Calisthenics for Beginners – by Matt Schifferle
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For those who are curious to take up calisthenics, for its famed benefit to many kinds of health, this is a great starter-book.
First, what kind of benefits can we expect? Lots, but most critically:
- Greater mobility (as a wide range of movements is practiced, some of them stretchy)
- Cardiovascular fitness (calisthenics can be performed as a form of High Intensity Impact Training, HIIT)
- Improved muscle-tone (because these are bodyweight strength-training exercises—have you seen a gymnast’s body?)
- Denser bones (strong muscles can’t be built on weak bones, so the body compensates by strengthening them)
A lot of the other benefits stem from those, ranging from reduced risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc, to improved mood, more energy, better sleep, and generally all things that come with a decent, rounded, exercise regime.
Schifferle explains not just the exercises, but also the principles, so that we understand what we’re doing and why. Understanding improves motivation, adherence, and—often—form. Exercise diagrams are clear, and have active muscle-groups highlighted and color-coded for extra clarity.
As well as explaining exercises individually, he includes three programs, increasing in intensity. He also offers adjustments to make exercises easier or more challenging, depending on the current condition of your body.
The book’s not without its limitations—it may be a little male-centric for some readers, for instance—but all in all, it’s a very strong introduction to calisthenics… Enough to get anyone up and running, so to speak!
Get started with “Calisthenics for Beginners” from Amazon today!
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Peanuts vs Macadamias – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing peanuts to macadamias, we picked the peanuts.
Why?
In terms of macros, peanuts have more than 3x the protein while macadamias have a lot more fat. It’s mostly healthy monounsaturated fat, but all the same, we’ll prioritize the protein over the fat, which becomes the deciding factor since they are approximately equal on carbs and fiber. So, a subjective win for peanuts in this category.
In the category of vitamins, peanuts have a lot more of vitamins B3, B5, B6, B9, E, and choline, while macadamias have slightly more of vitamins B1, B2, and C. A clear and convincing win for peanuts.
When it comes to minerals, peanuts have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while macadamias have more manganese. An overwhelming win for peanuts.
Adding up the sections with their various degrees of win for peanuts, makes for an overall absolute win for peanuts, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Enjoy!
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Traveling To Die: The Latest Form of Medical Tourism
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In the 18 months after Francine Milano was diagnosed with a recurrence of the ovarian cancer she thought she’d beaten 20 years ago, she traveled twice from her home in Pennsylvania to Vermont. She went not to ski, hike, or leaf-peep, but to arrange to die.
“I really wanted to take control over how I left this world,” said the 61-year-old who lives in Lancaster. “I decided that this was an option for me.”
Dying with medical assistance wasn’t an option when Milano learned in early 2023 that her disease was incurable. At that point, she would have had to travel to Switzerland — or live in the District of Columbia or one of the 10 states where medical aid in dying was legal.
But Vermont lifted its residency requirement in May 2023, followed by Oregon two months later. (Montana effectively allows aid in dying through a 2009 court decision, but that ruling doesn’t spell out rules around residency. And though New York and California recently considered legislation that would allow out-of-staters to secure aid in dying, neither provision passed.)
Despite the limited options and the challenges — such as finding doctors in a new state, figuring out where to die, and traveling when too sick to walk to the next room, let alone climb into a car — dozens have made the trek to the two states that have opened their doors to terminally ill nonresidents seeking aid in dying.
At least 26 people have traveled to Vermont to die, representing nearly 25% of the reported assisted deaths in the state from May 2023 through this June, according to the Vermont Department of Health. In Oregon, 23 out-of-state residents died using medical assistance in 2023, just over 6% of the state total, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
Oncologist Charles Blanke, whose clinic in Portland is devoted to end-of-life care, said he thinks that Oregon’s total is likely an undercount and he expects the numbers to grow. Over the past year, he said, he’s seen two to four out-of-state patients a week — about one-quarter of his practice — and fielded calls from across the U.S., including New York, the Carolinas, Florida, and “tons from Texas.” But just because patients are willing to travel doesn’t mean it’s easy or that they get their desired outcome.
