We have finally produced the second meditation in our meditation series! It’s a Hungry & Fit team effort–Fit writes and records the meditations and Hungry edits the video and adds effects. So we finally collaborated and got ‘er done and we’re quite happy with the result! You don’t need to watch the video, you just need to listen to it.
Does it bother me that maybe there should be a hyphen in the title? Kinda. But I actually purposefully left it out to keep it vague and free. Anyhow. I bring you Honey Spiced Cookies based on the Honey Biscuits recipe from A Feast of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones cookbook for those of you who *scoff* didn’t read the books). This is an incredible cookbook! I can’t recommend enough. It’s all based on foods that George RR Martin wrote into the books, and it splits the recipes into the different regions of Westeros. I’ve made several recipes from this cookbook such as applecakes and bread (both recipes serving the faithful Night’s Watch at the Wall). This recipe comes from the South from Lord Caswell’s kitchen.
These honey spiced cookies are warm, soft, and wonderfully potent with spices like pumpkin and ginger. The recipe takes under fifteen minutes and does not have a long ingredient list (honestly, if it’s too complicated, I don’t even want to make it). This recipe is probably best suited for warmer months due to its fall/winter-like spices, but I made this in a California heat wave (90 degrees F, ya’ll), and we still finished all of them in 1.5 sittings between the two of us. I mean, who says no to cookies based on the season?! Get real.
All you need for this exercise is either dumbells or a barbell (our example pictures are with a barbell). Or really any object that you can lift. Maybe your cats are the perfect weight to be your dumbbells! Just kidding (kinda, only if you’re gentle can you do that!). We’re all about doing a workout ANYWHERE so we encourage you to get (safely) creative. So, what exercise are we talking about today? Reverse curls.
What are reverse curls? Reverse curls and curls (lifting something toward you by extending your elbow), but flipped! What does that mean? Basically, instead of the soft (under) part of your arm facing you, your arms will be faced downward in their neutral position. To put it most simply: your palms are facing down instead of up. And then you latch those strong hands onto a weight and bend your elbow, bringing it toward your face/chin. You won’t be able to do as much weight this way, because it’s a bit harder on your muscles.
While a stubble is believed to be a timeless look that never goes out of style, it has its own downsides too. Despite being easy to maintain and care of, it can give you a hard time if it gets itchy, which it does more often than you may think.
However, that’s no reason to ditch it. Instead, you can follow everything we mentioned below and the itchiness would go away and probably never trouble you again.
Why a Stubble is Typically Itchier?
New beards and stubbles are often much itchier than a longer or fully grown beard. This is because you have to shave very regularly when getting and maintaining a stubble.
When you shave or trim regularly, your short beard hair gets a sharp edge. And this sharp edge then causes friction with your hair follicles, as the hair grows after trimming. Naturally, you’d want a very good stubble trimmer to maintain the length even throughout.
Shaving is a primary cause of itchiness when growing or maintaining a stubble. In fact, it’s also one of the reasons the initial phase of growing a beard tends to be very challenging, as a new or short beard often turns itchy. Therefore, ditch the razor and use a trimmer instead.
Cleanliness is a Great First Step
Keeping your beard clean can go a long way in helping you tackle the itchiness common with a stubble. Be it a stubble or a longer beard, they all trap the dead skin cells that come off your skin, which then lead to issues like itchiness and irritation. This is especially if you have no plans to continue your stubble into grow into a longer beard.
However, dealing with this kind of itchiness is not as difficult as it might seem. In fact, simply making sure your beard remains clean throughout the day can make quite a difference.
But you need to understand that your beard hair is different than the hair on your head. It’s androgenic, which means it tends to get influenced by your testosterone levels. This calls for a more careful way of washing your beard hair.
First of all, this means that you shouldn’t be using your body soap or the shampoo you use for your head’s hair for your beard. They often cause more harm than you may think, which includes striping your beard hair of its natural oils that are essential for its health, drying out the skin underneath your beard, and of course, contributing to the itchiness.
A good beard wash can be a very effective cleaning product for your beard. However, you would need to get one with all natural ingredients, and no chemicals at all.
In fact, unless your beard has turned too itchy, simply cleaning with water may work well too. After washing your beard with water, use a good beard brush to just move it over your stubble, and make sure all the areas of your beard hair are covered. This would help get rid of the dead skin cells that may be trapped in your stubble, as well as dirt or other elements that are typically associated with an itchy beard.
Finally, after being done with this process, you need to rinse your beard with warm water. Following this simple process alone may help you eliminate your itchiness to quite an extent.
Using a Good Beard Oil Product
A beard oil is not only for longer beards, but for a stubble as well. Even a stubble needs to be moisturized, and if you don’t use a solid beard oil product, the skin underneath your stubble will struggle to be hydrated enough to support your stubble well.
If the underneath skin lacks hydration, you will find it hard to keep the dandruff, dryness, irritation, itchiness and other similar issues at bay.
A beard oil offers many advantages, with the main ones being nourishing your stubble, keeping it and the skin underneath hydrated, as well as keeping the beard in an overall healthy condition. It’s important to note that as the beard and the skin underneath it rely on each other, it’s imperative for the latter to be hydrated and healthy as well.
And daily use of a good beard oil product helps you achieve that. Apart from that, it would also make your stubble softer, which would, in turn, help lower the friction between your stubble hair and your hair follicles.
As far as using the right amount of beard oil is concerned, a few drops would be more than enough for a stubble. The perfect amount, however, would vary from one man to another.
Start with a very small amount of beard oil, and avoid using in a quantity that makes your stubble feel greasy and oily.
