healthiest and fastest oatmeal recipes

 This is a good article with some oatmeal recipes of super elite marathon and triathalete types, so you know the ingredients will definitely be filling and energetically useful for sitting meditators as well.

I'll share my tips on the quickest and easiest way to make the healthiest oatmeal using steel cut oats with a video another time. 

from:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/oatmeal-is-still-the-world-s-best-performance-breakfast?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Oatmeal Is Still the World’s Best Performance Breakfast

Sure, it’s old fashioned. But it’s also nutritional rocket fuel, and athletes are making it taste great. Here’s how.

Outside

    Wes Judd

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

oatmeal-peanut-butter-bananas_h.jpg

A bowl of oats is a blank canvas, ready to be paired with a truckload of other high-quality, nutritious ingredients.Photo by john shepherd/iStock.

In a world of green juice and chia seed pudding, this age-old dish is the original, and perhaps most powerful, superfood, especially for athletes competing at the highest levels.

“I’ve asked a lot of elite endurance athletes about their breakfast foods, particularly before races, and oatmeal comes up again and again and again,” says Matt Fitzgerald, endurance coach, nutritionist, and author of The Endurance Diet.

You’re most likely to see oatmeal served with a ton of fixin’s, but even a bowl of plain oats holds its own as a nutritional panacea. Oatmeal is a whole grain (unless you buy oat bran—just part of the seed—as opposed to rolled oats) filled with key vitamins and minerals, a low-glycemic carb that provides lasting energy for your workout and helps fuel recovery without causing a sugar crash, and high in fiber to aid your digestive and metabolic systems.

But a bowl of oats is also a big blank canvas, ready to be combined with a truckload of other high-quality, nutritious ingredients that make it even better training food. “That’s one of oatmeal’s great virtues. You can take it in so many directions,” says Fitzgerald.

Even energy bar companies use it. Two-time Ironman champion Jesse Thomas’ Picky Bars released Picky Oats, a lineup of better-for-the-athlete instant oatmeal chock-full of real ingredients to support performance, rather than added sugars or fake health foods. “I literally believe that besides energy bars, oatmeal is the next most pervasive food for athletes,” says Thomas.

It’s easy to make. All you have to do is boil a ratio of 1/2 cup rolled oats to one cup liquid—either water or a milk of your choice—and top it with whatever you need that day. (For steel-cut oats, change the ratio to 1/4 cup oats to one cup liquid.) Here’s how six athletes do it.

Gwen Jorgensen

Triathlete

Gwen Jorgensen is arguably the most dominant triathlete alive. In 2014 and 2015, she competed in 12 World Triathlon Series races and won every single one, becoming the back-to-back ITU World Triathlon Series champion. As such, Jorgensen trains a lot—often three or four times in one day—which means she needs to eat just as much. “When I first started training for triathlons, I wasn’t eating enough, and it showed in my performance,” she said last year. “I started to work with a nutritionist, and we decided to start front-loading my days. I now eat a larger breakfast and lunch.” Her breakfast staple: the world’s biggest bowl of oatmeal.

“Gwen Jorgensen’s oatmeal recipe is notorious,” says Fitzgerald. Jorgensen says she eats this at least six days a week, including before races, and never gets sick of it.

Big Bowl o’ Oats

    4 cups water or milk

    2 cups oats

    4 eggs (Poach ahead of time in water with a bit of vinegar and salt.)

    2 tablespoons coconut oil 

Cook and top with generous servings of sliced banana, raisins, yogurt, berries, dried fruit, nuts, and/or peanut butter.

Lucy Bartholomew

Ultrarunner

Lucy Bartholomew is a 21-year-old Melbourne-based ultrarunner who transitioned to an entirely plant-based diet a few years ago. “I first made the switch based purely on thinking it was the healthier choice. I quickly learned that you have to be educated about it, and that you can’t simply cut out a food group and hope for the pyramid to remain stable, especially as a female long-distance runner,” she says. Oatmeal, which Bartholomew enjoys before and after runs, has become one of her staple dishes, in part because it allows for a variety of ingredients and macronutrients—fat, carbs, and protein. “I always carry a bag of quick oats at airports and hotels,” she says. Before a run, she keeps it classic: a little maple syrup and nut butter stirred in right at the end, then topped with banana and cinnamon. But to expedite her recovery, Bartholomew has a more indulgent recipe.