“The law is pretty strict about what has to be done,” Blanke said.
As in other states that allow what some call physician-assisted death or assisted suicide, Oregon and Vermont require patients to be assessed by two doctors. Patients must have less than six months to live, be mentally and cognitively sound, and be physically able to ingest the drugs to end their lives. Charts and records must be reviewed in the state; neglecting to do so constitutes practicing medicine out of state, which violates medical licensing requirements. For the same reason, the patients must be in the state for the initial exam, when they request the drugs, and when they ingest them.
State legislatures impose those restrictions as safeguards — to balance the rights of patients seeking aid in dying with a legislative imperative not to pass laws that are harmful to anyone, said Peg Sandeen, CEO of the group Death With Dignity. Like many aid-in-dying advocates, however, she said such rules create undue burdens for people who are already suffering.
Diana Barnard, a Vermont palliative care physician, said some patients cannot even come for their appointments. “They end up being sick or not feeling like traveling, so there’s rescheduling involved,” she said. “It’s asking people to use a significant part of their energy to come here when they really deserve to have the option closer to home.”
Those opposed to aid in dying include religious groups that say taking a life is immoral, and medical practitioners who argue their job is to make people more comfortable at the end of life, not to end the life itself.
Anthropologist Anita Hannig, who interviewed dozens of terminally ill patients while researching her 2022 book, “The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America,” said she doesn’t expect federal legislation to settle the issue anytime soon. As the Supreme Court did with abortion in 2022, it ruled assisted dying to be a states’ rights issue in 1997.
During the 2023-24 legislative sessions, 19 states (including Milano’s home state of Pennsylvania) considered aid-in-dying legislation, according to the advocacy group Compassion & Choices. Delaware was the sole state to pass it, but the governor has yet to act on it.
Sandeen said that many states initially pass restrictive laws — requiring 21-day wait times and psychiatric evaluations, for instance — only to eventually repeal provisions that prove unduly onerous. That makes her optimistic that more states will eventually follow Vermont and Oregon, she said.
Milano would have preferred to travel to neighboring New Jersey, where aid in dying has been legal since 2019, but its residency requirement made that a nonstarter. And though Oregon has more providers than the largely rural state of Vermont, Milano opted for the nine-hour car ride to Burlington because it was less physically and financially draining than a cross-country trip.
The logistics were key because Milano knew she’d have to return. When she traveled to Vermont in May 2023 with her husband and her brother, she wasn’t near death. She figured that the next time she was in Vermont, it would be to request the medication. Then she’d have to wait 15 days to receive it.
The waiting period is standard to ensure that a person has what Barnard calls “thoughtful time to contemplate the decision,” although she said most have done that long before. Some states have shortened the period or, like Oregon, have a waiver option.
That waiting period can be hard on patients, on top of being away from their health care team, home, and family. Blanke said he has seen as many as 25 relatives attend the death of an Oregon resident, but out-of-staters usually bring only one person. And while finding a place to die can be a problem for Oregonians who are in care homes or hospitals that prohibit aid in dying, it’s especially challenging for nonresidents.
When Oregon lifted its residency requirement, Blanke advertised on Craigslist and used the results to compile a list of short-term accommodations, including Airbnbs, willing to allow patients to die there. Nonprofits in states with aid-in-dying laws also maintain such lists, Sandeen said.
Milano hasn’t gotten to the point where she needs to find a place to take the meds and end her life. In fact, because she had a relatively healthy year after her first trip to Vermont, she let her six-month approval period lapse.
In June, though, she headed back to open another six-month window. This time, she went with a girlfriend who has a camper van. They drove six hours to cross the state border, stopping at a playground and gift shop before sitting in a parking lot where Milano had a Zoom appointment with her doctors rather than driving three more hours to Burlington to meet in person.
