Balanced Energy Cake Bars

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Unlike a lot of commercially available products, these bars won’t spike your blood sugars in the same way. There’s technically plenty of sugar in them, mostly from the chopped dates, but they’re also full of fiber, protein, and healthy fats. This means they can give you an energy boost (along with lots of gut-healthy, heart-healthy, and brain-healthy ingredients) without any crash later. They’re also delicious, and make for a great afternoon snack!

You will need

  • 1 cup oats
  • 15 Medjool dates, pitted and soaked in hot water for 15 minutes
  • 3 carrots, grated
  • 4oz almond butter
  • 2 tbsp tahini
  • 2 tbsp flaxseeds, milled
  • 1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
  • Optional: your choice of dried fruit and/or chopped nuts (mix it up; diversity is good!)

Method

(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

1) Steam the grated carrots for 3–4 minutes; pat dry and allow to cool

2) Drain and pat dry the dates, roughly chop them and add them to a bowl with the carrots. Because we chopped the dates rather than blended them (as many recipes do), they keep their fiber, which is important.

3) Add the oats, seeds, almond butter, and tahini. Also add in any additional dried fruit and/or chopped nuts you selected for the optional part. Mix well; the mixture should be quite firm. If it isn’t, add more oats.

4) Press the mixture into a 10″ square baking tin lined with baking paper. Refrigerate for a few hours, before cutting into bar shapes (or squares if you prefer). These can now be eaten immediately or stored for up to a week.

Enjoy!

Want to learn more?

For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

Take care!

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  • Stop Sabotaging Your Weight Loss – by Jennifer Powter, MSc

    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.

    This is not a dieting book, and it’s not a motivational pep talk.

    The book starts with the assumption that you do want to lose weight (it also assumes you’re a woman, and probably over 40… that’s just the book’s target market, but the same advice is good even if that’s not you), and that you’ve probably been trying, on and off, for a while. Her position is simple:

    ❝I don’t believe that you have a weight loss problem. I believe that you have a self-sabotage problem❞

    ~ Jennifer Powter, MSc

    As to how this sabotage may be occurring, Powter talks about fears that may be holding you back, including but not limited to:

    • Fear of failure
    • Fear of the unknown
    • Fear of loss
    • Fear of embarrassment
    • Fear of your weight not being the reason your life sucks

    Far from putting the reader down, though, Powter approaches everything with compassion. To this end, her prescription starts with encouraging self-love. Not when you’re down to a certain size, not when you’re conforming perfectly to a certain diet, but now. You don’t have to be perfect to be worthy of love.

    On the topic of perfection: a recurring theme in the book is the danger of perfectionism. In her view, perfectionism is nothing more nor less than the most justifiable way to hold yourself back in life.

    Lastly, she covers mental reframes, with useful questions to ask oneself on a daily basis, to ensure progressing step by step into your best life.

    In short: if you’d like to lose weight and have been trying for a while, maybe on and off, this book could get you out of that cycle and into a much better state of being.

    Get your copy of “Stop Sabotaging Your Weight Loss” from Amazon today!

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  • Vibration Plate, Review After 6 Months: Is It Worth It?

    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.

    Is it push-button exercise, or an expensive fad, or something else entirely? Robin, from “The Science of Self-Care”, has insights:

    Science & Experience

    According to the science (studies cited in the video and linked-to in the video description, underneath it on YouTube), vibration therapy does have some clear benefits, namely:

    • Bone health (helps with bone density, particularly beneficial for postmenopausal women)
    • Muscle recovery (reduces lactate levels, aiding faster recovery)
    • Joint health (reduces pain and improves function in osteoarthritis patients)
    • Muscle stimulation (helps older adults maintain muscle mass)
    • Cognitive function (due to increased blood flow to the brain)

    And from her personal experience, the benefits included:

    • Improved recovery after exercise, reducing muscle soreness and stiffness
    • Reduced back pain and improved posture (not surprising, given the need for stabilizing muscles when using one of these)
    • Better circulation and (likely resulting from same) skin clarity

    She did not, however, notice:

    • Any reduction in cellulite
    • Any change in body composition (fat loss or muscle gain)

    For a deeper look into these things and more, plus a demonstration of how the machine actually operates, enjoy:

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

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Take care!

