Exercise with Type 1 Diabetes – by Ginger Vieira
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If you or a loved one has Type 1 Diabetes, you’ll know that exercise can be especially frustrating…
- If you don’t do it, you risk weight gain and eventual insulin resistance.
- If you do it, you risk dangerous hypos, or perhaps hypers if you took off your pump or skipped a bolus.
Unfortunately, the popular medical advice is “well, just do your best”.
Ginger Vieira is Type 1 Diabetic, and writes with 20+ experience of managing her diabetes while being a keen exerciser. As T1D folks out there will also know, comorbidities are very common; in her case, fibromyalgia was the biggest additional blow to her ability to exercise, along with an underactive thyroid. So when it comes to dealing with the practical nuts and bolts of things, she (while herself observing she’s not a doctor, let alone your doctor) has a lot more practical knowledge than an endocrinologist (without diabetes) behind a desk.
Speaking of nuts and bolts, this book isn’t a pep talk.
It has a bit of that in, but most of it is really practical information, e.g: using fasted exercise (4 hours from last meal+bolus) to prevent hypos, counterintuitive as that may seem—the key is that timing a workout for when you have the least amount of fast-acting insulin in your body means your body can’t easily use your blood sugars for energy, and draws from your fat reserves instead… Win/Win!
That’s just one quick tip because this is a 1-minute review, but Vieira gives:
- whole chapters, with example datasets (real numbers)
- tech-specific advice, e.g. pump, injection, etc
- insulin-specific advice, e.g. fast vs slow, and adjustments to each in the context of exercise
- timing advice re meal/bolus/exercise for different insulins and techs
- blood-sugar management advice for different exercise types (aerobic/anaerobic, sprint/endurance, etc)
…and lots more that we don’t have room to mention here
Basically… If you or a loved one has T1D, we really recommend this book!
Order a copy of “Exercise with Type 1 Diabetes” from Amazon today!
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Lucid Dreaming – by Stephen LaBerge Ph.D.
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For any unfamiliar: lucid dreaming means being aware that one is dreaming, while dreaming, and exercising a degree of control over the dream. Superficially, this is fun. But if one really wants to go deeper into it, it can be a lot more:
Dr. Stephen LaBerge takes a science-based approach to lucid dreaming, and in this work provides not only step-by-step instructions of several ways of inducing lucid dreaming, but also, opens the reader’s mind to things that can be done there beyond the merely recreational:
In lucid dreams, he argues and illustrates, it’s possible to talk to parts of one’s own subconscious (Inception, anyone? Yes, this book came first) and get quite an amount of self-therapy done. And that hobby you wish you had more time to practice? The possibilities just became limitless. And who wouldn’t want that?
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Prostate Health: What You Should Know
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Prostate Health: What You Should Know
We’re aware that very many of our readers are women, who do not have a prostate.
However, dear reader: if you do have one, and/or love someone who has one, this is a good thing to know about.
The prostate gland is a (hopefully) walnut-sized gland (it actually looks a bit like a walnut too), that usually sits just under the bladder.
See also: How to Locate Your Prostate*
*The scale is not great in these diagrams, but they’ll get the job done. Besides, everyone is different on the inside, anyway. Not in a “special unique snowflake” way, but in a “you’d be surprised how much people’s insides move around” way.
Fun fact: did you ever feel like your intestines are squirming? That’s because they are.
You can’t feel it most of the time due to the paucity of that kind of nervous sensation down there, but the peristaltic motion that they use to move food along them on the inside, also causes them push against the rest of your guts, on the outside of them. This is the exact same way that many snakes move about.
If someone has to perform an operation in that region, sometimes it will be necessary to hang the intestines on a special rack, to keep them in one place for the surgery.
What can go wrong?
There are two very common things that can go wrong with the prostate:
- Benign Prostate Hyperplasia (BPH), otherwise known as an enlarged prostate
- Prostate cancer
For most men, the prostate gland continues to grow with age, which is how the former comes about so frequently.
For everyone, due to the nature of the mathematics involved in cellular mutation and replication, we will eventually get cancer if something else doesn’t kill us first.
- Prostate cancer affects 12% of men overall, and 60% of men aged 60+, with that percentage climbing each year thereafter.
- Prostate cancer can look like BPH in the early stages (and/or, an enlarged prostate can turn cancerous) so it’s important to not shrug off the symptoms of BPH.
How can BPH be avoided/managed?
