52 Ways to Walk – by Annabel Streets
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Most of us learned to walk at a very young age and probably haven’t thought much about it since, except perhaps in a case where some injury made it difficult.
Annabel Streets provides a wonderful guide to not just taking up (or perhaps reclaiming) the joy of walking, but also the science of it in more aspects than most of us have considered:
- The physical mechanics of walking—what’s best?
- Boots or shoes? Barefoot?
- Roads, grass, rougher vegetation… Mud?
- Flora & fauna down to the microbiota that affect us
- How much walking is needed, to be healthy?
- Is there such a thing as too much walking?
- What are the health benefits (or risks) of various kinds of weather?
- Is it better to walk quickly or to walk far?
- What about if we’re carrying some injury?
- What’s going on physiologically when we walk?
- And so much more…
Streets writes with a captivating blend of poetic joie-de-vivre coupled with scientific references.
One moment the book is talking about neuroradiology reports of NO-levels in our blood, the impact of Mycobacterium vaccae, and the studied relationship between daily steps taken and production of oligosaccharide 3′-sialyllactose,
…and the next it’s all:
“As if the newfound lightness in our limbs has crept into our minds, loosening our everyday cares and constraints…”
And all in all, this book helps remind us that sometimes, science and a sense of wonder can and do (and should!) walk hand-in-hand.
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Heart Health Calculator Entry Issue
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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
❝I tried to use your calculator for heart health, and was unable to enter in my height or weight. Is there another way to calculate? Why will that field not populate?❞
(this is in reference to yesterday’s main feature “How Are You, Really? And How Old Is Your Heart?“)
How strange! We tested it in several desktop browsers and several mobile browsers, and were unable to find any version that didn’t work. That includes switching between metric and imperial units, per preference; both appear to work fine. Do be aware that it’ll only take numerical imput, though.
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Intuitive Eating – by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
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You may be given to wonder: if this is about intuitive eating, and an anti-diet approach, why a whole book?
There’s a clue in the other part of the title: “4th Edition”.
The reason there’s a 4th edition (and before it, a 3rd and 2nd edition) is because this book is very much full of science, and science begets more science, and the evidence just keeps on rolling in.
While neither author is a doctor, each has a sizeable portion of the alphabet after their name (more than a lot of doctors), and this is an incredibly well-evidenced book.
The basic premise from many studies is that restrictive dieting does not work well long-term for most people, and instead, better is to make use of our bodies’ own interoceptive feedback.
You see, intuitive eating is not “eat randomly”. We do not call a person “intuitive” because they speak or act randomly, do we? Same with diet.
Instead, the authors give us ten guiding principles (yes, still following the science) to allow us a consistent “finger on the pulse” of what our body has to say about what we have been eating, and what we should be eating.
Bottom line: if you want to be a lot more in tune with your body and thus better able to nourish it the way it needs, this book is literally on the syllabus for many nutritional science classes, and will stand you in very good stead!
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Nudge – by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
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How often in life do we make a suboptimal decision that ends up plaguing us for a long time afterwards? Sometimes, a single good or bad decision can even directly change the rest of our life.
So, it really is important that we try to optimize the decisions we do make.
Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein look at all kinds of decision-making in this book. Their goal, as per the subtitle, is “improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness”.
For the most part, the book concentrates on “nudges”. Small factors that influence our decisions one way or another.
Most importantly: that some of them are very good reasons to be nudged; others, very bad ones. And they often look similar.
Where this book excels is in highlighting the many ways we make decisions without even thinking about it… or we think about it, but only down a prescribed, foreseen track, to an externally expected conclusion (for example, an insurance company offering three packages, but two of them exist only to direct you to the “correct” choice).
A weakness of the book is that in some aspects it’s a little inconsistent. The authors describe their economic philosophy as “libertarian paternalism”, and as libertarians they’re against mandates, except when as paternalists they’re for them. But, if we take away their labels, this boils down to “some mandates can be good and some can be bad”, which would not be so inconsistent after all.
Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand your own decision-making processes through the eyes of policy-setting economists (especially Sunstein, who worked for the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs) whose job it is to make sure you make the “right” decisions, then this is a very enlightening book.
Click here to check out Nudge and improve your decision-making clarity!
