But First, Inner Peace – by Case Kenny
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Thinking positively and vividly imagining a Ferrari parked in your driveway will not, in fact, cause it to manifest there.
You know what that method does work for, though? Feelings.
This book is essentially a guided thought-and-feeling modelling system that, consisting of 60 chapters to be taken one-per-day, aims to rewire your mind for inner peace.
This is not, however, just a matter of “imagine peacefulness”, or nice-sounding platitudes. Rather, at the end of each chapter there is an exercise and journaling prompts; effectively, work to do along the way.
Weighing in at 438 pages, this is a sizeable book, but part of that is because of the space to write answers to journaling prompts. Still, it’s not exactly a pamphlet, either—there is serious and extensive content here too.
Like any daily reader, you can zip through it all at once if you like, but a benefit to doing the chapter-a-day approach is that it sets a habit of mindful reflection, and gives you a chance to implement each thing, one per day, building up new habits in that regard, too. In contrast, reading it all in one sitting wouldn’t give that.
Bottom line: without inner peace, we don’t have much. Treat yourself—you deserve it.
Click here to check out But First, Inner Peace, and enjoy inner peace!
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Resistance band Training – by James Atkinson
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For those who’d like a full gym workout at home, without splashing out thousands on a home gym, resistance bands provide a lot of value. But how much value, really?
As James Atkinson demonstrates, there’s more exercise available than one might think.
Did you know that you can use the same band to strengthen your triceps as well as your biceps, for instance? and the same goes for your quadriceps and biceps femoris. And core strength? You bet.
The style here is not a sales pitch (though he does, at the end, offer extra resources if desired), but rather, instructional, and this book is in and of itself already a complete guide. With clear instructions and equally clear illustrations, you don’t need to spend a dime more (unless you don’t own a resistance band, in which case then yes, you will need one of those).
Bottom line: if you’d like to give your body the workout it deserves, this book is a potent resource.
Click here to check out Resistance Band Training, and get training!
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Feel Better In 5 – by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
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We’ve featured Dr. Rangan Chatterjee before, and here’s a great book of his.
The premise is a realistic twist on a classic, the classic being “such-and-such, in just 5 minutes per day!”
In this case, Dr. Chatterjee offers many lifestyle interventions that each take just 5 minutes, with the idea that you implement 3 of them per day (your choice which and when), and thus gradually build up healthy habits. Of course, once things take as habits, you’ll start adding in more, and before you know it, half your lifestyle has changed for the better.
Which, you may be thinking “my lifestyle’s not that bad”, but if you improve the health outcomes of, say, 20 areas of your life by just a few percent each, you know much better health that adds up to? We’ll give you a clue: it doesn’t add up, it compounds, because each improves the other too, for no part of the body works entirely in isolation.
And Dr. Chatterjee does tackle the body systematically, by the way; interventions for the gut, heart, brain, and so on.
As for what these interventions look like; it is very varied. One might be a physical exercise; another, a mental exercise; another, a “make this health 5-minute thing in the kitchen”, etc, etc.
Bottom line: this is the most supremely easy of easy-ins to healthier living, whatever your starting point—because even if you’re doing half of these interventions, chances are you aren’t doing the other half, and the idea is to pick and choose how and when you adopt them in any case, just picking three 5-minute interventions each day with no restrictions. In short, a lot of value to had here when it comes to real changes to one’s serious measurable health.
Click here to check out Feel Better In 5, and indeed feel better in 5!
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An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Dementia in general, and Alzheimer’s in particular, affects a lot of people, and probably even more than the stats show, because some (estimated to be: about half) will go undiagnosed and thus unreported:
Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good
At 10almonds, we often talk about brain health, whether from a nutrition standpoint or other lifestyle factors. For nutrition, by the way, check out:
Today we’ll be looking at some new science for an underrated tool:
Bilingualism as protective factor
It’s well-known that bilingualism offers brain benefits, but most people would be hard-pressed to name what, specifically, those brain benefits are.
As doctors Kristina Coulter and Natalie Phillips found in a recent study, one of the measurable benefits may be a defense against generalized (i.e. not necessarily language-related) memory loss Alzheimer’s disease.
Specifically,
❝We used surface-based morphometry methods to measure cortical thickness and volume of language-related and AD-related brain regions. We did not observe evidence of brain reserve in language-related regions.
However, reduced hippocampal volume was observed for monolingual, but not bilingual, older adults with AD. Thus, bilingualism is hypothesized to contribute to reserve in the form of brain maintenance in the context of AD.❞
Read in full: Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer’s disease
This is important, because while language is processed in various parts of the brain beyond the scope of this article, the hippocampi* are where memory is stored.
*usually mentioned in the singular as “hippocampus”, but you have one on each side, unless some terrible accident or incident befell you.
What this means in practical terms: these results suggest that being bilingual means we will retain more of our capacity for memory, even if we get Alzheimer’s disease, than people who are monolingual.
Furthermore, while we’re talking practicality:
❝…our subsample may be characterized as mostly late bilinguals (i.e., learning an L2 after age 5), having moderate self-reported L2 ability, and relatively few participants reporting daily L2 use (33 out of 119)❞
(L2 = second language)
This is important, because it means you don’t have to have grown up speaking multiple languages, you don’t even have to speak it well, and you don’t have to be using your second language(s) on a daily basis, to enjoy benefits. Merely having them in your head appears to be sufficient to trigger the brain to go “oh, we need to boost and maintain the hippocampal volume”.