There are prescription medications that can help reduce the size of the prostate, including testosterone blockers (such as spironolactone and bicalutamide) and 5α-reductase inhibitors, such as finasteride. Each have their pros and cons:
- Testosterone-blockers are the heavy-hitters, and work very well… but have more potential adverse side effects (your body is used to running on testosterone, after all)
- 5α-reductase inhibitors aren’t as powerful, but they block the conversion of free testosterone to dihydrogen testosterone (DHT), and it’s primarily DHT that causes the problems. By blocking the conversion of T to DHT, you may actually end up with higher serum testosterone levels, but fewer ill-effects. Exact results will vary depending on your personal physiology, and what else you are taking, though.
There are also supplements that can help, including saw palmetto and pumpkin seed oil. Here’s a good paper that covers both:
We have recommended saw palmetto before for a variety of uses, including against BPH:
Too much or too little testosterone? This one supplement may fix that
You might want to avoid certain medications that can worsen BPH symptoms (but not actually the size of the prostate itself). They include:
- Antihistamines
- Decongestants
- Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)
- Tricyclic antidepressants (most modern antidepressants aren’t this kind; ask your pharmacist/doctor if unsure)
You also might want to reduce/skip:
- Alcohol
- Caffeine
In all the above cases, it’s because of how they affect the bladder, not the prostate, but given their neighborliness, each thing affects the other.
What if it’s cancer? How do I know and what do I do?
The creator of the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test has since decried it as “a profit-driven health disaster” that is “no better than a coin toss”, but it remains the first go-to of many medical services.
However, there’s a newer, much more accurate test, called the Prostate Screening Episwitch (PSE) test, which is 94% accurate, so you might consider asking your healthcare provider whether that’s an option:
The new prostate cancer blood test with 94 per cent accuracy
As for where to go from there, we’re out of space for today, but we previously reviewed a very good book about this, Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer, and we highly recommend it—it could easily be a literal lifesaver.
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7 Steps to Get Off Sugar and Carbohydrates – by Susan Neal
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We will not keep the steps a mystery; abbreviated, they are:
- decide to really do this thing
- get knowledge and support
- clean out that pantry/fridge/etc and put those things behind you
- buy in healthy foods while starving your candida
- plan for an official start date, so that everything is ready
- change the way you eat (prep methods, timings, etc)
- keep on finding small ways to improve, without turning back
Particularly important amongst those are starving the candida (the fungus in your gut that is responsible for a lot of carb cravings, especially sugar and alcohol—which latter can be broken down easily into sugar), and changing the “how” of eating as well as the “what”; those are both things that are often overlooked in a lot of guides, but this one delivers well.
Walking the reader by the hand through things like that is probably the book’s greatest strength.
In the category of subjective criticism, the author does go off-piste a little at the end, to take a moment while she has our attention to talk about other things.
For example, you may not need “Appendix 7: How to Become A Christian and Disciple of Jesus Christ”.
Of course if that calls to you, then by all means, follow your heart, but it certainly isn’t a necessary step of quitting sugar. Nevertheless, the diversion doesn’t detract from the good dietary change advice that she has just spent a book delivering.
Bottom line: there’s no deep science here, but there’s a lot of very good, very practical advice, that’s consistent with good science.
Click here to check out 7 Steps to Get Off Sugar, and watch your health improve!
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Unlock Your Air-Fryer’s Potential!
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Unlock Your Air-Fryer’s Potential!
You know what they say:
“you get out of it what you put in”
…and in the case of an air-fryer, that’s very true!
More seriously:
A lot of people buy an air fryer for its health benefits and convenience, make fries a couple of times, and then mostly let it gather dust. But for those who want to unlock its potential, there’s plenty more it can do!
Let’s go over the basics first…
Isn’t it just a tiny convection oven?
Mechanically, yes. But the reason that it can be used to “air-fry” food rather than merely bake or roast the food is because of its tiny size allowing for much more rapid cooking at high temperatures.
On which note… If you’re shopping for an air-fryer:
- First of all, congratulations! You’re going to love it.
- Secondly: bigger is not better. If you go over more than about 4 liters capacity, then you don’t have an air-fryer; you have a convection oven. Which is great and all, but probably not what you wanted.
Are there health benefits beyond using less oil?
It also creates much less acrylamide than deep-frying starchy foods does. The jury is out on the health risks of acrylamide, but we can say with confidence: it’s not exactly a health food.
I tried it, but the food doesn’t cook or just burns!
The usual reason for this is either over-packing the fryer compartment (air needs to be able to circulate!), or not coating the contents in oil. The oil only needs to be a super-thin layer, but it does need to be there, or else again, you’re just baking things.
Two ways to get a super thin layer of oil on your food:
- (works for anything you can air-fry) spray the food with oil. You can buy spray-on oils at the grocery store (Fry-light and similar brands are great), or put oil in little spray bottle (of the kind that you might buy for haircare) yourself.
