5 Ways to Beat Menopausal Weight Gain!

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As it turns out, “common” does not mean “inevitable”!

Health Coach Kait’s advice

Her 5 tips are…

  • Understand your metabolism: otherwise you’re working the dark and will get random results. Learn about how different foods affect your metabolism, and note that hormonal changes due to menopause can mean that some food types have different effects now.
  • Eat enough protein: one thing doesn’t change—protein helps with satiety, thus helping to avoid overeating.
  • Focus on sleep: prioritizing sleep is essential for hormone regulation, and that means not just sex hormones, but also food-related hormones such as insulin, ghrelin, and leptin.
  • Be smart about carbs: taking a lot of carbs at once can lead to insulin spikes and thus metabolic disorder, which in turn leads to fat in places you don’t want it (especially your liver and belly). Enjoying a low-carb diet, and/or pairing your carbs with proteins and fats, does a lot to help avoid insulin spikes too. Not mentioned in the video, but we’re going to mention here: don’t underestimate fiber’s role either, especially if you take it before the carbs, which is best for blood sugars, as it gives a buffer to the digestive process, thus slowing down absorption of carbs.
  • Build muscle: if trying to avoid/lose fat, it’s tempting to focus on cardio, but we generally can’t exercise our way out of having fat, whereas having more muscle increases the body’s metabolic base rate, burning fat just by existing. So for this reason, enjoy muscle-building resistance exercises at least a few times per week.

For more information on each of these, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It

Take care!

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  • Soap vs Sanitizer – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing soap to sanitizer, we picked the soap.

    Why?

    Both are good at killing bacteria / inactivating viruses, but there are several things that set them apart:

    • Soap doesn’t just kill them; it slides them off and away down the drain. That means that any it failed to kill are also off and down the drain, not still on your hands. This is assuming good handwashing technique, of course!
    • Sanitizer gel kills them, but can take up to 4 minutes of contact to do so. Given that people find 20 seconds of handwashing laborious, 240 seconds of sanitizer gel use seems too much to hope for.

    Both can be dehydrating for the hands; both can have ingredients added to try to mitigate that.

    We recommend a good (separate) moisturizer in either case, but the point is, the dehydration factor doesn’t swing it far either way.

    So, we’ll go with the one that gets rid of the germs the most quickly: the soap

    10almonds tip: splash out on the extra-nice hand-soaps for your home—this will make you and others more likely to wash your hands more often! Sometimes, making something a more pleasant experience makes all the difference.

    Want to know more?

    Check out:

    Mythbusting Handwashing

    Take care!

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  • Fasting, eating earlier in the day or eating fewer meals – what works best for weight loss?

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    Globally, one in eight people are living with obesity. This is an issue because excess fat increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

    Modifying your diet is important for managing obesity and preventing weight gain. This might include reducing your calorie intake, changing your eating patterns and prioritising healthy food.

    But is one formula for weight loss more likely to result in success than another? Our new research compared three weight-loss methods, to see if one delivered more weight loss than the others:

    • altering calorie distribution – eating more calories earlier rather than later in the day
    • eating fewer meals
    • intermittent fasting.

    We analysed data from 29 clinical trials involving almost 2,500 people.

    We found that over 12 weeks or more, the three methods resulted in similar weight loss: 1.4–1.8kg.

    So if you do want to lose weight, choose a method that works best for you and your lifestyle.

    chalermphon_tiam/Shutterstock

    Eating earlier in the day

    When our metabolism isn’t functioning properly, our body can’t respond to the hormone insulin properly. This can lead to weight gain, fatigue and can increase the risk of a number of chronic diseases such as diabetes.

    Eating later in the day – with a heavy dinner and late-night snacking – seems to lead to worse metabolic function. This means the body becomes less efficient at converting food into energy, managing blood sugar and regulating fat storage.

    In contrast, consuming calories earlier in the day appears to improve metabolic function.

    However, this might not be the case for everyone. Some people naturally have an evening “chronotype”, meaning they wake up and stay up later.

    People with this chronotype appear to have less success losing weight, no matter the method. This is due to a combination of factors including genes, an increased likelihood to have a poorer diet overall and higher levels of hunger hormones.