We would hypothesize that using second language(s) regularly and/or speaking second language(s) well offers additional protection, and the data would support this if it weren’t for the fact that the sample sizes for daily and high-level speakers are a bit small to draw conclusions.
But the important part is: simply knowing another language, including if you literally just learned it later in life, is already protective of hippocampal volume in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.
Here’s a pop-science article about the study, that goes into it in more detail than we have room to here:
Bilingualism linked to greater brain resilience in older adults
Want to learn a new language?
Here are some options where you can get going right away:
If you are thinking “sounds good, but learning a language is too much work”, then that is why we included that third option there. It’s specifically for one language, and that language is Esperanto, arguably the world’s easiest language and specifically designed to be super quick and easy to get good at. Also, it’s free!
Do, kial ne lerni novan lingvon rapide kaj facile? 😉
Want to know more?
For ways to reduce your overall Alzheimer’s risk according to science, check out:
Take care!
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The Pain-Free Mindset – by Dr. Deepak Ravindran
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
First: please ignore the terrible title. This is not the medical equivalent of “think and grow rich”. A better title would have been something like “The Pain-Free Plan”.
Attentive subscribers may notice that this author was our featured expert yesterday, so you can learn about his “seven steps” described in our article there, without us repeating that in our review here.
This book’s greatest strength is also potentially its greatest weakness, depending on the reader: it contains a lot of detailed medical information.
This is good or bad depending on whether you like lots of detailed medical information. Dr. Ravindran doesn’t assume prior knowledge, so everything is explained as we go. However, this means that after his well-referenced clinical explanations, high quality medical diagrams, etc, you may come out of this book feeling like you’ve just done a semester at medical school.
Knowledge is power, though, so understanding the underlying processes of pain and pain management really does help the reader become a more informed expert on your own pain—and options for reducing that pain.
Bottom line: this, disguised by its cover as a “think healing thoughts” book, is actually a science-centric, information-dense, well-sourced, comprehensive guide to pain management from one of the leading lights in the field.
Click here to check out The Pain-Free Mindset, and manage yours more comfortably!
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Stop Checking Your Likes – by Susie Moore
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You might think this one’s advice is summed up sufficiently by the title, that there’s no need for a book! But…
There’s a lot more to this than “stop comparing the worst out-takes of your life to someone else’s highlight reel”, and there’s a lot more to this than “just unplug”.
Instead, Susie Moore discusses the serious underlying real emotional considerations of the need for approval (and even just acceptance) by our community, as well the fear of missing out.
It’s not just about how social media is designed to hijack various parts of our brain, or how The Alogorithm™ is out to personally drag your soul through Hell for a few more clicks; it’s also about the human element that would exist even without that. Who remembers MySpace? No algorithm in those days, but oh the drama potential for those “top 8 friends” places. And if you think that kind of problem is just for young people 20 years ago, you have mercifully missed the drama that older generations can get into on Facebook.
Along with the litany of evil, though, Moore also gives practical advice on how to overcome those things, how to “see the world through comedy-colored glasses”, how to ask “what’s missing, really?”, and how to make your social media experience work for you, rather than it merely using you as fuel. ← link is to our own related article!
Bottom line: if social media sucks a lot of your time, there may be more to it than just “social media sucks in general”, and there are ways to meet your emotional needs without playing by corporations’ rules to do so.
Click here to check out Stop Checking Your Likes, and breathe easy!
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Invigorating Sabzi Khordan
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Have you ever looked at the nutritional values and phytochemical properties of herbs, and thought “well that’s all well and good, but we only use a tiny amount”? Sabzi khordan is a herb-centric traditional Levantine sharing platter served most commonly as an appetizer, and it is indeed appetizing! Never again will “start your meal with a green salad to ensure a gentle blood sugar curve” seem like a chore:
You will need
- Large bunch of parsley
- Small bunch of tarragon leaves
- Small bunch of basil leaves
- Small bunch of mint
- Small bunch of sorrel leaves
- 7 oz block of feta cheese (if vegan, a plant-based substitution is fine in culinary terms, but won’t have the same gut-healthy benefits, as plant-based cheeses are not fermented)
- 9 oz labneh-stuffed vine leaves in olive oil (if vegan, same deal as the above, except it’s harder to find plant-based substitutes for labneh (strained yogurt cheese), so you might want to use our Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese recipe instead and make your own)
- 2 tbsp za’atar (you can make your own by blending dried hyssop, dried sumac berries, sesame seeds, dried thyme, and salt—but if you haven’t had za’atar before, we recommend first buying some like the one that we linked, so that next time you know what you’re aiming for)
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 10 radishes
- 6 scallions
- 9 oz walnuts, soaked in water overnight and drained
- 1 cucumber, cut into batons
- Warm flatbreads (you can use our Healthy Homemade Flatbreads recipe)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Arrange the feta, labneh, za’atar, and olive oil in separate little serving dishes.
2) Arrange everything else around them on a platter.
3) Serve! You may be thinking: did we really need a recipe to tell us “put the things on a plate”? The answer here is that this one today was shared mostly as a matter of inspiration, because when was the last time you thought to serve herbs as the star of the dish? Plus, it’s an excuse to try za’atar, not something so commonly seen outside of the Levant.
An alternative presentation
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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