- (works with anything that can be shaken vigorously without harming it, e.g. root vegetables) chop the food, and put it in a tub (or a pan with a lid) with about a tablespoon of olive oil. Don’t worry if that looks like it’s not nearly enough—it will be! Now’s a great time to add your seasonings* too, by the way. Put the lid on, and holding the lid firmly in place, shake the tub/pan/whatever vigorously. Open it, and you’ll find the oil has now distributed itself into a very thin layer all over the food.
*About those seasonings…
Obviously not everything will go with everything, but some very healthful seasonings to consider adding are:
- Garlic minced/granules/powder (great for the heart and immune health)
- Black pepper (boosts absorption of other nutrients, and provides more benefits of its own than we can list here)
- Turmeric (slows aging and has anti-cancer properties)
- Cinnamon (great for the heart and has anti-inflammatory properties)
Garlic and black pepper can go with almost anything (and in this writer’s house, they usually do!)
Turmeric has a sweet nutty taste, and will add its color anything it touches. So if you want beautiful golden fries, perfect! If you don’t want yellow eggplant, maybe skip it.
Cinnamon is, of course, great as part of breakfast and dessert dishes
On which note, things most people don’t think of air-frying:
- Breakfast frittata—the healthy way!
- Omelets—no more accidental scrambled egg and you don’t have to babysit it! Just take out the tray that things normally sit on, and build it directly onto the (spray-oiled) bottom of the air-fryer pan. If you’re worried it’ll burn: a) it won’t, because the heat is coming from above, not below b) you can always use greaseproof paper or even a small heatproof plate
- French toast—again with no cooking skills required
- Fish cakes—make the patties as normal, spray-oil and lightly bread them
- Cauliflower bites—spray oil or do the pan-jiggle we described; for seasonings, we recommend adding smoked paprika and, if you like heat, your preferred kind of hot pepper! These are delicious, and an amazing healthy snack that feels like junk food.
- Falafel—make the balls as usual, spray-oil (do not jiggle violently; they won’t have the structural integrity for that) and air-fry!
- Calamari (vegan option: onion rings!)—cut the squid (or onions) into rings, and lightly coat in batter and refrigerate for about an hour before air-frying at the highest heat your fryer does. This is critical, because air-fryers don’t like wet things, and if you don’t refrigerate it and then use a high heat, the batter will just drip, and you don’t want that. But with those two tips, it’ll work just great.
Want more ideas?
Check out EatingWell’s 65+ Healthy Air-Fryer Recipes ← the recipes are right there, no need to fight one’s way to them in any fashion!
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The Twenty-Four Hour Mind – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright
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We’ve reviewed books about sleep before, and even about dreaming, so what does this one have to offer that’s new?
Quite a lot, actually! Before Dr. Cartwright, there were mainly two models of sleep and dreaming:
- The “top-down” model of psychoanalysts: our minds shape our dreams which in turn reveal things about us as people
- The “bottom-up” model of neuroscientists: our brains need to go through regular maintaince cycles, of which vivid hallucinations are a quirky side-effect.
And now, as Dr. Cartwright puts it:
❝I will lay out a new [horizontal] psychological model of the twenty-four hour mind; that is, how the predominantly conscious (waking) and unconscious (sleeping) forms of mental behavior interact through the brain’s regular, but differently organized, states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming.❞
This she does in the exploratory style of a 224-page lecture, which sounds like it might be tedious, but is actually attention-grabbing and engaging throughout. This book is more of a page-turner than soporific bedtime reading!
Bottom line: if you’d like to know more about the effect your waking and sleeping brain have on each other (to include getting in between those and making adjutments as appropriate), this is very much an elucidating read!
Click here to check out The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, and learn more about yours!
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Carrot vs Sweet Potato – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing carrot to sweet potato, we picked the sweet potato.
Why?
Both are great! But there’s a winner in the end:
Looking at the macros first, sweet potato has more protein carbs, and fiber, and is thus the “more food per food” item. If they are both cooked the same, then the glycemic index is comparable, despite the carrot’s carbs having more sucrose and the sweet potato’s carbs having more starch. We’ll call this category a tie.
In terms of vitamins, carrots have more of vitamins B9 and K, while sweet potatoes have more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6. B7, C, E, and choline. Both are equally high in vitamin A. Thus, the vitamins category is an overwhelming win for sweet potato.
When it comes to minerals, carrots are not higher in any minerals (unless we count that they are slightly higher in sodium, but that is not generally considered a plus for most people in most places most of the time), while sweet potato is higher in calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Another easy win for sweet potato.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear win for the sweet potato as the more nutritionally dense option, but as ever, enjoy either or both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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