Thanks for mentioning this btw. I found this article on the topic, which talks about various nuts and calorie calculation methods in general.
20%+ change seems like a really big deal.
Makes sense.
That reminds me of the bacon nitrate thing.
I have looked into CSAs. It seems like you get a variety of different items in a CSA box that you can’t really control (at least that’s true of the CSAs in my area). That doesn’t work well with my current diet, but might be an option in the future.
Ah good tip.
I have mostly treated frozen fruit as smoothie material (not doing much of that at the moment!) and fresh fruit as the things you eat as fruit. I can try defrosting some frozen berries in the fridge or something though (only eating a couple of kinds of berries atm cuz of diet).
Yeah. I get my berries from Costco quite often.
I did try making my own. I found it kind of annoying. Part of the issue is I want to consume a fair amount of milk. Sometimes I just want a glass and I don’t like the gritty, unstrained kind. Sometimes I want milk as an ingredient (like to make a dressing more liquidy, or as liquid for a keto seed porridge). Another is I’m still adjusting to all the additional stuff I have to do as far as food (make my own dressing, shred my own cheese) and making milk is just like another thing, so I’m pretty disinclined to do it if there’s any practical alternative.
I agree with you re: it being nutritionally better to just drink water and eat the nuts.
You can eat frozen berries with coconut cream (like, the canned kind), yogurt, heavy cream, chia pudding or something like that. If you are using coconut cream, if you refrigerate it first, it will get thicker and creamier.
You can put frozen berries straight into the cream, yogurt, whatever. Some people like that because it freezes the yogurt a bit and makes it kind of like ice cream or frozen yogurt. You can stir it and let it sit a bit until it is a texture you like.
Or you can use thawed berries, either from refrigerator thawing or mild microwaving. And if you microwave, you can do it warm if you like. That is good too, it just depends on personal preference.
You can also stir nuts & seeds or bits of coconut into it. That will give you some crunch and a somewhat granola-like experience. (And if you look at the grain-free granolas, that is basically what they are – just nuts & seeds & coconut. They also have sweeteners though, and sometimes vegetable oils, so I avoid them.)
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I’ve done a ton of fresh berries + yogurt, and have tossed some nuts in sometimes, but you’ve given lots of good ideas.
I’ve used chia seeds, hemp hearts, etc to make a porridge (with milk, heavy cream, sometimes some almond butter, with berries as the “sweetener”) but need to learn how to use those ingredients in more varied ways.
This one seems decent, specifically the “no salt added” product.
Was reading this article:
All four artificial sweeteners they tested had effects on gut bacteria, and two of them affected glycemic response as well.
That seems pretty bad. I’m further encouraged to continue avoiding fake sugars.
I’ve seen stuff indicating that some bacon is permitted on AIP (if it meets certain criteria), but I’m also seeing stuff (general health news/science type articles) indicating that bacon causes inflammation. I wonder if they studied “normal” bacon and not the “cleaner” kinds that you can buy when doing the inflammation studies. I haven’t looked into that yet.
There is lots of general health stuff that says that all meat causes inflammation, or that red meat causes inflammation, or that fatty meat causes inflammation. All those things are allowed on AIP too. Most of what I’ve seen isn’t clear on why or where they are getting the information from, so I haven’t really tried to evaluate it very much.
Also, the only evidence I’ve seen against processed meat is bad correlation studies that don’t separate types of processed meats. But I still tend to avoid processed meat just because of things like trying to avoid extra & unnecessary ingredients & processing, and trying to eat local and humane meat.
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I came across this passage in an introduction to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:
Another difference between Aristotle and modern theorists of the
virtues is his objective notion of happiness. The idea that there is some
universal account of well-being, especially one grounded in human
nature, is denied by most important modern writers who otherwise see
themselves as returning to Aristotle. Likewise, none of them goes as far
as to identify happiness with the exercise of the virtues.
This seems to be ignoring Ayn Rand and denying that she exists. Rand said happiness comes from the achievement of values, and virtues are what let you gain and keep values. So she connects happiness and virtues pretty directly.
For all the non-nutritive sweeteners I’ve looked into, there have either been studies showing that they have an effect on gut bacteria, or there have just not been any studies done on that.
(Also, it is well known that many of them cause digestion issues, tummy upset, diarrhea, etc.)
I didn’t find anything that was both well studied and showed no effect on gut bacteria.
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Do you know of any issues or problems with what they put in things like body washes/soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, or other personal hygiene things?
I made my own with a nut milk bag and blender and was happy with the process this time. I found the process way easier and less messy with the bag. I’ve noticed there are machines to make nut milk that make things even easier (supposedly), but I’m wary of spending money on that since at the moment I’m not sure how long I’ll be avoiding normal milk for.
I came across this description of learning methods and it reminded me of some themes @Elliot has discussed as far as the ideas of practice and mastery.
New, complex ideas are difficult to wrap your head around when you consider them all at once. Research shows that people can only hold a small number of pieces of information in their short-term memories at once. When you’re repeatedly having to refresh your memory of fussy details to understand what’s going on, other information that you need to understand the idea gets constantly pushed out of your short-term memory, so a full understanding becomes somewhere between difficult and impossible.
If you instead break down the idea into simpler parts and thoroughly learn each part and the relationships of the parts to each other, you’ll be able to think about the parts more fluidly and on a higher level when you come back to the larger idea.
The act of splitting up an idea also forces you to understand the idea more deeply than you would if you simply copied and pasted textbook material or wrote down what someone said in a lecture and studied that.