Carrot Cake Recovery Oatmeal

    1 cup water

    1/2 cup oats

    One grated carrot

    1 tablespoon maple syrup 

Cook and top with 1/4 cup each walnuts and chopped dates, plus a sprinkle of cinnamon.

Mark Healey

Big-wave surfer

Surfer Mark Healey depends on oatmeal before big days on the ocean. His go-to recipe perfectly balances nutrients, delivering carbohydrates and immediate energy in the form of bananas and raisins, a bit of protein from chia seeds, and satiating healthy fats in coconut oil and butter.

Fatty Oats

    1 cup water

    1/2 cup oats

    Organic butter

    1 tablespoon coconut oil

    1 tablespoon brown sugar 

Cook and top with one sliced banana, 1/4 cup raisins, and one tablespoon chia seeds.

Cat Bradley

Ultrarunner

Cat Bradley, this year’s Western States winner, is a self-proclaimed oat queen. She’s been eating oatmeal for breakfast for years and sometimes doubles up in one day, eating it for lunch as well. Bradley’s simple breakfast oats dole out fats (nut butter and Frost’d Turmeric-Coconut Oil Snack Frosting, sugars (frozen blueberries and RAD almond-quinoa granola), and carbohydrates (mainly the oats) to keep her fueled and satiated. Her recovery recipe includes turmeric and eggs, which help reduce inflammation and build muscle, respectively.

Savory Oats

    1 cup water

    1/2 cup oats

    1/2 cup canned coconut milk

    Salt, pepper, turmeric, and chopped garlic, all to taste

    Fried egg (Prepared ahead of time.) 

Cook oats with salt, pepper, turmeric and garlic, and top with seasonal veggies and a fried egg.

Kirsten Sweetland

Canadian Olympic triathlete

“I always have oatmeal before races, but I rarely eat it as my daily breakfast otherwise,” says Kirsten Sweetland, a 29-year-old former junior world champion triathlete. She’s a fan of the KIS method—Keep It Simple—and wants just enough carbs to “keep me full but not too full and give me enough energy to race.”

KIS Oats

    1 cup water

    1/2 cup oats 

Cook and top with 1/4 cup frozen berries plus one tablespoon each cacao and hemp seeds.

Steph Violett

Ultrarunner

Steph Violett, a nutritionist, The North Face–sponsored ultrarunner, and winner of the 2014 Western States race, prefers her oatmeal after runs. Depending on her mood, Violett adds proteins and fats in the form of eggs, cheese, and pumpkin puree. “Oatmeal is one of my favorite comfort foods, especially when it’s cold outside,” she says.

Pumpkin Oats

    1 cup milk

    1/2 cup oats

    1/4 cup pumpkin puree 

Cook and top with cinnamon, one tablespoon maple syrup, and 1/4 cup pecans.

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dental floss loop hack - salvages low quality wax dental floss, decreases material waste of floss

typical floss wasting way to floss, plus it strangles and hurts the two fingers on your hands.

 

The sure grip loop method, and floss mass conserving method (needs about 12" to start)

I learned this hack from the web somewhere, maybe lifehacks.

Whoever came up with the idea, we salute you.

What led to this awesome discovery, is after trying several different brands of wax dental floss over the decades, the only one that seemed to work properly was Johnson and johnson's brand.

J&J brand seems to strike just the right balance between not too waxy so that it's frictionless and sliding around your teeth when you need a little more grip and friction to extract food particles, but waxy enough so the floss doesn't just get cut up by your teeth and leaves tiny strands of floss like mango fibre that get stuck in your teeth and even after you remove them it feels like you still have something stuck in them. 

Anyway, one time the Target store had been out of J&J brand floss for quite a while, I couldn't wait any longer, so I bought their generic store brand wax floss.

Worst floss ever. Too waxy. So waxy, that even if you wrap 10 miles of floss on your left and right fingers, when wet the floss still slides off your fingers! I was debating whether it was worth the time to go return this worthless floss,  and decided to do some searching on the web to see if there was a better floss product or flossing technique to prevent finger slippage.

I found that life hack on making the dental floss into a loop.

I demonstrate in the video, using the shitty target brand floss. It's so waxy, I do the first knotted loop 4 times, and the second knot 3 times. Because if you don't loop that many times, it's so waxy the knot will come undone.

