ghosts? If not, why? If so, do they think they’re magical/tie into their religion, or are they scientifically plausible?

She 10000% believes in ghosts. If nightmares are real, so are ghosts. They most certainly have a magical tie to the land.

E. Education & Intelligence

1. Would you say that your OC is intelligent? In what ways? Would your OC agree?

Gyneth is very intelligent. She has a bachelor’s in Archeology, an MD in anthropology, and an MBA. She won’t flaunt it, but she is well aware of her smarts.

3. How many languages do they speak?

She is fluent in 3 languages; Common, Skyling, and Spanish. She is proficient in cajun french (thanks, hubby).

7. Are they a good note-taker? Are they a good test-taker? Do exams make them nervous?

She is a TERRIBLE note taker. At work, she won’t write down your order, or else she’d forget it. She’s an audial learner. She’s really good at taking tests, and hardly gets nervous when it comes to exam time.

F. Domestic Habits, Work, and Hobbies,

1.What sort of home do they live in now, if at all? How did they end up there?

She has a pretty spacious 1-story home. (in game, it’s only like 2 rooms but those kids have rooms. Clarence and Pete probably share a room since they are twins, but Max and Marie have their own rooms.)

3. Could they ever live in a “tiny home”?

She’d be content with a tiny home once the kids have left the nest. Of course, she would want to make sure there’s a guest room (+ extra beds) in the event they visit.

7. What’s their “dream career” or job situation?

She already had her dream job of leading several archeological digs and finding new information on skyling history. She’s very happy with her bar and would love to see it grow in recognition and quality as the years go on. Maybe she could teach a class or two, but doesn’t want to do that while the kids are still in school. (she does want to embarrass them but promised she wouldn’t interfere with their education like that.)

G. Family & Growing Up

1. Is your OC close to their family?

with her grandparents? Yes. her Mother and Father? No. Her siblings? Kinda. they grew closer when she left home.

3. Does your OC find their family supportive? If not, what would be an example why not?

Her grandparents? YES. Her grandfather taught her how to eat nightmare feathers and her grandmother showed her the importance of being happy with yourself before you can make others happy.

Her parents? not so much. Her mother arranged several marriages and contracts for her, to the point Gyneth changed her last name in an effort to make those arrangements null and void. Her father is kind but will not try to dissuade her mother nor try to interfere in any way. That frustrates her more than he realizes.

7. Do they have any childhood memories they’d rather forget or be less affected by?

She’d rather forget her first contract, and after years of letting that influence her life, she put it behind her and was able to find love. Sometimes she wonders if it affects some of her choices in how she raises her kids, but if it did, she assumes it’s gonna be for the better.

She’s actually willingly let 2 contracts sleep with her, and felt disgusting the entire time. She’d rather forget those times but is thankful she never had a nest from those contracts/ took measures to prevent them.

She tries to forget the time she went to a party in HS when other students realized she was partial skyling. It involved lots of racial slurs, a feather eating incident, and getting in a fight. She left early and spent the night at her grandparents’ house. She worries something like that will happen to her kids, or that they’ll be bullied for their bloodlines.

H. Romance & Intimacy

1. What is your OC’s orientation, romantic and/or sexual? Has it ever been a source of stress for them? Have they always been pretty sure of their orientation?

Demiromantic, Bisexual. Romance used to stress her out a lot, as she wasn’t certain if any proclaims of love towards were honest or not. (it happened several times) She’s been very sure of her sexual orientation since her early teens.

3. Does your OC believe there’s only one ideal partner (or multiple ideal if not monogamous) for everyone, or that there are many people who could be right?

Sometimes she can hardly believe she found love. She hopes there’s more than one for those important to her, so they have better chances of finding them. For her, she’s got 1 ideal partner and she’s going to cherish him with all her heart. Maybe there’s another one out there, but she doens’t care to find out.

7. What do they look for in partners? (Emotionally, mentally, physically..)

She likes someone with self-confidence, empathy, honesty (big on this), and a good sense of humor. Physically, she has a weakness for pretty eyes and a good physique. She wants someone who can keep up with her, and if she ever falls she wants someone who can help her back on her feet.

I. Food

1. What are their favorite kinds of flavors– Sweet, salty, sour, spicy, creamy, et cetera?

She loves savory foods & seasonings. She also loves sweet treats, and likes spicy foods. Probably cannot handle as much spice as her hubby. (he can probably handle super-hot, she’s more of a medium). Sours are good in drinks but that’s really about it.

3. Are they vegan/vegetarian (if their overall culture/species generally aren’t)? If so, why? Do they think animal products are wrong in all circumstances?