    Eating fewer meals

    Skipping breakfast is common, but does it hinder weight loss? Or is a larger breakfast and smaller dinner ideal?

    While frequent meals may reduce disease risk, recent studies suggest that compared to eating one to two meals a day, eating six times a day might increase weight loss success.

    However, this doesn’t reflect the broader research, which tends to show consuming fewer meals can lead to greater weight loss. Our research suggests three meals a day is better than six. The easiest way to do this is by cutting out snacks and keeping breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    Most studies compare three versus six meals, with limited evidence on whether two meals is better than three.

    However, front-loading your calories (consuming most of your calories between breakfast and lunch) appears to be better for weight loss and may also help reduce hunger across the day. But more studies with a longer duration are needed.

    Fasting, or time-restricted eating

    Many of us eat over a period of more than 14 hours a day.

    Eating late at night can throw off your body’s natural rhythm and alter how your organs function. Over time, this can increase your risk of type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases, particularly among shift workers.

    Time-restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting, means eating all your calories within a six- to ten-hour window during the day when you’re most active. It’s not about changing what or how much you eat, but when you eat it.

    Man looks at his watch
    Some people limit their calories to a six hour window, while others opt for ten hours. Shutterstock/NIKS ADS

    Animal studies suggest time-restricted eating can lead to weight loss and improved metabolism. But the evidence in humans is still limited, especially about the long-term benefits.

    It’s also unclear if the benefits of time-restricted eating are due to the timing itself or because people are eating less overall. When we looked at studies where participants ate freely (with no intentional calorie limits) but followed an eight-hour daily eating window, they naturally consumed about 200 fewer calories per day.

    What will work for you?

    In the past, clinicians have thought about weight loss and avoiding weight gain as a simile equation of calories in and out. But factors such as how we distribute our calories across the day, how often we eat and whether we eat late at night may also impact our metabolism, weight and health.

    There are no easy ways to lose weight. So choose a method, or combination of methods, that suits you best. You might consider

    • aiming to eat in an eight-hour window
    • consuming your calories earlier, by focusing on breakfast and lunch
    • opting for three meals a day, instead of six.

    The average adult gains 0.4 to 0.7 kg per year. Improving the quality of your diet is important to prevent this weight gain and the strategies above might also help.

    Finally, there’s still a lot we don’t know about these eating patterns. Many existing studies are short-term, with small sample sizes and varied methods, making it hard to make direct comparisons.

    More research is underway, including well-controlled trials with larger samples, diverse populations and consistent methods. So hopefully future research will help us better understand how altering our eating patterns can result in better health.

    Hayley O’Neill, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University and Loai Albarqouni, Assistant Professor | NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow, Bond University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Chicken or Fish – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing chicken to fish, we picked the fish.

    Why?

    To understand the choice, we have to start a bit earlier on the decision tree. For most people most of the time, when it comes to a diet high in plants or high in animals, the plant-centric diet will generally be best:

    Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?

    When it comes to animal meats, red meat is a fairly uncontroversial first thing to strike off the list:

    Eat To Beat Cancer

    …with pork and some other meats not being much better.

    But chicken? Poultry in general appears to be quite health-neutral. The jury is out and the science has mixed results, but the data is leaning towards “it’s probably fine”.

    See for example this huge (n=29,682) study:

    Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality

    this same paper shows that…

    ❝higher intake of processed meat, unprocessed red meat, or poultry, but not fish, was significantly associated with a small increased risk of incident CVD, whereas higher intake of processed meat or unprocessed red meat, but not poultry or fish, was significantly associated with a small increased risk of all-cause mortality❞

    So, since poultry isn’t significantly increasing all-cause mortality, and fish isn’t significantly increasing all-cause mortality or cardiovascular disease, fish comes out as the hands-down (fins-down?) winner.

    One more (this time, easy) choice to make, though!

    While fish in general (please, not fried, though!) is generally considered quite healthy, there is a big difference (more than you might think, and for reasons that are quite alarming), between…

    Health Risks & Nutrition: Farmed Fish vs Wild-Caught

    Enjoy, and take care!