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  • Stand Up For Your Health (Or Don’t)

    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.

    You may have heard the phrase “sitting is the new smoking”, and while the jury’s out on whether that’s accurate or not in terms of exactly how damaging it is, one thing that is universally agreed-upon is that sitting is indeed very bad.

    It’s especially bad for your spine (because of being folded in ways it shouldn’t be), your muscles and associated nerves of the lower back and hip area, your abdominal organs (because of being compressed in ways they shouldn’t be), and your heart (because of arteries and veins being squashed up in ways they shouldn’t be), and if you remember how “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain”, the inverse is true, and what’s bad for your heart is also bad for your brain, which won’t get nourished with oxygen and nutrients and which won’t have its detritus removed as efficiently as it should; that’ll be left to build up in the brain instead.

    First, elephant in the room: not everybody can stand, and of those who can, not everybody can stand for long. So obviously, work within what’s attainable for you.

    Also note that while sitting is the disease-bringer/worsener, standing isn’t the only solution, for example:

    • Walking is better than standing. You may be wondering: “who can’t stand but can walk?” and the answer is, a lot of people with certain kinds of chronic pain, for whom walking is less chronic-pain-exacerbating than standing, because the human body is built for movement and inactivity can worsen things even more than movement.
    • Lying down is better than sitting. One of the major problems with sitting is that your organs are all bunched up in ways they shouldn’t be. Lying down is, in this regard, closer to standing than sitting, because your body has a nice straight line to it.
    • Sitting can be made less bad! For example:
      • Sitting in a recliner chair in the reclined position is… Not great, if you’re then tilting your skull forwards to compensate, but if you’re just sitting back and relaxing, this is a lot better than sitting in the usual seated position, because again, it’s closer to lying down, which is closer to standing.
      • Sitting in seiza (the traditional Japanese kneeling position) is, provided you do it correctly and with good posture, better than sitting in the traditional Western manner. The reason for this is simple: instead of having your torso and legs at 90°, they are at 120°ish, give or take the size of your thighs and butt (bigger being better in this regard), and even that angle can be made even better if you use a meditation bench like this one ← we’re eyeballing it and didn’t get out a protractor, but if you look at the model’s torso and thighs, that’s about 135° difference, which is huge improvement over the 90° you get while sitting Western-style.

    For most of us a lot of the time though, we can stand to sit less. Think about the places you most often sit, and what can be done to reasonably minimize those, for example:

    • Car: minimize driving (or being a passenger in a car); walk where reasonably possible. Public transport, if available, may have standing options.
    • Office: a standing desk is, of course, the way to go. You can even use a standing desk converter, like this one. Just make sure to set it at the correct height, both in terms of where the keyboard and mouse go (the same height as your elbows are when your arms are dropped to your sides), and where the monitor goes (center of the monitor should be at eye-level).
      • Note: laptops will never be right for this, unless the natural resting distance between your elbows and your eyes is about 4½ inches, which will only be the case if your total height is approximately 1 foot and 2 inches. For anyone taller than that, laptops are still great to have when on the move and as a backup, but not great for ergonomics.
      • Workaround: if for some reason you must use a laptop for your day-to-day work, consider using a bluetooth keyboard so that you can still set them the appropriate height-distance apart and thus not have to hunch over them.
    • Dining room: sitting to eat a main meal is reasonable, but consider standing options for lighter bites; a standing-height “brunch bar” is great if you can arrange one.
    • Lounge: let it live up to its name, and actually lounge: if you’re not going to stand, then horizontal lounging is an improvement over sitting—as is sitting on the floor, and changing your position frequently. Who knew, kids had it right in that regard!
      • Note: if, like this writer, you do a lot of reading, the same applies regardless of which room you’re doing it in.
    • Bedroom: a culprit for many will be sitting while doing a beauty routine and/or possibly make-up. Easily avoided if you set a well-lit mirror at the correct height to use while standing.
      • Note: at the correct height though! While hunching up over a wall-mounted mirror is an improvement over hunching up at a seated vanity, it’s not a great improvement. You want to be able to stand with good posture and do it comfortably.
    • Bathroom: leave your phone outside—which is also a good approach for avoiding hemorrhoids! See also: Half Of Americans Over 50 Have Hemorrhoids, But They Can Be Prevented!