No. Her cultural upbringing always includes a meat somewhere.

5*. Are they a good cook?

you darn bet your gumbo she is.

J. Politics, Current Events, Environmental Aspects

1. Where does your OC stand most politically? What would they align with most?

middle leaning democrat I’d think.

3. How politically active are they?

considering I haven’t really thought too heavily on the politics of the ATTS universe I’m not sure? She’d be pretty active in the real world. She’d host fundraisers, help with events, ect.

*edit: because I’m a dunce and forgot about human politics shit, she’s active in the ATTS verse. with what I’m not 100% sure but she’s helping out one way or another.

tbhshe’sprobablyworkingonmakingcontractsathingofthepastormakingthembetterfortheinvolvedpartiesbecauseshe’sgothighlevelsofsalttowardsthem.

7. How much interest in environmental health do they have?

She cares a lot for the environment since it can impact dig sites and artifact quality. She also cares because she doesn’t want her children and their potential children to suffer for stupid choices she made.

K. For OCs in Reality-Based Worlds Who Are Unusual in Paranormal Ways (such as magical abilities, being another species, having a curse like lycanthropy, sci-fi abilities, being from another time, et cetera)– Also for OCs where the scenario is similar even if their universe isn’t based on reality

(since she’s human [rare spp.] and skyling [female rare] I think these questions can apply? Probably to her skylng bloodline.)

1. Does your OC have to keep their paranormal aspect (PA) a secret from general society? If so, how? I.e., they can’t discuss their abilities, they have to hide a tail, they have an alter-ego, et cetera. What would happen if society found out about it?

She’s part Skyling, and normally does not tell people about it unless it is a life or death scenario. The kids don’t even really know.

3. Does your OC have any friends who know about their PA? Any enemies?

I think nightmares would be able to tell. They seem the type to have a strange sense like that. Sam knows. Mrs. B probably knows (I can imagine them going on some wildly dangerous adventures together).

7. Does your OC’s PA affect their dietary habits so that they are unusual or problematic by their society’s standards?

She has a special section of the cupboard dedicated to feather eating & skyling-beneficial foods. In case she has to eat feathers again or meets any other skylings who can benefit from different throat-soothing treats she’s learned to make over the years. Her honey-echinacea drops are rather delicious.

L. For the Writer/Owner

1.How have your characters changed since you created them?

Oh golly, Gyneth has changed so much since her initial design. And all the better, she’s grown as I have grown and continues to be a character I look to for strength when I’m not feeling my strongest. She’s changed race, name, age, and attitude. She’s still beautiful (inside and out), confident, physically built, and still will take no shit.

3. Which OC do you think is the most decent morally or behaviorally?

most likely? Rytzar. she tries her best to be good, even if she gets in a lot of trouble. It’s kinda like Stitch. Philomena doesn’t care about behaving unless Morticia is in earshot and even then the pirate queen encourages her to cause trouble. Ki’Daro doesn’t care for morals. It’s survival first.

Gyneth has good morals, but wasn’t on her best behavior for a while. even now I can imagine she stirs up a bit of trouble.

7. Which OC do you think is the most attractive? AKA, which is supposed to be a “bad guy”?

Gyneth. 100%. She’s attractive, she knows what she wants (it took her a while in the love department but she eventually figured it out), and loves doing things that make her feel free. She had a motorcycle in her teens/ early adult phase, will totally rock leather and spikes, and has totally ruined other girl’s contracts/dreams by snatching their man (aka Sam Morricun. He’s a dreamboat and she’s totally commandeering that ship).

#long post #Gyneth Morricun-Sinseria #zombbean #atts #Alkatraz Taste the Sky #atts oc

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prettyediblestylist · 7 years

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Hassleback Potatoes with Almond, Spinach and Parsley/Basil pesto (vegan & gluten-free)

Firstly, may I begin by saying a huge THANK YOU. My new book The Goodness of Nuts & Seeds is now ‘finally’ on the shelves and now that I have had a little time to reflect (short term anyway: before I jet off to Australia for a book promotional tour in two days!), I feel so grateful to all of you that have showed your support these past few months. Whether you’ve come out to an event, book signing, reposted a recipe on your own blog, sent me a message of love, or happy vibes through the ether, I have felt it all and will carry the collective experience with me always. I am officially overwhelmed with gratitude. It’s been a very fulfilling time for me, but if I’m being honest, it’s also been a very challenging one. There hasn’t been much in the way of breaks (or breathing) and as someone who is perpetually beating the drum of balance and wellness, I have recently started to make a conscious effort towards putting sacred and precious time aside whilst focusing on what’s ‘really’ important…such as eating well again. I am however also realistic - and with that have an awareness we all lead very busy lives. And so in the manner of practising what I preach and with spring just around the corner (rejoice!) I’m introducing an all new set of quick, delicious and healthy recipes, just without any risk of lengthy time-frame! Cooking beautiful meals for company with a carefully planned menu is one thing, but being able to whip up five semi-quick, easy going delicious meals Monday through to Friday without extra trips to the supermarket is another. In my opinion, it’s actually much more difficult.