To be clear, I broadly agree with the quote I pasted in my last post re: splitting up complex ideas and it makes sense to me. I realized that I didn’t share an evaluation of what I pasted.
I’ve been using flashcards (mostly the Mochi app, but have tried some others as well) to help with learning some stuff, and I’ve found it pretty helpful. I’ve been trying to find a good all-in-one app for flash cards and note taking, and haven’t succeeded yet. Mochi has a “notebook” view for note-taking but it’s not too great. RemNote is way better at the note-taking task but not as good/fast/intuitive at the flashcard part as Mochi is. (If others are familiar with other software that might be good, feel free to let me know.)
Responding to Elliot’s post here:
Dang, I had no idea about the CritRat connection. I didn’t think too much about where the similarity to Elliot’s writing might have come from specifically, but I was definite thinking of a more “innocent” explanation than plagiarism and CritRat involvement 
This analysis reminds of me Ideal a bit. Cuz basically, you think that being a serious fan logically entails a certain course of action, but most people don’t act like that’s the case.
That all sounds plausible.
I’m going to give this serious consideration. Most of my RemNote notes are pretty unexciting anyways (I’ve even shared some of them e.g. here) and for stuff where I was more concerned about privacy, I used their local-machine-only, non-cloud-syncing database feature. I haven’t found anything else with RemNote’s particular combination of features, so I’m kind of mixed on not using it entirely at the moment (I’m in the middle of taking some notes on Aristotle with it), but I’m definitely feeling encouraged to make more strenuous efforts to find an alternative.
I searched a bit specifically for RemNote alternatives and some people mentioned Logseq so I’m definitely going to check that out.
Another app to investigate. This one markets itself as an alternative to Mochi app
Yeah, there are lots of potential problems with those things.
One thing you can do is look for personal care products on the EWG database. That isn’t perfect though, and I have my doubts about their “verified” category. But if you look at other categories, it will list the ingredients and give a rating for each ingredient, and you can decide for yourself what you think.
Another problem is that even products with “good” ingredients can be problematic because of contamination with things like PFAS or heavy metals.
A couple specific things I am concerned about are sunscreen and antiperspirant. They mostly just haven’t tested sunscreen at the levels you are supposed to use it at, and there is evidence that some commonly used sunscreen ingredients are endocrine disruptors. So I try to stick to zinc for sunscreen. I think it makes sense that when you are spreading actual drugs/medications all over your skin (which is what sunscreen is), that could have potential side effects. So I realized the same thing would apply to antiperspirant. I haven’t looked into that thoroughly, but when I briefly tried to look into it, it seemed like they actually just haven’t done any good studies on that either.
There have been rumours for years that antiperspirant is bad for you, causes cancer, etc. I always had heard there was no evidence it is actually bad. But I think it might be a case of: there is no evidence because no one has done any good studies and looked for evidence. This isn’t what I used to think “there is no evidence” meant. I used to think they meant that we HAD studied it, and we found no evidence of causality. Like, that’s what all the pro-science stuff I had read said was the correct way to look at things. You can’t prove a negative. But you can look for evidence with well designed studies, and then fail to find evidence, and that is about as good as we can get. But it turns out that a lot of the time when people say “there is no evidence that X causes Y”, they just mean we haven’t looked at all. And then they act like the people who think X might cause Y are all just crazy, anti-science, into pseudoscience, etc.
So, anyway, based on that kind of thinking, I just stopped trusting a lot of things, and I have tended towards choosing more natural/minimalist things. Not because I think natural is always inherently better. But because industry has literally knowingly poisoned people for decades with “new technology” (e.g. Dupont and PFAS). And I can’t avoid everything, anything might be harmful. But I can at least try to stick to minimalist ingredients that have been around longer and have fewer factors.
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Kind of an out of the blue/no context post and maybe I should have DM’d you this Justin, but I figure I can be better held accountable in public and also add some value to the community by writing this in public rather than in private. Let me know if posting like this is inappropriate and you want me to modify future behaviour of this kind to address stuff like this differently.
I just wanted to apologize and make reparations for mistreating you in the past and breaking promises to you. I remember I agreed to play Creed with you and also to reply to you about conceding a discussion point where I was wrong, and I ended up ghosting you and not doing either of those things. I lent my VR headset to a friend but I’m looking to move to renting my own room in the next month or two, so I will look into setting up VR then and update you then if you still want to try playing some multiplayer VR games. I want to figure out how to get the cables hooked up to the ceiling so they can be behind and above me or something instead of in front of me. I’ll figure out the logistics.
About the concession discussion point, I don’t remember the topic
Well, I just looked it up on Discord and it was on May 10, 2020. It was about me quitting WoW and making excuses that couldn’t have been the cause for quitting WoW (like ramping up on League) since I stopped playing WoW before I started playing League more. I quit WoW because it was hard and I had trouble problem solving, and also engaging in rational discussion about my class choice and e.g. learning to speed run levelling up and levelling efficiently and so on. So in hindsight, I concede my disagreements with curi and think I was being emotional about it. Honestly, looking back, I’m kind of flabbergasted that I quit over this. It seems like such a small thing and I wonder why I got so emotional about it. It should have been easy for me to admit I was wrong, that I had a lot to learn, and that I needed to take smaller steps to build up to being able to do harder things like engage in those emotionally challenging discussions.
So I apologize for behaving the way I did, especially for avoiding the discussion after that, leaving the Discord, and also for coming back like a year later and not proactively apologizing and addressing the issue. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to set things right and move forward with a more healthy relationship.