When Bad Joints Stop You From Exercising (5 Things To Change)
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The first trick to exercising with bad joints is to have better joints.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you can take a supplement and magically your joint problems will be cured, but there are adjustable lifestyle factors that can and will make things relatively better or worse.
We say “and will”, because you don’t get a choice in that part. Everything we do, every little choice in our day, makes our health a little better or a little worse in some aspect(s). But we do get a choice between “relatively better” and “relatively worse”.
With that in mind, do check out:
- Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
- Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
- How To Really Look After Your Joints
Ok, you have bad joints though; what next?
Let’s assume you’re doing your best with the above, and/or have simply decided not to, which is your call. You know your circumstances best. Either way, your joints are still not in sufficiently good condition to be able to exercise the way you’d like.
First, the obvious: enjoy low-impact exercises
For example:
- Swimming
- Yoga (much more appropriate here than the commonly-paired “and tai chi”)*
- Isometric exercises (i.e. exercise without movement, e.g. squeezing things, or stationary stability exercises)
*This is not to say that tai chi is bad. But if your problem is specifically your knees, there are many movements in most forms of tai chi that require putting the majority of one’s weight on one bent leg, which means the knee of that leg is going to suffer. If your knees are fine, then this won’t be an issue and it will simply continue strengthening your knees without discomfort. But they have to be fine first.
See also: Exercising With Osteoporosis
Second: support your joints through a full range of motion
If you have bad joints, you probably know that there’s an unfortunate paradox whereby you get to choose between:
- Exercise, and inflame your joints
- Rest, and your joints seize up
This is the way to get around that damaging dilemma.
Moving your joints through a full range of motion regularly is critical for their maintenance, so do that in a way that isn’t straining them:
If it’s your shoulders, for example, you can do (slow, gentle!) backstroke or front-crawl or butterfly motions while standing in the comfort of your living room.
If it’s your knees, then supported squats can do you a world of good. That means, squat in front of a table or other stable object, with your fingertips (or as much of your hands as you need) on it, to take a portion of your weight (it can be a large portion; that’s fine too!) while you go through the full range of motion of the squat. Repeat.
And so forth for other joints.
See also: The Most Underrated Hip Mobility Exercise (Not Stretching)
Third: work up slowly, and stop early
You can do exercises that involve impact, and if you live a fairly normal life, you’ll probably have to (walking is an impact exercise). You can also enjoy cycling (low-impact, but not so low-impact as we discussed in the last section) and work up to running if you want to.
However…
While building up your joints’ mobility and strength, it is generally a good idea to stop before you think you need to.
This means that it’s important to do those exercises in a way that you can stop early. For example, an exercise bike or a treadmill can be a lot of use here, so that you don’t find you need to stop for the day while miles from your house.
If you get such a device, it doesn’t even have to be fancy and/or expensive. This writer got herself an inexpensive exercise bike like this one, and it’s perfectly adequate.
Fourth: prioritize recovery, even if it doesn’t feel like you need it
Everyone should do this anyway, but if your joints are bad, it goes double:
Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise (According To Actual Science)
Fifth: get professional help
Physiotherapists are great for this. Find one, and take their advice for your specific body and your specific circumstances and goals.
Take care!
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In Defense of Food – by Michael Pollan
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Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or…
Somehow, whatever we eat is not good enough, and we should always be doing it differently!
Michael Pollan takes a more down-to-Earth approach.
He kicks off by questioning the wisdom of thinking of our food only in terms of nutritional profiles, and overthinking healthy-eating. He concludes, as many do, that a “common-sense, moderate” approach is needed.
And yet, most people who believe they are taking a “common-sense, moderate” approach to health are in fact over-fed yet under-nourished.
So, how to fix this?
He offers us a reframe: to think of food as a relationship, and health being a product of it:
- If we are constantly stressing about a relationship, it’s probably not good.
- On the other hand, if we are completely thoughtless about it, it’s probably not good either.
- But if we can outline some good, basic principles and celebrate it with a whole heart? It’s probably at the very least decent.
The style is very casual and readable throughout. His conclusions, by the way, can be summed up as “Eat real food, make it mostly plants, and make it not too much”.
However, to summarize it thusly undercuts a lot of the actual value of the book, which is the principles for discerning what is “real food” and what is “not too much”.
Bottom line: if you’re tired of complicated eating plans, this book can help produce something very simple, attainable, and really quite good.
Click here to check out In Defense of Food, for some good, hearty eating.
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No, taking drugs like Ozempic isn’t ‘cheating’ at weight loss or the ‘easy way out’
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Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are taking drugs like Ozempic to lose weight. But what do we actually know about them? This month, The Conversation’s experts explore their rise, impact and potential consequences.
Obesity medication that is effective has been a long time coming. Enter semaglutide (sold as Ozempic and Wegovy), which is helping people improve weight-related health, including lowering the risk of a having a heart attack or stroke, while also silencing “food noise”.
As demand for semaglutide increases, so are claims that taking it is “cheating” at weight loss or the “easy way out”.
We don’t tell people who need statin medication to treat high cholesterol or drugs to manage high blood pressure they’re cheating or taking the easy way out.