So. These Hassleback potatoes with almond, spinach and parsley/basil pesto is truly a match-made in heaven - and fuss-free to boot. Satisfying in all the ways that count; filling without making you feel ‘full’, and a salty (from the crisp roast potatoes) and sweet (from the toasted almonds and delicate herbs) balance of flavours which confidently ticks that all-important satiating/nutritious box. I sometimes serve this dish with glistening lamb chops or shoulder of lamb - slow-cooked to the point where its silky soft meat falls off the bone. Golden-skinned chicken thighs are equally wonderful served alongside - which I pop in the oven 25 minutes before the end of the potatoes cooking time, simply drizzled with a little olive oil, then the skin brushed with some of the nutty pesto and a little sea salt/pepper sprinkled over. Poached eggs work very well too as does adding kale, beans, tomatoes and onion for a vegan-friendly accompaniment (add to the pan for the last 15 minutes of roasting) - or you can simply serve solo as it also stands alone just as it is for the perfect meal on any given Wednesday night. (For again non-vegans, a crumbling of goats cheese over the potatoes when they come out of the oven is also a welcome salty - yet creamy - addition!)

The history bit! There has been a lot of welcome excitement for the humble spud recently, and most of this is due to a special technique of cooking them - which falls under the appropriate name, the ‘Hassleback’. This involves a simple technique of slicing each one thinly (but not all the way through), drizzling with fat and baking them until the edges are crispy and the middle is creamy and soft. Suddenly this resurgence all makes sense! Hassleback potatoes were apparently invented at a restaurant in Stockholm in the 1950’s as a method to shorten the baking time but since then they have certainly made a comeback and have been increasingly popular over the last couple of years. This is my all-time favourite way of serving them. I urge you to give them a go!

Hassleback Potatoes with Almond, Spinach and Parsley/Basil Pesto

The pesto can be made ahead and stored in the fridge, covered, for up to 10 days. The baking time can vary depending on the potato size and variety. Smaller potatoes will need a little less time. Serves 2-3, or 4 served with additional serving suggestions as above

For the pesto (makes about 300g) 150g almonds, toasted 1 small lemon, zest and a good squeeze of juice a large handful of young leaf spinach (about 40g) a handful each of fresh basil and parsley leaves (about 30g total) 1 small clove of garlic, crushed 1 tsp sea salt About 150ml olive oil (I like to use ½ rapeseed and ½ ex-virgin olive oil but use whatever you have to hand)

1kg new potatoes olive oil for drizzling

1. Begin by making the pesto. Toast the almonds in a dry pan for a few minutes , or until toasted (keep a close eye on them as they turn quite quickly!) In a food processor or powerful high-speed blender, pulse 25g of the almonds until you reach a medium to fine crumb. Set aside until needed. Add the remaining almonds and pulse again for 5-10 seconds before adding the lemon, spinach, herbs, garlic and salt. Sprinkle in a little pepper too. Process until just roughly chopped but not too fine as you want a rustic and textured pesto), then carefully pour in the oil whilst the motor is running. When you reach your desired consistency (you want the mix to be soaked in the oil and still a bit thick, but not saturated in it. The nuts soak up the oil over time so you can be more liberal if you are making this ahead, but remember you can always add more before serving!) Transfer to a bowl and set aside until needed, or cover and place in the fridge if you are making this in advance. 2. Preheat your oven to 180C, fan 160C. Slice each potato thinly, stopping each cut about two-thirds into the potato, leaving the bottom intact. Some people find this easier by placing the potatoes inside a large spoon so that the edges of the spoon will then stop the knife from cutting too deep. I prefer the old school way of just slicing and using my eye - but you have the option. 3. Place the potatoes on a large baking tray and drizzle with a generous amount of oil (again whatever you have to hand - but best to use your more special stock for the pesto), then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 30 minutes, then brush the potatoes all over with some of the pesto, making sure you’re picking up some oil too. The potatoes should have started to fan out slightly which will make it easier to allow some of the oil to fall between the slices too. 4. Bake for about another 20 minutes for average-sized new potatoes - you may need more or less so you can always check after 10-15 minutes to see whether they are cooked and golden. 5. Sprinkle the reserved chopped almonds on top of the remaining pesto. You can also add a little more oil for a fancy look :) The potatoes are especially delicious served warm to hot with ‘at room temperature’ pesto on the side. (Occasionally with this dish, I receive a lot of joyous, happy faces from a ‘dip and go’ style of serving!)

