Author: Henry Barnard

I am a voracious reader and also enjoy writing. I often have a very different point of view than the popular one. I do see value in debate, and thought it might add to the public debate on controversial issues if I were to express my contrarian opinions. I also started keeping my poems recently (I've written little pieces my whole adult life but never kept any); and I've been a photographer now for over 25 years. So I will be adding an occasional poem and hopefully interesting photograph to the blog along the way, just to spice things up.

Cuts

In the last 12 years — retired — I’ve learned how to cook, mostly getting instruction from Youtube videos. To my surprise, I love cooking — just love it. I spend a lot of time each day planning the OMAD meal of the following day, and use cronometer.com to do that.

But what I now know about cooking is there is a lot of dicing of food with sharp knives — an incredible amount of chopping for every meal. So the question I have is to what extent the best chefs of the world suffer from cuts, probably some cuts that can be severe, given the sharpness of their knives and perhaps the need for haste for food preparation in a restaurant?

I suspect that getting cut is a very common occupational hazard for the top chefs, and something that happens on a fairly regular basis. Just speaking from my own experience.

Tasty Veg Casserole

Suppression

I felt a wonderful sense of relief and gladness the other day. It was so strong that it was almost alarming.

What I realized when this happened was that for the longest time, perhaps forever, I’ve kept my emotions so in check that it amounted to suppressing them constantly.

That raises the question to what extent one should restrain one’s emotion. Restraint means acting more rationally in the face of adversity, but it also means, to a certain extent, not really living.

So it is a dilemma. My constant suppression means that I have been able to navigate difficulties with rational reactions, but have I really lived? Not really.

Discipline

Hardest Part

Hardest part of growing old is maintaining one’s strength. You need weight training/resistance training to maintain your muscles. And you need to do that with discipline.

Many older people either don’t know that or they don’t have the discipline, so they end up feeble in old age.

95% Do This

No Salt

Stop using salt in your food and you will start to really appreciate various tastes. Your pallet will become much richer for it.

Those cooking instructions that tell you to add a “pinch of salt” to your recipes are very unhealthy, as you get enough sodium from the food you eat and don’t need any additional salt. That pinch of salt just means you are raising your blood pressure a notch, and so welcoming heart issues.

Don’t add a pinch of salt to anything.

Tasty Veg Casserole

95% Do This

There’s a seat in the grocery store I visit virtually every day, and this seat is across from the bread isle. I sit there and watch the shoppers pick out there bread. The vast majority of these people make terrible choices.

Pretty straight forward what you are looking for in commercial bread. First of all, it needs to be whole grain and not refined flour. Second, you would prefer to have multi-grain, not just wheat. Third, if there is added seeds of any kind, this is a positive, as it adds some protein to the bread, and so make the bread less carb-centric. Finally, you would prefer very little added sugar, preferable no sugar added at all.

Instead, the majority of people pick a bread with refined flour (and so no fiber), with only wheat flour, and lots of added sugar, and no seeds. Duh.

This bread choice, once digested by your system, turns into pure sugar with a tremendous insulin spike. Duh, duh, duh.

The Ezekiel breads are the best commercial breads, and Dave’s are pretty good too, although he does have some added sugar.

Don’t be part of this bread majority.

No Hunger