“I don’t know if they do GPS tracking or IP address kind of stuff, but I would have been afraid not to be honest,” she said.
That’s not all that scares her. She worries she’ll be too sick to return to Vermont when she is ready to die. And, even if she can get there, she wonders whether she’ll have the courage to take the medication. About one-third of people approved for assisted death don’t follow through, Blanke said. For them, it’s often enough to know they have the meds — the control — to end their lives when they want.
Milano said she is grateful she has that power now while she’s still healthy enough to travel and enjoy life. “I just wish more people had the option,” she said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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How to Use Topical Estrogen Cream For Aging Skin
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Dr. Sam Ellis, dermatologist, explains:
Tackling the cause
Estrogen is important for very many aspects of health beyond the sexual aspects. When it comes to skin, a drop in estrogen (usually because of menopause) leads to changes like collagen loss, dryness, reduced elasticity, and slower wound healing. Applying estrogen creams to the skin can reverse these changes.
If your estrogen levels are already within normal pre-menopausal female ranges, by the way, there isn’t so much science to indicate its benefit when used topically. If you are already on systemic HRT (i.e., you take estrogen already to raise your blood estrogen levels and affect your body in its entirety), you may or may not gain extra benefits from the topical cream, depending on factors such as your estrogen dose, your route of administration, your cardiovascular health, and other factors.
For those with lower estrogen and not currently on HRT, you may be wondering: can topical estrogen cream affect systemic estrogen levels? And the answer is that it mostly depends on the dose. In other words: it’s definitely possible, but for most people it’s unlikely.
As ever, if thinking of taking up any hormonal treatment, do consult an endocrinologist and/or gynecologist, and if you have an increased breast cancer risk (for example genetically or prior history), then an oncologist too, just to be safe.
That sounds like a lot of scary things, but mostly it’s just to be on the safe side. The dose of estrogen is very low in topical creams, and even then, only a tiny amount is used per day.
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 to read:
- “Why Does It Hurt When I Have Sex?” (And What To Do About It) ← because topical estrogen is not just for your face! Yes, you can use it down there too and it’s commonly prescribed for exactly this use.
- Hormones & Health, Beyond The Obvious
- The Hormone Therapy That Reduces Breast Cancer Risk & More
Take care!
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Fennel vs Onion – 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 fennel to onion, we picked the fennel.
Why?
First note, in case you didn’t see the picture: we are talking about white onions here (also called brown onions, by virtue of their attire).
Looking at the macros, fennel has nearly 2x the fiber and a little more protein, while onion has more carbs. An easy win in this category for the fennel.
In the category of vitamins, fennel has more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B5, B9, C, E, K, and choline (most of them by generous margins and some by especially large margins, we are talking, for example, 480x the vitamin A, 29x the vitamin E, and 157x the vitamin K), while onions have more of vitmains B1 and B6. Another clear win for fennel.
When it comes to minerals, fennel has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while onion is not higher in any minerals. No prizes for guessing: fennel wins this category too.
You may be curious as to how they add up on the polyphenol front, and the answer is, they don’t, much. Wonderful as these two vegetables are, an abundance of polyphenols is not amongst their strengths; fennel has some lignans and onion has some flavonols, but we’re talking tiny numbers here (in contrast, red onion would have aced it with 120mg/100g quercetin, amongst others, but red onion wasn’t on trial today).
Adding up the sections makes a clear win for fennel today.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
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Hate salad or veggies? Just keep eating them. Here’s how our tastebuds adapt to what we eat
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Do you hate salad? It’s OK if you do, there are plenty of foods in the world, and lots of different ways to prepare them.
But given almost all of us don’t eat enough vegetables, even though most of us (81%) know eating more vegetables is a simple way to improve our health, you might want to try.
If this idea makes you miserable, fear not, with time and a little effort you can make friends with salad.