Recipes, styling & Photography: Natalie Seldon Follow me on instagram @prettyediblestylist

The Goodness of Nuts & Seeds is available NOW in most book stores and stockists, and available online via http://amzn.to/2ijctNq

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benjamingarden · 4 years

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Saving Money On Groceries + What We Eat

By far, the number one question I am asked is "what do you eat?" I used to share our meal plan's but it was a lot of work and I honestly wasn't sure if it was something that really interested anyone. Well, apparently it was! Part of the reason for some of the questions is because my husband and I eat very differently, so some of you are also trying to figure out how to make a similar arrangement work. Other reasons are that we are all trying to find new ideas. I find myself wondering the same things and watching other blogger and vlogger grocery hauls and meal planning sessions on you tube. There was a time (long ago) that I didn't pay attention at all to our grocery budget so I would buy ingredients and try tons of new recipes regardless of cost. Ugh....I don't even like to think about those days. At that time I was still trying to build my recipe book (although I now realize there was a MUCH more efficient and cost effective way to have done so) so I was making a ton of new recipes. What I've found is that in the past 10 years we don't try too terribly many new items and as of the past year or two, I actually don't mind eating the same thing multiple times a week. So the way I cook and what we eat has continued to evolve over the years. At one time I was able to stick pretty closely to a $60.00/week budget. It now changes on the season. During the summer and fall I can keep it around $60.00/week because we grow so many of our vegetables. We do preserve vegetables for use later in the year, but I still buy some fresh from the store in winter so it is anywhere from $60.00 - $80.00/week. I can share more about that in a later post if you'd like (this one is already quite long). Although I do enjoy cooking for the most part, I don't enjoy spending hours in the kitchen. Since we work from home it is much easier for me (I can prep ahead, make things in stages, take something out to defrost that I forgot to take out the night before, etc.), but I'm really not interested in spending too terribly long cooking.

Frugality In The Kitchen What we spend on groceries has evolved as well (thankfully). Our personal goal is not necessarily to eat the dirt cheapest food available, although we've gone through financial times where this was our most important goal. Instead, we try to eat organic and/or local food when we can while sticking to a moderate budget. We've also incorporated into our budget a few "treats". For instance, the 2 teas that I absolutely love are definitely not the most inexpensive brands. But I make cuts in other places so I can enjoy these teas without any guilt whatsoever. While there are many tactics that I've shared on the blog, the most important "rules" I follow are: 1. Rarely eat out. It's just too expensive and usually not so healthy. Besides, when you only go out occasionally, it's more of a treat and not an expectation so it's appreciated as such. 2. Don't purchase lunch, snacks, or coffee out. Again, this has been a HUGE expense for us in the past and something that is so easy to eliminate. It's all about preplanning and creating new habits. 3. Stop wasting food. Have you honestly looked at how much food you throw away? I did about 12 years ago. I would write it on a list (along with it's approximate cost) every time I threw something out and it shocked me. Meal planning is what allowed me to turn that around. 4. Pay with cash. Although we now pretty much buy the same things so it's not such a struggle coming in at or under budget, this has been an integral part of slashing our grocery budget. If you set aside your budgeted amount in cash you have no choice but to stick with your budget because when the money's gone, it's gone.