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Why Doctors Skip Breakfast – by Dr. Gregory Charlop
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This book is what it claims to be in the subtitle: “[a collection of] wellness tips to reverse aging, treat depression, and get a good night’s sleep”. It’s not delivered quite like that though—one might expect this to be a page-a-day reader with one tip per page, for example, and it isn’t.
Instead, Dr. Charlop oscillates between telling stories (of the anecdotal variety, though they do come across as illustrative fictions rather than actual case studies with names changed) and sharing his thoughts on various topics, much as one might if talking to a friend or other small social audience in a casual manner.
As such, it’s very easy-reading, while at the same time not being necessarily conducive to skimming, as then one may miss the information buried in the text.
The knowledge itself is probably not anything that regular readers of 10almonds won’t have read before, but it can be good to have a reminder in any case; it’s easy to let things slip, get distracted from a good habit and then not reprise it, that sort of thing, so books like this can function as a timely prompt to make use of various wellness tools and techniques.
As for practicality, some things can be done quickly and easily (such as the intermittent fasting alluded to by the title, for example) whereas others will require investing more time and/or money, but all are at least worthy of consideration.
The style is, as we say, casual—but there is a bibliography and list of further references, so that’s a point in its favor, especially as the book itself is not very long or information-dense.
Bottom line: while there is nothing groundbreaking here, this book will provide a refresher on what for 10almonds readers might be considered the basics, plus some pet interests of the author’s (such as red light therapy and ketamine, which while they have their place, cannot be described as “the basics” of good health; the former is a very nice extra, and the latter has its pros and cons).
Click here to check out Why Doctors Skip Breakfast, and see how your health habits measure up!
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Body Recomposition: How To Get Toned Quickly
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Personal trainer Elisi Wolf explains how to cut straight to it:
As easy as 1-2-3
Many women say they want to “get toned,” which really means they want a body recomposition; looking leaner at the same weight is due to gaining muscle while losing fat—not weight.
Elisi says the sweet spot for effective recomposition is around 25% body fat, allowing for noticeable muscle gain and fat loss simultaneously, ending up with more like 21% body fat as a reasonable healthy end point to the recomposition phase (i.e., the point at which you’ll stop recomposing and start maintaining), though of course you might prefer more or less than that; that’s up to you.
How to do it, her way:
- Calculate maintenance calories: use a calorie calculator and subtract 400 to find your true maintenance; eat this amount for a week to confirm the scale doesn’t change
- Progress your workouts: consistently increase effort by adding weight, improving control (an oft-neglected factor that Elisi focuses on a lot in her training), and/or increasing movement (e.g. daily walks)
- Enjoy a high protein diet: protein is essential for muscle building, fat loss, and satiety; it also burns more energy to digest and keeps you full with fewer calories
About the progression: she recommends to, for example, start with 20 lb hip thrusts and increase weight every second week; eventually, this builds visible muscle without changing calories. Adapt the same model for your preferred exercises, of course.
About the protein: she also notes that we should not just increase protein intake, but also prioritize protein over carbs and fats; it’s not used for energy unless absolutely necessary, so most of it supports muscle gain. She advises that this works whether you still eat meat or enjoy a vegan diet—just ensure your protein intake is high and “clean” (i.e. unprocessed whole foods, or minimally-processed where some kind of processing is necessary—for example, cooking lentils is indeed a process).
About maintenance: once you’ve got to the body composition you want, you should find that your newly recomposed body is actually pretty easy to maintain, because muscle has a thermogenic effect, helping you burn more calories at rest and aiding fat loss (i.e. muscle “costs” calories just by being there—unlike fat, which triggers the body to slow down the metabolism to survive the famine for which we were surely preparing when we put the fat on).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Can You Gain Muscle & Lose Fat At The Same Time? ← we got this question in our Q&A day a little while ago, and here was our answer. We went for a less numbers-based approach, and a more principles-based approach. Both ways work, so by all means pick whichever method you personally find better suits how you like to do things!
See also: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? ← the answer is “yes” and this article explains how
Take care!
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Why Keto Fat Loss Doesn’t Work So Well For Women
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We’ve written before about the ketogenic diet:
Ketogenic Diet: Burning Fat Or Burning Out?