The starting length for the floss is about 12 inches.

Start with dry hands, dry floss, otherwise wet hands makes it really hard to tie the loop.

Before you secure the loop on the 2nd knot, you can adjust the location of the  intersection so that the loop is smaller or larger according to your preference.

The final part of the video, where I demonstrate grabbing the loop with many fingers from both sides, is the wondrous property of this floss hack that makes your grip possible when you floss, no matter how slippery the wax, or how wet your hands are. 

Additional bonus of this loop hack: Save the loop of floss and reuse it several times. I can usually get about 4-6 uses out of it before it starts to break apart and leaving string residue in my teeth.

This is great if you're going backpacking, just pre loop a few loops instead of a whole cannister of floss taking up weight and space.

Now before you say, "gross, that's not hygenic reusing floss."

Let me ask you this. Do you throw away your toothbrush after each use? Because the same bacteria that you think is gross and un hygenic goes onto the floss and brush. So if you can rinse and reuse the brush, same with the floss.

Summary of benefits

1. loop floss grip doesn't strangle your fingers, the pressure is distributed across many fingers 

2. you're not dependent on J&J brand (the best quality wax floss), you can now use all kinds of shitty brands of floss and make them work for you. 

3. using the loop grip, you start with 12" instead of 18", so right off the bat, you're using 33% less floss. And since you can reuse each loop let's say an average of 4 times, your cannister of floss will last more than 5 times longer (4 + 33% x 4)

discussion thread

post replydental floss loop hack - salvages low quality wax dental floss, eliminates wastage of floss also

from heuristic-dish via /r/EarlyBuddhismMeditati sent 3 hours ago

Is that a form of tantric dental flossing meditation?

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lucid24-frankk[S] 1 point just now 

not sure if you're joking, but like eating, flossing should be done with sati and samadhi. You should even be able to retain about 20% jhana if you go slow, very relaxed. I floss with complete focus, eyes closed, and I picture the area I'm flossing, making sure to apply pressure with both hands so it does a thorough scrape, I go up and down 5 or 6 times each tooth surface.

Part of my motivation was to really get flossing down perfect and prevent any more cavities. For yogis on super low budget, and high medical cost care in the USA, that's important. But that's another thing about the jhana mentality. Once you get into it, the natural tendency is to strive for excellence in whatever endeavor you do.

My flossing technique is pretty much perfect after years of practice, but in the end, the shape of your teeth can still be your downfall. Wherever you have natural indentation/concavities on your teeth surfaces, the floss will glide over it without scraping. Dukkha, can't avoid it (through flossing).

pressure cooker, dry pasta in 10 min, no need to use 6 quarts of water, fresh pasta in 5 min.

 you can use way less water to make pasta than cooking directions require,

if you use a pressure cooker.

So with less water to heat up, the actual net cooking times are much faster.

more time saved cooking, more energy saved from not burning fossil fuels to heat unnecessarily large amount of water, save the planet,

save more time to do jhana.

(more details and concrete recipe examples later)

the reason they tell you to use so much water is so it won't make ravioli stick together. 

through trial and error i found with pressure cooker, even with so little water you wouldn't believe, the ravioli separate easily.

taiji bang/ruler - good for circulating qi to hands and forearms, coordinating whole body movement, twining

 good explanation in this video

originally the moves were designed not for qigong but qing na martial intent, grappling and breaking arms, etc. 

So some of the moves in the set are meant to be done with strong hand grip.

Qigong Gorilla's intention are purely internal energy development and health, so I do super soft grip 90-99% of the time, doing a few strong grips now and then to exercise muscle/ligament/tendon circulation/strength. 

🙀🐈💩the cat and the scat: great exercise for sitting meditators, squatting safely

The Cat and THE SCAT 

You can see where I got the name for this exercise. It leverages the memory link with a popular children's book character. I was going to name the exercise "safe squats", but this is more memorable, easier for sati (rememberfulness) to recall. And it's a more fun name that brings a smile, great for physical and mental health. 

Regular squat exercise from standing

Looks something like this:

disadvantages: can be hard on joints, knees, especially if you're old, overweight, do too much sitting meditation, etc. 