5. Use a meal plan. You don't have to go through the actual process of meal planning, but having an idea of what you'll be eating the next week is the only way you can accurately purchase all of the food you need and not overbuying. On this same note, make a list for every single shopping trip and follow it. 6. Have back-up plans on hand. Yes, plural. It is inevitable that something will come up at least a couple of times a month. You forgot to defrost the meat, you don't feel like eating any of the meals you planned, something has come up and you don't have time to cook what was planned, etc. If you aren't prepared for these times, take-out or eating out will feel like the only options. Having a few freezer meals, pantry staples, and/or frozen pizza's on hand will be budget lifesavers. The freezer back-ups we currently have on hand are frozen pizza (one vegan and one with meat & cheese, although surprisingly, my husband doesn't mind the vegan version), Trader Joe's Mandarin Orange Chicken (can be thrown in the oven while rice cooks in the rice cooker), frozen lentil/bean burgers as well as frozen beef burgers, and frozen vegan chili from a recipe that I made excess of purposely for freezing. The chili is great because I eat it as is, and I also keep cooked ground beef in the freezer in single batch portions, so I can add burger to some for my husband. If you aren't fond of freezer items, keeping a few ingredients stocked in your pantry for super simple meals also works. I keep a list of easy meals (that don't necessarily require defrosting) because when I'm standing in the kitchen at 6pm with no plan and we're starving, I don't always think of options. Some of the meals on our list are: Spaghetti, Veggie Stir-fry with Rice or Millet, Breakfast for dinner, Burger with Mac and Cheese, Szechuan Noodles, Southwest Quinoa, etc. We almost always have the ingredients on hand and they can all be whipped up within 1/2 hour (same time it takes to get take-out!). 7. Choose your store(s) wisely. Warehouse stores are great for some things, but not all. Aldi has great prices but they don't have a large selection. Trader Joe's has some great exclusive items, but some of their other items may be higher priced than if you bought them at your conventional store. Paying attention to prices and being willing to shop at multiple stores, when it makes sense, can be a huge budget saver.

Our Typical Meals So, what exactly do you EAT, you ask. I eat whole food plant-based with no added oil, refined sugar, and very little salt. Jay eats a pretty standard diet of meat, veggies, dairy, grains & fruit. We are both fine with gluten so we do not eat gluten free. I eat almost completely whole grains although Jay is pretty resistant to most whole grains. We have a set 35 or so meals that we choose from for dinner, and throw in a new one to try from time-to-time. Here is what is typical for our daily meals: Breakfast I almost always eat oatmeal. It's inexpensive, nutritious, and filling. While I've begun disliking baked or cooked oatmeal, I have recently fallen in love with eating rolled oats (not quick oats) like cold cereal. I'm not sure why I never thought of this before. I was listening to Dr. Esselstyn speak one day and he was saying that every single morning he pours rolled oats into a bowl, adds fruit and then tops it with non-dairy milk. It was intriguing to me. So I tried it and loved it! I add sliced bananas or berries, a tablespoon of chia seeds, and oat milk (plus a little extra) and allow it to sit for 10 minutes (it softens the oats and they soak up some of the milk) and then dig in. Jay either eats cold cereal (with fruit/berries on the side), toast, an egg sandwich, or breakfast burrito & homefries.

Lunch I eat a green salad (using whatever veggies and beans we have on hand) sometimes as the only meal and sometimes as a side to soup, avocado toast, or toast with nut butter. For the salad dressing, I really enjoy balsamic vinegar, or a mustard/maple syrup/vinegar blend, and I top my salad with a few pepitas and a tablespoon of flax seed. Quinoa is added frequently as well. I've come to love salads which is good because it's a great serving of greens (soooooo nutritious), fairly inexpensive and fills me up so I don't eat so much of anything I'm eating the salad with. I do like to make this chickpea sandwich occasionally - it's really good! Jay usually eats a sandwich, sandwich + soup, or leftovers. The soups I usually make vegan and oil free and then add meat to his. Sometimes he requests a salad with chicken as the protein.

Snack Seasonal fruit! If we have some fruit that was going bad so we threw it in the freezer I'll make fruit smoothies to use that up instead. I definitely have a sweet tooth so every once in a while we have a small piece of good quality chocolate too. Popcorn, tortilla chips, or nuts are rare, but also snack items in our house. Jay very rarely gets potato chips, but does so from time-to-time usually in the summer. If I've made any baked goodies (very rare) we enjoy them during our mid-day snack rather than eating it later in the evening.

Wintertime Dinners Here is where I try, when it's possible, to make something that both Jay and I can eat and then the additions for him are usually meat and for me are usually salad. Making 2 separate meals is a pain. It's why I went from being vegetarian for 14 years to eating meat when we moved in together back in my 20's. I'm figuring it out though. I'm never in the kitchen for longer than an hour so I make a lot of simple meals or I make full recipes of my meals and I will eat leftovers throughout the week. For Jay, he only likes leftovers at lunch so I will cook up meat or grain in bulk and use that to build new recipes throughout the week. Some examples of when we can eat some of the same:

Southwest quinoa as my main meal (small salad was my side). It's quinoa, black beans, cilantro, corn, peppers, and tomatoes. I added a sprinkling of cheese to his and a baked chicken breast on the side. Sometimes I eat this on top of greens like a burrito bowl.