Why don’t I like salads?
It’s an unfortunate quirk of evolution that vegetables are so good for us but they aren’t all immediately tasty to all of us. We have evolved to enjoy the sweet or umami (savoury) taste of higher energy foods, because starvation is a more immediate risk than long-term health.
Vegetables aren’t particularly high energy but they are jam-packed with dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals, and health-promoting compounds called bioactives.
Those bioactives are part of the reason vegetables taste bitter. Plant bioactives, also called phytonutrients, are made by plants to protect themselves against environmental stress and predators. The very things that make plant foods bitter, are the things that make them good for us.
Unfortunately, bitter taste evolved to protect us from poisons, and possibly from over-eating one single plant food. So in a way, plant foods can taste like poison.
For some of us, this bitter sensing is particularly acute, and for others it isn’t so bad. This is partly due to our genes. Humans have at least 25 different receptors that detect bitterness, and we each have our own genetic combinations. So some people really, really taste some bitter compounds while others can barely detect them.
This means we don’t all have the same starting point when it comes to interacting with salads and veggies. So be patient with yourself. But the steps toward learning to like salads and veggies are the same regardless of your starting point.
It takes time
We can train our tastes because our genes and our receptors aren’t the end of the story. Repeat exposures to bitter foods can help us adapt over time. Repeat exposures help our brain learn that bitter vegetables aren’t posions.
And as we change what we eat, the enzymes and other proteins in our saliva change too. This changes how different compounds in food are broken down and detected by our taste buds. How exactly this works isn’t clear, but it’s similar to other behavioural cognitive training.
Add masking ingredients
The good news is we can use lots of great strategies to mask the bitterness of vegetables, and this positively reinforces our taste training.
Salt and fat can reduce the perception of bitterness, so adding seasoning and dressing can help make salads taste better instantly. You are probably thinking, “but don’t we need to reduce our salt and fat intake?” – yes, but you will get more nutritional bang-for-buck by reducing those in discretionary foods like cakes, biscuits, chips and desserts, not by trying to avoid them with your vegetables.
Adding heat with chillies or pepper can also help by acting as a decoy to the bitterness. Adding fruits to salads adds sweetness and juiciness, this can help improve the overall flavour and texture balance, increasing enjoyment.
Pairing foods you are learning to like with foods you already like can also help.
The options for salads are almost endless, if you don’t like the standard garden salad you were raised on, that’s OK, keep experimenting.
Experimenting with texture (for example chopping vegetables smaller or chunkier) can also help in finding your salad loves.
Challenge your biases
Challenging your biases can also help the salad situation. A phenomenon called the “unhealthy-tasty intuition” makes us assume tasty foods aren’t good for us, and that healthy foods will taste bad. Shaking that assumption off can help you enjoy your vegetables more.
When researchers labelled vegetables with taste-focused labels, priming subjects for an enjoyable taste, they were more likely to enjoy them compared to when they were told how healthy they were.
The bottom line
Vegetables are good for us, but we need to be patient and kind with ourselves when we start trying to eat more.
Try working with biology and brain, and not against them.
And hold back from judging yourself or other people if they don’t like the salads you do. We are all on a different point of our taste-training journey.
Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer (Food Science and Human Nutrition), School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Get Past Executive Dysfunction
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In mathematics, there is a thing called the “travelling salesman problem”, and it is hard. Not just subjectively; it is classified in mathematical terms as an “NP-hard problem”, wherein NP stands for “nondeterministic polynomial”.
The problem is: a travelling salesman must visit a certain list of cities, order undetermined, by the shortest possible route that visits them all.
To work out what the shortest route is involves either very advanced mathematics, or else solving it by brute force, which means measuring every possible combination order (which number gets exponentially larger very quickly after the first few cities) and then selecting the shortest.
Why are we telling you this?