The Cat and THE SCAT 

looks like this: 

The inspiration for this move, comes from the fact that after you do a long sitting meditation, your legs may be numb. You should do some gentle exercises to not only remedy that, but exercise long enough to prevent chronic damage, nerves dying out and partial paralysis of the legs, for long time sitting meditators like monks and nuns who meditate 8 hours a day. Stretching immediately is not advisable, remember the gorilla mantra "always WASTE FREE". (WAS = warm and soft)

Always get your body warm and soft before you stretch. So to do that, starting from sitting on the floor position, you can do some cat cow gentle stretches, or go into 'cat and the scat'.

Like the picture of the cat shows, your arms are going to be the base and support your squatting move, unlike the standard standing squat. So you've effectively taken half your body weight from pressuring your knees. Now the squatting action is just the legs squatting its own lower body weight. So you can do a lot more squats this way. Depending on your flexibility, you can go from a full squat on the ground initially, to an ending position where your legs are full extended into a standing forward bend posture. But don't force it. The idea here is getting enough reps and circulation back into your feet, knees, legs,  and undo the damage done from a long sit. 

In one set, you can probably do anywhere between 15-50 reps. Experiment with the speed of the movement, number of reps and sets,  breathing, etc., to make this a gentle, safe. and fruitful exercise to counter any damage you may have done with long sitting. Certainly spend at least enough time that no  part of your leg is numb or uncomfortable, everything is feeling warm and soft and nice. 

As a reference point for an example of what to do, right after a long meditation, while still seated on the floor:

*  I'll spend about half a minute massaging my legs. 

* Then another half minute doing some flying cat cow (regular cat cow with more spinal orientations)

* Then between 30-50 repetitions of 🙀🐈💩. Most of the reps will just be about half of the range of a full length cat scat, at a pretty fast speed. 50 reps is about the point where I start to feel some 'burn' from weaker parts of the leg getting tired, such as knees and ligaments/fascia around the knee. Notice that this kind of 'burn' is different than the 'burn' that a weight lifter who is trying to bulk up and build bigger and stronger muscles is aiming for. I'm doing high reps and a partial range of motion so I can pump a lot of blood into my feet, ankles, knees that were deprived from a long sitting session. The 'burn' I feel from doing 50 reps is because the circulation pathways are atrophied and weak (compared to non sitting meditators), and the goal is to do enough reps so that I can strengthen my circulation pathways, not to get bigger muscles. So if you're a meditator who has decades of long sitting damage to your lower legs, then do more reps, more sets, feel the right kind of 'burn' so you can heal yourself faster. If your feet get cold easily, your knees get sore easily, your balance standing and walking is kind of wobbly, those are signs you have problems and need to do more reps and sets.  

If you compare a standard squatting exercise to  🙀🐈💩, you'll see that cat scat gets a fuller range of motion on the ankles and knees. 

I spent time in monasteries where monks and nuns sit 10 hours a day. That is the place people really need to do this exercise. It will never catch on for group sits in a meditation hall, for decorum, etc. But in your own sits in your own space, you should do this. I've also notice long time sitters, and this started happening to myself, where parts of your leg get permanently numb and paralyzed, making your balance standing and walking wobbly, and impacting your overall health. I was able to fix these problems doing other physical exercises after many years, but better to prevent that problem from happening in the first place. I wish someone had taught me some of these great exercises.

Verified great results done many times a day

1/10/2021 update

This is currently what I do every day, after each sitting meditation session (typically 30-90 min each sit).

1 set partial range fast set 36 reps to get heat, circulation - note whatever parts of legs start to get burn or fatigue is where qi flow is suboptimal - should see improvement over time.

1 set 9-18 reps, slow speed,  full range of motion, depending on your flexibility I go from full cat squat into legs nearly fully standing and heels on ground. On the down part of the rep, I still go slow and controlled, not letting gravity take out my legs from working, unlike the first set where I do partial range fast set. 

This gets heat, circulation, legs feeling normal again quickly and efficiently with zero risk of injury, biasing and working the legs which for most people will have been slowly starved of blood and oxygen for the sit session.

Another fun exercise to combo with Cat and the Scat,

I call it bunny hopping:

From the Cat scat position, instead of squatting up into standing, you jump your legs off the floor completely. It's really fun. Land your feet in different spots. Left, right, forward, backward so you gradually even go from a pushup position into cat scat posture. (I'll make a demo video later)

It's really fun, and great exercise.

These pictures included just because