Roasted veggies such as sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, cauliflower, squash, mushrooms, onions, and carrots. I usually have greens on the side and I bake a chicken breast with the veggies for Jay. I like to drizzle balsamic vinegar over mine.

Broccoli rice (rice cooked with vegetable broth, seasonings, and broccoli chopped and added at the end) as our side and my main is a salad with whatever veggies and beans we have on hand. Jay's is a sautéed chicken breast.

Mushroom risotto as our side with a green salad for me and steak tips for Jay. I usually add steamed broccoli or cauliflower.

Spaghetti is made completely vegan and oil free and then I bake pre-made meatballs to add to Jay's and I add beans and greens to mine. We serve salad as the side.

Taco nights I make beef tacos for him with peppers, fresh salsa, cheese, and guac. The ground beef is pre-cooked and frozen so I just have to defrost and add to the shells. I fill mine with refried beans (pre-cooked and frozen or I use canned) along with the same peppers, fresh salsa, and guac. The side is usually rice.

There are also many meals where I make 2 completely separate meals: Some of Jay's favorites:

Salisbury Steak is beef patties cooked with mushrooms and onions. I make a gravy and then serve it all over white rice. I don't eat too much white rice so I usually just make a different dinner for me.

Skillet pork chop with mac and cheese is another where I don't eat any part of what I cook for Jay. I usually serve him broccoli or cauliflower on the side, so I do incorporate that in my dinner.

Chicken and dumplings is a great way to use leftover chicken and he LOVES it. Again, I make something separate for me.

Whole roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and a veggie or two on the side.

Some of my dinners that Jay doesn't eat any part of are:

Baked falafel with a green salad.

Steamed veggies (fresh or frozen) over millet or quinoa. I drizzle them with either balsamic vinegar, homemade liquid gold sauce (recipe found here) or a Dijon mustard sauce.

Baked potato with broccoli, beans, and homemade "cheese" sauce (it doesn't really taste like cheese but it's delicious) and a side salad.

Veggie pot pie with black pepper biscuits is a dish I have been LOVING for winter. The recipe is here and she has a gluten-free variation. The recipes I've tried from her blog have been really really good.

Grain bowl with quinoa or millet usually as the grain and topped with greens, beans, corn, peppers, cilantro, tomatoes, and a drizzle of liquid gold sauce or a chipotle sauce.

Lentil Stew is one of my favorite wintertime treats. It has lentils, potatoes (sweet or regular), carrots & kale.

Lentil loaf with mashed potatoes and vegan mushroom gravy is also really really good. I don't make it often but when I do I savor it.

Desserts While we certainly don't have dessert every night, when we do it's usually either "nice cream" (frozen bananas blended with non-dairy milk, a dash of maple syrup, cacao powder & vanilla extract) or fruit. I do keep a few non-dairy ice creams on hand although we rarely eat them because of the sugar and fats in them. Lately I've been enjoying a cup of non-dairy hot cocoa (sweetened with maple syrup) from time-to-time. It's delicious!

Beverages I drink water or hot tea. I gave up coffee a few months ago and it was really the best choice for me. I do (rarely) drink decaf coffee and, as noted above, hot cocoa. My husband will only drink sweetened iced tea and coffee. Try as I might to get the man to drink water, there is just no way to get him to do so.

How about you? What types of things does your family eat? What grocery budget tips do you have?

Saving Money On Groceries + What We Eat was originally posted by My Favorite Chicken Blogs(benjamingardening)

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michaelfallcon · 5 years

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A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Leeds

Some Yorkshire natives frequently describe the area as “God’s own county,” which suggests they’re not shy of sharing the virtues of this northern English region. Leeds is Yorkshire’s largest city, which may explain the loud and proud approach of many locals when their home is the subject.

That said, the place does have a fair bit to shout about. Formerly an industrial powerhouse built on the milling trade, Leeds has evolved to become the country’s second-largest financial and legal hub, with four universities fueling growth across different sectors.

Previously dubbed “the United Kingdom’s fastest-growing city,” Leeds now blends historic houses of commerce like the 1857 Kirkgate Market—one of the largest in Europe—with designer developments such as Trinity Leeds. But fortunately, it’s not all big brands. Recent years have seen the city’s independent economy thrive, and this is evident in the ever-expanding set of places to pick up a great coffee.

