Can you eat grapes, or do the stems give you trouble? Consider keeping canned fruit around (peaches, pears, mandarin oranges, pineapple, &c) or dried fruit (raisins, dates, craisins, papaya, whatever) as a way to get fruit that does not include non-food parts. Similar options exist with vegetables. Frozen also works - frozen cherries are already pitted for you just like canned ones.

Keep simple stuff around: for instance, buy hummus, spreadable cheese, guacamole, cold cuts, etc., and keep a sliced loaf of bread in the freezer. At will, break off an arbitrary number of slices, toast bread, put stuff on it, nom.

Hardboil eggs - you can do an entire layer of eggs (how many that is depends on pot size) in half an hour, during most of which time you don't have to be doing anything, and they keep really well. (Put eggs in a single layer in pot. Cover with cold water, plus an inch above the top of the eggs. Bring to a rolling boil, then remove from heat, cover, time 15 minutes, and then drain them and put them in cold water with some ice to bring the temperature down. Store in fridge. To eat, peel (thereby removing all nonedible parts) and take a bite; good with salt, better with salt and also other spices.)

I am mildly malnourished. I am far too thin for my height/age and I do not eat in sufficient volume or sufficiently healthily.

Cost is the major prohibiting factor. I live at home, but I pay for most of what I consume. (Breakfast/lunch.) I am working full time, saving for college.

Food preparation in advance is an option, but I tell myself I don't have the time to do so. Plus buying pre-prepared food is easier and I lack the motivation to make food if I can just buy it.

If I try to prohibit myself from spending (leaving my money/debit card in my car or at home) then I'll more than likely just not eat.

When it comes to preparing food at home, if there is something unhealthy, but gives the illusion of being filling, I will more than likely take that instead of taking the time to make something.

Also, slightly tangential, but still related: I can't eat food that has not-food parts. Examples: apples, I will cut up beforehand and eat only after slicing and discarding the nonedible parts. On meat that has a small amount of fat, I have to completely trim and remove it before starting to eat. I cannot even touch ribs, even though I know I'd like the taste, nor chicken with bones.

Self control is an important element in influencing others, and as such it is central to negotiation theory. So is interpreting the world as it actually is. Clearly communicating one's desires without having them interpreted as anything more demanding than a request (i.e. NVC) is useful, but it is only one way to interact with people and will not always be ideal, even among those one is emotionally intimate with.

I didn't say negotiation and NVC didn't have areas of overlap, I said there were areas where their goals might be in conflict. Not the same thing. (I also didn't say that negotiation was always zero-sum, I said that zero-sum negotiation was an area where conflicts with NVC would likely exist.)

Compare the HNP core concerns, the Max-Neef needs, and the NVC needs inventory for more insight.

You could also look at my own SASS model, or the Murray-Bennett-Robbins models found in lots of self-help stuff. (See e.g. Robbins' TED talk about the six human needs.) There's also a recent 16-point needs model that lists all the same stuff, organized differently. (I don't remember the scientist's name right off, sorry.)

Pretty much every model of human needs ends up with the same big list, just grouped differently as far as categories. And what categorization you use really depends on what functional goals you have for applying your model, rather than there being any epistemologically "correct" classification. (Well, in theory, there's whatever physical groupings that occur in the brain or genome, but there's no point in waiting until we know that before we use the information we have.)

In general, when one is trying to train people to achieve some practical result, the best categorization to use is one that is both mnemonic, and closely tied either to the actions students need to take, and/or to the diagnostic/classification criteria they'll be using. So, HNP, NVC, and I can all have quite legitimate reasons for categorizing the basic needs differently, depending on what we intend to train people to do.

This comment pertains only to the end of the last footnote. It is tangential, but not off topic.

I don't know much about nonviolent communication, as I only heard about it recently and looked it up on wikipedia and the websites that are the first few google hits for it.

I am very, very unimpressed with it, particularly as it contrasts with a negotiation course I took taught by an editor of the last few books of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project Director. How is NVC being integrated with broader LW themes?