…and the answer to the question posed by that title is “both”:
- the one thing that it is generally considered good for (aside from managing refractory epilepsy in children, which is what the diet was originally designed for) is fat loss
- however, this comes at the cost of cumulative health issues, mostly for the heart, which risks thus become more dangerous over time, for example:
❝As obesity rates in the populace keep rising, dietary fads such as the ketogenic diet are gaining traction.
Although they could help with weight loss, this study had a notable observation of severe hypercholesterolemia and increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease among the ketogenic diet participants.❞
~ Dr. Shadan Khdher et al.
…although there are other problems too, for example: Is Losing Weight Worth Losing Your Kidney: Keto Diet Resulting in Renal Failure
Nevertheless, let’s take a look at that fat loss for which so many people turn to keto:
Ketogenic diet and sex differences
Like most health science for anything outside of “the bikini zone” (i.e. places covered by a bikini), most research into the ketogenic diet has not taken sex differences into account, and has typically looked at either male participants, or participants of any sex and/but without those sex differences being looked at.
However, “most” is not “all”, and a team of researchers (Dr. Yingying Jiao et al.) did examine those sex differences.
She and her team found that over the same period of time, men lost 11.63% of body weight vs 8.95% for women on identical ketogenic diet protocols.
Grabbing a calculator (100(11.63-8.95)/11.63), we see that that means 23% less weight loss for women.
You can read the paper in full, here: Sex differences in ketogenic diet: are men more likely than women to lose weight?
As to why, it comes down to several factors, but first, let’s do a quick recap of how the ketogenic diet works for fat loss: it’s an extremely low-carb, moderate-protein, high-fat diet that mimics fasting. In response to this, the body shifts from using glucose for energy to using ketones. This promotes fat breakdown, reduces appetite, and maintains blood glucose levels as it goes.
Now, let’s look at the process piece by piece.
In terms of hormone signalling:
- estrogen conserves fat breakdown via α-adrenergic receptors
- testosterone accelerates fat breakdown by increasing β-adrenergic receptors
In terms of metabolic energy use:
- estrogen promotes the storage fatty acids as triglycerides and use of carbs as energy
- testosterone promotes the oxidization of fatty acids for energy and store carbs
In terms of where body fat is stored (and thus how easy it is for the body to get at it):
- estrogen promotes the storage of fat subcutaneously (harder to mobilize)
- testosterone promotes the storage of fat viscerally (easier to burn)
In short, everything estrogen does in this regard improves our endurance and helps us survive famine.
Which, on an evolutionary level, is fabulous. However, when it comes to trying to use fasting (or, as in the case of keto, a fast-mimicking diet) to lose weight, then it isn’t so helpful.
Our body is just too well-prepared for it and responds to the “famine” (extremely low-carb diet) by going “don’t worry, we’ve got this!” and carefully rationing our body fat to ensure we can survive the winter.
You may be wondering: if all this is about estrogen vs testosterone, then does untreated menopause (and thus much lower estrogen levels) change this?
And the answer is: yes, it does, albeit not completely, because testosterone levels will still not be so high as in men. Thus, in the category of fat loss, the ketogenic diet:
- works well for men,
- works moderately well for women in untreated menopause, and
- works least well for premenopausal women and women on HRT.
(This is all discussed in the above-linked paper too, by the way)
On that latter note (the menopause etc), it’s also worth bearing in mind that an extra concern that typically comes with the menopause anyway, is further compounded in the case of conforming to a ketogenic diet, because even in the short term, keto already increases osteoporosis risk:
❝Markers of bone modeling/remodeling were impaired after short-term low-carbohydrate high-fat diet, and only one marker of resorption recovered after acute carbohydrate restoration❞
~ Dr. Ida Heikura et al.
A Short-Term Ketogenic Diet Impairs Markers of Bone Health in Response to Exercise
If you, dear reader, are a woman and perhaps of a certain age, and all this has prompted you to wonder what dietary balance (especially: ratio of energy from fat to energy from carbs) might be better for you, then this is quite personalizable, so check out:
What Macronutrient Balance Is Right For You?
Want to lose weight, but not on keto?
We’ve got you covered:
How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
Want to learn more?
For more on sex differences in nutrition (and exercise), with a focus on what’s best with female physiology, you might like this very good book that we reviewed recently:
Enjoy!
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