    Want to know more?

    We reviewed this book recently, which goes into all of the above in much more detail than we have room for here, plus also discusses a lot of social reframes that can be used (since a lot of sitting is a matter of social expectations, not actual need). It’s a very useful read:

    Death by Sitting: The Hidden Health Risks of a Sedentary Life and How to Stand Up for Your Well-Being – by Carolyne Thompson

    Take care!

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  • Think you’re good at multi-tasking? Here’s how your brain compensates – and how this changes with age

    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.

    We’re all time-poor, so multi-tasking is seen as a necessity of modern living. We answer work emails while watching TV, make shopping lists in meetings and listen to podcasts when doing the dishes. We attempt to split our attention countless times a day when juggling both mundane and important tasks.

    But doing two things at the same time isn’t always as productive or safe as focusing on one thing at a time.

    The dilemma with multi-tasking is that when tasks become complex or energy-demanding, like driving a car while talking on the phone, our performance often drops on one or both.

    Here’s why – and how our ability to multi-task changes as we age.

    Doing more things, but less effectively

    The issue with multi-tasking at a brain level, is that two tasks performed at the same time often compete for common neural pathways – like two intersecting streams of traffic on a road.

    In particular, the brain’s planning centres in the frontal cortex (and connections to parieto-cerebellar system, among others) are needed for both motor and cognitive tasks. The more tasks rely on the same sensory system, like vision, the greater the interference.

    This is why multi-tasking, such as talking on the phone, while driving can be risky. It takes longer to react to critical events, such as a car braking suddenly, and you have a higher risk of missing critical signals, such as a red light.

    The more involved the phone conversation, the higher the accident risk, even when talking “hands-free”.

    Generally, the more skilled you are on a primary motor task, the better able you are to juggle another task at the same time. Skilled surgeons, for example, can multitask more effectively than residents, which is reassuring in a busy operating suite.

    Highly automated skills and efficient brain processes mean greater flexibility when multi-tasking.

    Adults are better at multi-tasking than kids

    Both brain capacity and experience endow adults with a greater capacity for multi-tasking compared with children.

    You may have noticed that when you start thinking about a problem, you walk more slowly, and sometimes to a standstill if deep in thought. The ability to walk and think at the same time gets better over childhood and adolescence, as do other types of multi-tasking.

    When children do these two things at once, their walking speed and smoothness both wane, particularly when also doing a memory task (like recalling a sequence of numbers), verbal fluency task (like naming animals) or a fine-motor task (like buttoning up a shirt). Alternately, outside the lab, the cognitive task might fall by wayside as the motor goal takes precedence.

    Brain maturation has a lot to do with these age differences. A larger prefrontal cortex helps share cognitive resources between tasks, thereby reducing the costs. This means better capacity to maintain performance at or near single-task levels.

    The white matter tract that connects our two hemispheres (the corpus callosum) also takes a long time to fully mature, placing limits on how well children can walk around and do manual tasks (like texting on a phone) together.

    For a child or adult with motor skill difficulties, or developmental coordination disorder, multi-tastking errors are more common. Simply standing still while solving a visual task (like judging which of two lines is longer) is hard. When walking, it takes much longer to complete a path if it also involves cognitive effort along the way. So you can imagine how difficult walking to school could be.

    What about as we approach older age?

    Older adults are more prone to multi-tasking errors. When walking, for example, adding another task generally means older adults walk much slower and with less fluid movement than younger adults.

    These age differences are even more pronounced when obstacles must be avoided or the path is winding or uneven.

    Older adults tend to enlist more of their prefrontal cortex when walking and, especially, when multi-tasking. This creates more interference when the same brain networks are also enlisted to perform a cognitive task.

    These age differences in performance of multi-tasking might be more “compensatory” than anything else, allowing older adults more time and safety when negotiating events around them.

    Older people can practise and improve

    Testing multi-tasking capabilities can tell clinicians about an older patient’s risk of future falls better than an assessment of walking alone, even for healthy people living in the community.