From my perspective, if it were well done it would be to the credit of the outlook and philosophy of whoever was doing the integrating rather than to the credit of NVC. In other words, I see NVC as being badly flawed and based on the types of poor thinking LW specifically guards against, so if I saw a collection of only true concepts all gleaned from NVC, the person who made that collection would have to be skilled in critical thought, though if in general they thought well of NVC I'd wonder at their inability to see what they were doing when discarding core elements of NVC.

What I'm saying is related to the difference between a) the principle of charity and b) the principle that one should be able to defeat the good argument that most resembles your interlocutor's bad one. It is possible to cut the wrongness out of NVC, use the remaining pieces as half of a rational theory of negotiation and communication, and stand that up on its own, but to call it NVC would be a misuse of the admittedly compelling label, as far as I can tell.

That said, I can see how a "typical" female who took the negotiation class I did might be less repulsed by NVC. I'm perfectly willing to grant that it's not very unlikely I'm wrong in my assessment of exactly how much better academic negotiation is than NVC; my wrongness could stem purely from idiosyncratic or male biases. A female from my class who didn't become as irrational as I may upon reading the treacly NVC material might give a less damning critique, and a more accurate one.

Still and all, I predict all of my class of 20 would prefer academic negotiation theory to NVC, and so would most sufficiently intelligent people, whichever approach they learned first.

This seems a lot like... ignoring the bigger issues in order to maximize the happiness of self and anyone-you-might-happen-to-encounter.

In other words: Short term gain of personal happiness, long term (potential/risk for) loss of overall world-happiness.

Exercise: Improv (improvised comedy).

What games CAN be good for, is overcoming akrasia.

How so? For the last 15 years or so games have been one of my major sources of akrasia, or rather the stuff I do instead of what I want. Not that I blame them, but except for inspiring me to "be awesome" occasionally, I don't see how games could possibly help here.

I believe the idea - which I have seen brought up elsewhere - is that you can use game mechanics to get yourself to do things that you really should be doing. Essentially you build a game around the actual task that needs getting done. Here's a TED talk about it.

Sure, it might be possible in principle to pick an educational topic and intentionally build a solid game around it that teaches it. Thing is, I have never seen this work so far and the video game industry (including indies) isn't exactly getting more creative recently. Outside view tells me to have very little faith in that happening.

At best, even if it can be done, it still seems to be a really inefficient way to do it. I suspect an underlying fallacy here is a lack of a proper Theory of Change.

sigh

I downvoted this, and in the interest of clarity, let me explain why. I hope I can avoid making this sound too ranty.

This doesn't sound like any fun at all. "Educational" games or games "with a message" never end up being fun. Before I end up channeling Sean Malstrom, I'll just say that if you wanna make a game, make a game. If you want to teach rationality, do that. But don't dress up your attempt at a video game as something more high status than it really is. All learning success that's been attributed to games so far is in my opinion bogus. (Yeah, I learned who Huayna Capac was from Civ4, too.)

This goes for the whole artsy indie game genre. (Especially Braid, which is everything that is wrong with games today.) But none of this is why I downvoted this. I downvoted because there's nothing to see. You have a vague idea. You haven't even playtested yet. How could you possibly know if what you're doing works? Come back when I can play something. Or at least watch someone else do it.

(Also, a puzzle platformer? Srsly? I mean, platformer are among my favorite genres too, but don't you think that maybe it's time to try something different? At least it doesn't look retro.)

Interesting article, but that guy could have avoided some suffering if he knew about ways to lessen pain without anesthetic. A common technique used by body piercers is to numb the area with ice beforehand.

Really though, most of the benefits of those things don't require any cutting. Why not wear the RFID tag in a bracelet? Why not temporarily glue rare earth magnets to his fingertips? If that guy ever needs an MRI, he'll have to get the magnets removed from his body. If he's in an accident and the doctors don't know about his magnets, the MRI could injure him or damage the scanner.

Edit: Oh, he has a blog. It's umm... interesting.