Conditioning Your Beard
Just like the hair on your head, your beard hair can do with some conditioning as well. However, like what we said about washing your beard, using a hair conditioner on your beard is not a good idea too.
An ideal product for conditioning your beard would be a beard balm. But again, don’t forget what we told you about avoiding products containing chemicals.
Going for one that has Argan or Jojoba as its main ingredient would be a great choice. These two ingredients are known for softening and strengthening your beard, as well as tackling dandruff, which is one of the biggest reasons most men experience itching in their beard.
Other Useful Tips
Apart from the three main steps we explained above in detail, there are also some quick tips that might help get rid of the itching in your stubble for good.
Let’s take a look at them below.
Every month, Hungry and I have goals. Twenty-five to be exact. They are split into five categories: Alana, Chris, Hungry & Fit, Home, Fun. Each have five goals within them. One of our fun goals this month was to do a picnic and hike at Will Rogers with Noke.
It depends! That is one of the most common answers in the health, wellness and fitness industries. Why? Every single person is unique and reacts differently to various stimuli. That is why there is not a universal training program that works for everyone. That is why there is not a certain diet that works for everyone. In this situation, it really depends first and foremost on whether you’re having trouble sleeping or not. There are countless sleep-based research studies that have been conducted. Private companies trying to promote their revolutionary, or not so revolutionary, products often conduct their own studies. Universities and wellness institutes do the same since sleep is often considered the most crucial way to recover, and recovery is seen as one of the three core competencies when it comes to your general health. (The other two are physical activity and what you consume.)
In college, I operated at an extremely high level while sleeping four hours or so a night. At the time, I did take a mid-day nap for about an hour. I was training nearly six hours a day and consuming well over 12,000 calories a day. While I was completely drug free, I would take a multi-vitamin everyday and also took some supplements, including fish oils, glucosamine and even melatonin. Melatonin is the most common sleep aid on the market. It is made by many companies and its single ingredient nature makes it less intimidating to most consumers. First, will melatonin make a difference in your sleep and second, how much do you personally need to take?
Even after you find the right amount, any supplement to your health routine might not necessarily maintain its effectiveness over time. You can often build tolerances and find that you need a higher dosage to feel the same outcome. Even if you find it to make a positive difference, the cost over time might outweigh how much better you’re sleeping. It becomes a question of whether you’re willing to make a small investment at first, in order to see if you can sleep better. Those investments can come in many forms, other than pills or tablets. I’ve tried buying expensive pillows, fancy sheets, using a fan at night to stay cool, sleeping with ice packs under my lower back and shoulders, playing sleep music throughout the room, using blackout curtains and more. I’ve tried Neuro’s sleep drink and also Ronnie Coleman’s Resurrection supplement. Why? Because I understand the importance of optimizing recovery.
Most people aim for 6-8 hours of sleep a night. Those are the recommended numbers, according to most sleep research studies. I don’t care as much about the number of hours that I lay in bed at night. My focus is getting in bed, immediately falling asleep, not waking up in the middle of the night and waking up fresh enough that I can instantly roll out of bed at 5:30 in the morning and get right to work. My goal, with my current life schedule, is to be in bed from 10:30 pm-5:30 am and do nothing other than get quality recovery time. Right now, in an effort to do so, with the blistering temperatures and lack of air conditioning in our LA apartment, as well as my insanely, unimaginably impossible schedule, I’ve started using a new product called Sleep Complex by ORB. They reached out to us to see if we would like to try out their product. For honesty purposes, we were paid for this post, but that won’t stop us from giving our honest opinion.
This is a heavy, heavy day in Los Angeles. While I was watching (on television) a hostage situation wrap up at a local Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake, I was scrolling through my Instagram, when I saw more horrible news. Jonathan Gold dies at 57. What?! That must be a joke? He’s been fine. However, apparently, he hasn’t been fine. In early July, Gold was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, damn, it must’ve been aggressive for him to be gone already. This is devastating for Los Angeles. Devastating for us at Hungry & Fit too, he was a hero in the food industry. He even inspired us to do our LA’s Must-Visit Restaurants quest.
Who was Jonathan Gold? He was a Pulitzer-prize, James Beard-award winning food critic, but that doesn’t even cover it. He drove a green pick-up truck and barely turned in his articles in on time. He used his art–and it was art–to shine light on small “ethnic” food joints and lift Los Angeles up to be respected across the food industry alongside New York and San Francisco. Jonathan Gold focused on being positive, unlike many food critics (or critics in general). As he became more and more popular, he knew that his voice was powerful, and he used it for good.
Leg curls are exercises that are focused on the hamstrings. Most fitness buffs mainly focus on their arms and other parts of their body but forget just how important it is to exercise their legs. When they fail to do so, it will result in an imbalanced look, or what people call chicken legs.
July 4th is literally tomorrow and I bet a good amount of you are going to some kind of event. Do all of you have the dish in mind that you will bring? If the answer is no, we are here for you! July 4th is for relaxing, catching up with family and friends, and usually consuming food and alcohol. At most of these events, be it party, BBQ, whatever, there will certainly be lots of food. And a good amount of it will not be healthy. And you know here at Hungry & Fit, we are fine with living it up. But what it’s all about is moderation.
So, we have come up with a list of 5 Hungry & Fit healthier (but still very tasty) recipes that you can whip up and bring to your event. Your friends and family will be impressed that you made it yourself and didn’t just buy from the store! We’ve brought you a mix of savory and sweet dishes perfect for this American holiday. You can thank me in advance for saving you some recipe-scouring time.
1. Cannoli Dip