Executive dysfunction’s analysis paralysis
Executive dysfunction is the state of knowing you have things to do, wanting to do them, intending to do them, and then simply not doing them.
Colloquially, this can be called “analysis paralysis” and is considered a problem of planning and organizing, as much as it is a problem of initiating tasks.
Let’s give a simple example:
You wake up in the morning, and you need to go to the bathroom. But the bathroom will be cold, so you’ll want to get dressed first. However, it will be uncomfortable to get dressed while you still need to use the bathroom, so you contemplate doing that first. Those two items are already a closed loop now. You’re thirsty, so you want to have a drink, but the bathroom is calling to you. Sitting up, it’s colder than under the covers, so you think about getting dressed. Maybe you should have just a sip of water first. What else do you need to do today anyway? You grab your phone to check, drink untouched, clothes unselected, bathroom unvisited.
That was a simple example; now apply that to other parts of your day that have much more complex planning possible.
This is like the travelling salesman problem, except that now, some things are better if done before or after certain other things. Sometimes, possibly, they are outright required to be done before or after certain other things.
So you have four options:
- Solve the problem of your travelling-salesman-like tasklist using advanced mathematics (good luck if you don’t have advanced mathematics)
- Solve the problem by brute force, calculating all possible variations and selecting the shortest (good luck getting that done the same day)
- Go with a gut feeling and stick to it (people without executive dysfunction do this)
- Go towards the nearest item, notice another item on the way, go towards that, notice a different item on the way there, and another one, get stuck for a while choosing between those two, head towards one, notice another one, and so on until you’ve done a very long scenic curly route that has narrowly missed all of your targetted items (this is the executive dysfunction approach).
So instead, just pick one, do it, pick another one, do it, and so forth.
That may seem “easier said than done”, but there are tools available…
Task zero
We’ve mentioned this before in the little section at the top of our daily newsletter that we often use for tips.
One of the problems that leads to executive function is a shortage of “working memory”, like the RAM of a computer, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed with lists of things to do.
So instead, hold only two items in your mind:
- Task zero: the thing you are doing right now
- Task one: the thing you plan to do next
When you’ve completed task zero, move on to task one, renaming it task zero, and select a new task one.
With this approach, you will never:
- Think “what did I come into this room for?”
- Get distracted by alluring side-quests
Do not get corrupted by the cursed artefact
In fantasy, and occasionally science fiction, there is a trope: an item that people are drawn towards, but which corrupts them, changes their motivations and behaviors for the worse, as well as making them resistant to giving the item up.
An archetypal example of this would be the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings.
It’s easy to read/watch and think “well I would simply not be corrupted by the cursed artefact”.
And then pick up one’s phone to open the same three apps in a cycle for the next 40 minutes.
This is because technology that is designed to be addictive hijacks our dopamine processing, and takes advantage of executive dysfunction, while worsening it.
There are some ways to mitigate this:
Rebalancing Dopamine (Without “Dopamine Fasting”)
…but one way to avoid it entirely is to mentally narrate your choices. It’s a lot harder to make bad choices with an internal narrator going:
- “She picked up her phone absent-mindedly, certain that this time it really would be only a few seconds”
- “She picked up her phone for the eleventy-third time”
- “Despite her plan to put her shoes on, she headed instead for the kitchen”
This method also helps against other bad choices aside from those pertaining to executive dysfunction, too:
- “Abandoning her plan to eat healthily, she lingered in the confectionary aisle, scanning the shelves for sugary treats”
- “Monday morning will be the best time to start my new exercise regime”, she thought, for the 35th week so far this year
Get pharmaceutical or nutraceutical help
While it’s not for everyone, many people with executive dysfunction benefit from ADHD meds. However, they have their pros and cons (perhaps we’ll do a run-down one of these days).
There are also gentler options that can significantly ameliorate executive dysfunction, for example:
Bacopa Monnieri: A Well-Evidenced Cognitive Enhancer For Focus & More
Enjoy!
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