Locals appreciate this daily, whether they’re working on deals, dissertations, or just feel tired from worrying over when Leeds United will finally awake from slumber and win promotion back to the Premier League. But the city’s well worth a stop for tourists too, particularly as its cultural, sporting, and social attractions are a straightforward train trip from London, Edinburgh, Manchester, or York. The list below is by no means exhaustive, but if you feel your energy dipping as you wander across this lively city, it includes some of the best places to grab a brew and recharge.

La Bottega Milanese

A man in an immaculate shirt and tie dispenses drinks and “Ciaos” in perfect synchrony. Customers sip cappuccinos while standing at tiny tables. People in suits breeze past naked lightbulbs and concrete pillars. That instrumental funk you’re imagining? It’s playing.

You might be in Leeds, but the stylish La Bottega Milanese does its best to capture something of the city it’s named after. Espresso comes from two La Marzocco Linea Classic Pros, and the drinks menu proudly wears its Italian heritage, with traditional nods including an affogato and a liqueur-spiked espresso corretto.

The “off-peak” service section offers AeroPress and V60 cups too, and more modern tastes are reflected in the range of non-dairy milk and matcha, beetroot, and turmeric lattes. One of three grinders will presumably always hold La Bottega’s own La Classica blend, but recent guest espresso came courtesy of Darkwoods Coffee, based only 25 miles from Leeds.

If you plan to stop for more than a quick caffeine hit, you might find yourself tempted by the counter of savory and sweet Italian treats. Do chocolate cannoli taste just as good regardless of which country you’re in? There’s only one way to be sure.

La Bottega Milanese has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

North Star Coffee Shop & General Store

Want to escape the city buzz and wander by some water? A 20-minute walk from the central train station, North Star lies just off the River Aire on Leeds Dock. While the company has been roasting coffee since 2013, the cafe opened its doors less than two years ago.

The outside seating might not always be your first choice (Yorkshire isn’t famous for its climate), but the tranquil interior provides an ideal opportunity to relax with a drink. A piccolo with North Star’s Burundi Maruri Natural was the best coffee of my last weekend in Leeds, and the shelves were full of more offerings from Peru, Rwanda, and El Salvador. A La Marzocco Linea PB sits on the light wood counter—there are always two espresso choices—while filter comes from Marco SP9 brewers.

Noisette Bakehouse takes care of the food here: breakfast and lunch plus highly photogenic cakes and pastries. The “General Store” features plenty of coffee equipment next to various food and drink products, and the menu also includes beers from some of Leeds’s superb breweries. One of which—Northern Monk—has a bar that is only a short stroll back up the riverside …

North Star Coffee Shop & General Store is located at 33 Leeds Dock, The Boulevard, LS10 1PZ. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Layne’s Espresso

Something of an early fixture on the Leeds specialty coffee scene, an unmistakable orange front gives way to a clean, minimal space. (Is it possible to say that a venue opened in 2011 has a rather “classic” feel? Maybe in this industry.)

Layne’s baristas serve espresso from a Synesso MVP, with batch and pour-over brews also on the board. London’s Square Mile regularly provides the coffee here, but the V60 was recently loaded with a single-origin Colombian from Round Hill Roastery in southwest England.

Being around the corner from Leeds Station means Layne’s is often busy, but the apparently compact layout benefits from chilled out basement seating. The main service area provides contrasting viewing opportunities: will you choose a window pew and look out on bustling commuters, or turn inwards to see plates proceed from the open kitchen? The food includes brunch comforts such as Turkish eggs and buckwheat pancakes, as well as coffee complements from fellow Leeds business Porterhouse Cake Co.

Given its people-watching potential—and how tough it can be to find good coffee in the United Kingdom after 5pm—it’s worth knowing that Layne’s is open until 7pm weekdays, 6pm weekends.

Layne’s Espresso is located at 16 New Station Street, LS1 5DL. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Temple Coffee & Donuts

Though it sits on an unremarkable lot among garages and petrol stations, this is a popular fuel stop to the west of the city’s financial district. Savvy work on branding and social media is reflected on the premises, where the décor’s as bright as the rainbow of donuts at the counter. If you don’t plan on dunking one of these in your drink, they can be carried away for later in equally fresh pink and green boxes.

Still, it’s not a case of style over substance. Coffee–from East London’s Dark Arts–flows smoothly from a three-group La Marzocco Strada, with batch-brew filter available. Vegan caffeine fiends might appreciate that the swap to oat milk is free, which is not the case in some other city shops. It makes sense here though: all the donuts are vegan, as is the ice cream.

A couple of iced coffee options sit alongside more alternative specials, including the “Purple Haze: lavender steamed milk with floral flavors.” There’s less in the way of coffee equipment for sale, but there is a wall of branded merch should you desire a cafe-related souvenir of your stay in Leeds.