    Testing can be as simple as asking someone to walk a path while either mentally subtracting by sevens, carrying a cup and saucer, or balancing a ball on a tray.

    Patients can then practise and improve these abilities by, for example, pedalling an exercise bike or walking on a treadmill while composing a poem, making a shopping list, or playing a word game.

    The goal is for patients to be able to divide their attention more efficiently across two tasks and to ignore distractions, improving speed and balance.

    There are times when we do think better when moving

    Let’s not forget that a good walk can help unclutter our mind and promote creative thought. And, some research shows walking can improve our ability to search and respond to visual events in the environment.

    But often, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time

    We often overlook the emotional and energy costs of multi-tasking when time-pressured. In many areas of life – home, work and school – we think it will save us time and energy. But the reality can be different.

    Multi-tasking can sometimes sap our reserves and create stress, raising our cortisol levels, especially when we’re time-pressured. If such performance is sustained over long periods, it can leave you feeling fatigued or just plain empty.

    Deep thinking is energy demanding by itself and so caution is sometimes warranted when acting at the same time – such as being immersed in deep thought while crossing a busy road, descending steep stairs, using power tools, or climbing a ladder.

    So, pick a good time to ask someone a vexed question – perhaps not while they’re cutting vegetables with a sharp knife. Sometimes, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time.The Conversation

    Peter Wilson, Professor of Developmental Psychology, Australian Catholic University

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

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  • The Spectrum of Hope – by Dr. Gayatri Devi

    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.

    We’ve written before about Dr. Devi’s work (See: “Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good“) but she has plenty more to say than we could fit in an article.

    The book is written for patients, family/carers, and clinicians—without getting deep into the science, which it is assumed clinicians will know. the general style of the book is pop-science, and it’s more about addressing the misconceptions around Alzheimer’s, rather than focusing on neurological features such as beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins and the like.

    Dr. Devi explains a lot about the experience of Alzheimer’s—what to expect, or rather, what to know about in advance. Because, as she explains, there are a lot of different manifestations of Alzheimer’s that are all lumped under the same umbrella.

    This means that a person could have negligible memory but perfect language and reasoning skills, or the other way around, or some other combination of symptoms showing up or not.

    Which means that any plan for managing one’s Alzheimer’s needs to be adaptable and personalized, which is something Dr. Devi talks us through, too.

    Bottom line: if you are a loved one has Alzheimer’s, or you just like to be prepared, this is a great book to prepare anybody for just that.

    Click here to check out The Spectrum of Hope, and hold onto that hope!

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  • Kombucha vs Kimchi – Which is Healthier

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing kombucha to kimchi, we picked the kombucha.

    Why?

    While both are very respectable gut-healthy fermented products,
    •⁠ ⁠the kombucha contains fermented tea, a little apple cider vinegar, and a little fiber
    •⁠ ⁠the kimchi contains (after the vegetables) 810 mg sodium in that little tin, and despite the vegetables, no fiber.

    You may reasonably be surprised that they managed to take something that is made of mostly vegetables and ended up with no fiber without juicing it, but they did. Fermented vegetables are great for the healthy bacteria benefits (and are tasty too!), but the osmotic pressure due to the salt destroys the cell walls and thus the fiber.

    Thus, we chose the kombucha that does the same job without delivering all that salt.

    However! If you are comparing kombucha and kimchi out in the wilds of your local supermarket, do still check individual labels. It’s not uncommon, for example, for stores to sell pre-made kombucha that’s loaded with sugar.

    About sugar and kombucha…

    Sugar is required to make kombucha, to feed the yeast and helpful bacteria. However, there should be none of that sugar left (or only the tiniest trace amount) in the final product, because the yeast (and friends) consumed and metabolized it.

    What some store brands do, however, is add in sugar afterwards, as they believe it improves the taste. This writer cannot imagine how, but that is their rationale in any case. Needless to say, it is not a healthy addition, and specifically, it’s bad for your gut, which (healthwise) is the whole point of drinking kombucha in the first place.

    Want some? Here is an example product on Amazon, but feel free to shop around as there are many flavors available!

    Read more about gut health: Gut Health 101

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