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    In Wednesday’s main feature, we wrote about the Wim Hof Method, and/but only scratched the surface. Such is the downside of being a super-condensed newsletter! However, it does give us the opportunity to feature the book:

    The Wim Hof Method is definitely loudly trumpeted as “up there” with Atomic Habits or How Not To Die in the category of “life-changing” books. Why?

    Firstly, it’s a very motivational book. Hof is a big proponent of the notion “if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” idea, practises what he preaches, and makes clear he’s not special.

    Secondly, it’s backed up with science. While it’s not a science-heavy book and that’s not the main focus, there are references to studies. Where physiological explanations are given for how certain things work, those explanations are sound. There’s no pseudoscience here, which is especially important for a book of this genre!

    What does the book have that our article didn’t? A good few things:

    • More about Hof’s own background and where it’s taken him. This is generally not a reason people buy books (unless they are biographies), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
    • A lot more advice, data, and information about Cold Therapy and how it can (and, he argues convincingly, should) be built into your life.
    • A lot about breathing exercises that we just didn’t cover at all in our article, but is actually an important part of the Wim Hof Method.
    • More about stepping through the psychological barriers that can hold us back.

    Bottom line: this book offers benefits that stretch into many areas of life, from some simple habits that can be built.

    Pick up your copy of The Wim Hof Method from Amazon today!

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  • How To Reduce Knee Pain After Sitting

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    Sitting is bad for the health, and doubly so if you have arthritis, as a lack of regular movement can cause joints to “seize up”. So, what to do about it if you have to sit for an extended time?

    Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, arthritis specialist, explains:

    Movement remains key

    The trick is to continue periodically moving, notwithstanding that you may need to remain seated. So…

    1. Heel slides
      • Straighten and bend your leg by sliding or lifting your heel.
      • Promotes blood flow and reduces fluid buildup in the knee.
      • Helps lubricate the joint, making standing up easier.
    2. Heel lifts
      • Lift your heels up and down while keeping feet on the ground.
      • This one’s ideal for tight spaces, such as when riding in a car or airplane.
      • Improves blood circulation and can reduce ankle swelling and leg heaviness.

    Do 20–30 repetitions every now and again, to keep your joints moving.

    Note: if you are a wheelchair user whose legs lack the strength and/or motor function to do this, in this case it’s the movement of the leg that counts, not where that movement originated from. So, if you use one hand to lift your leg slightly and the other to push it like a swing, that will also be sufficient to give the joint the periodic movement it needs.

    For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

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    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • The Healthiest Bread Recipe You’ll Probably Find

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    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small

    ❝[About accidental scalding with water] Is cold water actually the best immediate treatment for a burn? Maybe there is something better, or something I should apply after the cold water.❞

    If this is a case of spilled tea or similar—as in your story, which (apologies) we clipped for brevity—indeed, cold running water is best, and nothing else should be needed. It’s up to you whether you want to invest the time based on the extent of the scalding, but 10 minutes is recommended to minimize tissue damage.

    If it’s a more severe scalding or burning, seek medical attention immediately. If it’s a burn to anywhere other than the airway, cold running water is still best for 10 minutes, but if you have to choose between that and professional medical attention, don’t delay the help.

    If it’s a burn you’ve given 10 minutes of cold running water and it still hurts and/or has blistered, cover it in a sterile, non-adhesive dressing that extends well beyond the visible burn (because the actual damage probably extends further, and you don’t want to find this out the hard way later). If the burn is to the face, do still irrigate but not cover it; wait for help.

    Do not apply any kind of cream, lotion, oil, etc. No matter how tempting, no matter where the burn is.

    All of the above also goes for splashed oil, chemical burns, and electrical burns too (but obviously, make sure to get away from the electricity first).

    Source: this ex-military writer was trained for this sort of thing and, suffice it to say, has dealt with more serious things than spilled tea before now.

    Legal note: notwithstanding the above, we are a health science newsletter, not paramedics. Also, circumstances may differ, and best practices may change. In the case of serious injury, call emergency services first, and follow their instructions over ours.

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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