Temple Coffee & Donuts is located at 3 Burley Place, LS4 2AR. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Kapow Coffee

Its renown as a shopping destination means that each weekend crowds hit Leeds in search of glitzy goods. If that all gets too much, you can stop here in the smaller Thornton’s Arcade, and find an oasis of relaxed style and substance.

Kapow’s downstairs area is snug, with a couple of small tables and some window seats. This means customers have the option of chatting with the friendly staff, who knock out espresso on a Kees van der Westen Mirage Duette. Pour-overs are on hand too; a honey-processed Ethiopian from Echelon Coffee Roasters was fresh and floral on my latest stop.

Echelon was one of several Leeds-based coffee brands stocked on that visit. Maude Coffee Roasters—last seen plotting another specialty venue for Leeds, titled Fwd Coffee—was also among the many retail bags in the window. This suggests a laudable commitment to the locality, despite the house espresso being provided by London’s Union Coffee.

Customers who pass the small but well-filled cabinet of goodies—plenty of gluten-free options alongside decadent brownies from Leeds’s Brown & Blond—can enjoy a peaceful hour on two airy additional floors, with artwork dotting the walls throughout.

Kapow Coffee has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Opposite Cafe

This unfussy pit-stop between the city centre and the student areas of Hyde Park and Headingley has been around longer than many of the specialty spots in Leeds: a sign informs passers-by that Opposite has been “Smashing out amazing coffee since 2005.”

The Cafe lies—funnily enough—opposite the main campus of the University of Leeds and therefore fuels the toil of students and staff throughout the day. But this isn’t an extension of the library: the easygoing vibe means many tables are free of textbooks, and the helpful baristas are just as accommodating to customers from further afield. Dropping in on a weekday afternoon, I was handed a super-smooth oat milk flat white, and suggestions for other worthy cafes in the city.

Here, Union Coffee is fed into a La Marzocco Linea PB, with batch-brew from the likes of North Star. Tempting homemade cakes are bolstered by strong pastry work from another Yorkshire city; cinnamon buns and more are sent up from Sheffield’s Cawa Bakery. Back in Leeds, Opposite could provide a handy pause on the way to an intimate gig at the Brudenell Social Club, or a film at the beautiful Hyde Park Cinema.

Opposite Cafe has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Cielo Coffee House

Though Leeds has certainly improved in the last few years, it’s not always easy to find a quality cup away from more central parts. Happily, this outpost in the eastern area of Garforth has been roasting and pouring coffee for more than a decade, and has retained its upbeat atmosphere.

This might be down to the owners’ commitment to giving their profits to other local organizations, or their volunteer program, which helps young people gain coffee skills that can lead to paid employment.

It would be a shame if the product didn’t match the principles, but thankfully it deserves a mention too. All of Cielo’s coffee is roasted on site, and an April trip to Uganda was planned to build more direct relationships with importers. Espresso is dispensed from a La Marzocco FB80, and the house choice is rotated regularly.

Nearby French bakery Dumouchel supplies excellent pastries, and those wanting a sugar fix might also eye the hot chocolates, often served swaying with cream and chunks of sweet snacks. Cielo is a heartening example of a neighborhood independent that has survived the nationwide deluge of awful-to-average chain coffee.

Cielo Coffee House has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Martin Flynn is a freelance journalist based in Sheffield. This is Martin Flynn’s first feature for Sprudge.

The post A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Leeds appeared first on Sprudge.

A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Leeds published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

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shebreathesslowly · 5 years

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A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Leeds

La Bottega Milanese

La Bottega Milanese has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

North Star Coffee Shop & General Store

North Star Coffee Shop & General Store is located at 33 Leeds Dock, The Boulevard, LS10 1PZ. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Layne’s Espresso

Given its people-watching potential—and how tough it can be to find good coffee in the United Kingdom after 5pm—it’s worth knowing that Layne’s is open until 7pm weekdays, 6pm weekends.

Layne’s Espresso is located at 16 New Station Street, LS1 5DL. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Temple Coffee & Donuts

Temple Coffee & Donuts is located at 3 Burley Place, LS4 2AR. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Kapow Coffee

Kapow Coffee has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Opposite Cafe

Opposite Cafe has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Cielo Coffee House

Cielo Coffee House has multiple locations in Leeds. Visit the official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Martin Flynn is a freelance journalist based in Sheffield. This is Martin Flynn’s first feature for Sprudge.

The post A Coffee Drinker’s Guide To Leeds appeared first on Sprudge.

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