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

❝Please please give some information on elderly loss of energy and how it can be corrected. Please!❞

A lot of that is the metabolic slump described above! While we certainly wouldn’t describe 60 as elderly, and the health impacts from those changes at 45–55 get a gentler curve from 60 onwards… that curve is only going in one direction if we don’t take exceptionally good care of ourselves.

And of course, there’s also a degree of genetic lottery, and external factors we can’t entirely control (e.g. injuries etc).

One factor that gets overlooked a lot, though, is really easy to fix: B-vitamins.

In particular, vitamins B1, B5, B6, and B12. Of those, especially vitamins B1 and B12.

(Vitamins B5 and B6 are critical to health too, but relatively few people are deficient in those, while many are deficient in B1 and/or B12, especially as we get older)

Without going so detailed as to make this a main feature: these vitamins are essential for energy conversion from food, and they will make a big big difference.

You might especially want to consider taking sulbutiamine, which is a synthetic version of thiamin (vitamin B1), and instead of being water-soluble, it’s fat-soluble, and it easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, which is a big deal.

As ever, always check with your doctor because your needs/risks may be different. Also, there can be a lot of reasons for fatigue and you wouldn’t want to overlook something important.

You might also want to check out yesterday’s sponsor, as they offer personalized at-home health testing to check exactly this sort of thing.

❝What are natural ways to lose weight after 60? Taking into account bad knees or ankles, walking may be out as an exercise, running certainly is.❞

Losing weight is generally something that comes more from the kitchen than the gym, as most forms of exercise (except HIIT; see below) cause the metabolism to slow afterwards to compensate.

However, exercise is still very important, and swimming is a fine option if that’s available to you.

A word to the wise: people will often say “gentle activities, like tai chi or yoga”, and… These things are not the same.

Tai chi and yoga both focus on stability and suppleness, which are great, but:

• Yoga is based around mostly static self-support, often on the floor
• Tai chi will have you very often putting most of your weight on one slowly-increasingly bent knee at a time, and if you have bad knees, we’ll bet you winced while reading that.

So, maybe skip tai chi, or at least keep it to standing meditations and the like, not dynamic routines. Qigong, the same breathing exercises used in tai chi, is also an excellent way to improve your metabolism, by the way.

Ok, back onto HIIT:

You might like our previous article: How To Do HIIT* (Without Wrecking Your Body)

*High-Intensity Interval Training (the article also explains what this is and why you want to do it)