Nor should we shame people taking semaglutide. It’s a drug used to treat diabetes and obesity which needs to be taken long term and comes with risks and side effects, as well as benefits. When prescribed for obesity, it’s given alongside advice about diet and exercise.
How does it work?
Semaglutide is a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA). This means it makes your body’s own glucagon-like peptide-1 hormone, called GLP-1 for short, work better.
GLP-1 gets secreted by cells in your gut when it detects increased nutrient levels after eating. This stimulates insulin production, which lowers blood sugars.
GLP-1 also slows gastric emptying, which makes you feel full, and reduces hunger and feelings of reward after eating.
GLP-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA) medications like Ozempic help the body’s own GLP-1 work better by mimicking and extending its action.
Some studies have found less GLP-1 gets released after meals in adults with obesity or type 2 diabetes mellitus compared to adults with normal glucose tolerance. So having less GLP-1 circulating in your blood means you don’t feel as full after eating and get hungry again sooner compared to people who produce more.
GLP-1 has a very short half-life of about two minutes. So GLP-1RA medications were designed to have a very long half-life of about seven days. That’s why semaglutide is given as a weekly injection.
What can users expect? What does the research say?
Higher doses of semaglutide are prescribed to treat obesity compared to type 2 diabetes management (up to 2.4mg versus 2.0mg weekly).
A large group of randomised controlled trials, called STEP trials, all tested weekly 2.4mg semaglutide injections versus different interventions or placebo drugs.
Trials lasting 1.3–2 years consistently found weekly 2.4 mg semaglutide injections led to 6–12% greater weight loss compared to placebo or alternative interventions. The average weight change depended on how long medication treatment lasted and length of follow-up.
Higher doses of semaglutide are prescribed for obesity than for type 2 diabetes. fcm82/Shutterstock Weight reduction due to semaglutide also leads to a reduction in systolic and diastolic blood pressure of about 4.8 mmHg and 2.5 mmHg respectively, a reduction in triglyceride levels (a type of blood fat) and improved physical function.
Another recent trial in adults with pre-existing heart disease and obesity, but without type 2 diabetes, found adults receiving weekly 2.4mg semaglutide injections had a 20% lower risk of specific cardiovascular events, including having a non-fatal heart attack, a stroke or dying from cardiovascular disease, after three years follow-up.
Who is eligible for semaglutide?
Australia’s regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), has approved semaglutide, sold as Ozempic, for treating type 2 diabetes.
However, due to shortages, the TGA had advised doctors not to start new Ozempic prescriptions for “off-label use” such as obesity treatment and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme doesn’t currently subsidise off-label use.
The TGA has approved Wegovy to treat obesity but it’s not currently available in Australia.
When it’s available, doctors will be able to prescribe semaglutide to treat obesity in conjunction with lifestyle interventions (including diet, physical activity and psychological support) in adults with obesity (a BMI of 30 or above) or those with a BMI of 27 or above who also have weight-related medical complications.
What else do you need to do during Ozempic treatment?
Checking details of the STEP trial intervention components, it’s clear participants invested a lot of time and effort. In addition to taking medication, people had brief lifestyle counselling sessions with dietitians or other health professionals every four weeks as a minimum in most trials.
Support sessions were designed to help people stick with consuming 2,000 kilojoules (500 calories) less daily compared to their energy needs, and performing 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, like brisk walking, dancing and gardening each week.
STEP trials varied in other components, with follow-up time periods varying from 68 to 104 weeks. The aim of these trials was to show the effect of adding the medication on top of other lifestyle counselling.
Trial participants also exercised for 150 minutes a week. Elena Nichizhenova/Shutterstock A review of obesity medication trials found people reported they needed less cognitive behaviour training to help them stick with the reduced energy intake. This is one aspect where drug treatment may make adherence a little easier. Not feeling as hungry and having environmental food cues “switched off” may mean less support is required for goal-setting, self-monitoring food intake and avoiding things that trigger eating.
But what are the side effects?
Semaglutide’s side-effects include nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, constipation, indigestion and abdominal pain.
In one study these led to discontinuation of medication in 6% of people, but interestingly also in 3% of people taking placebos.
More severe side-effects included gallbladder disease, acute pancreatitis, hypoglycaemia, acute kidney disease and injection site reactions.
To reduce risk or severity of side-effects, medication doses are increased very slowly over months. Once the full dose and response are achieved, research indicates you need to take it long term.
Given this long-term commitment, and associated high out-of-pocket cost of medication, when it comes to taking semaglutide to treat obesity, there is no way it can be considered “cheating”.
Read the other articles in The Conversation’s Ozempic series here.
Clare Collins, Laureate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Is Ant Oil Just “Snake Oil”?
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We Tested Out “Ant Egg Oil”
Did you know?! There’s a special protein found only in the eggs of a particular species of ant found in Turkey, that can painlessly and permanently stop (not just slow!) hair regrowth in places you’d rather not have hair.
Neither did we, and when we heard about it, we did our usual research, and discovered a startling secret.
…there probably isn’t.
We decided to dig deeper, and the plot (unlike the hair in question) thickens:
We could not find any science for or against (or even generally about) the use of ant egg oil to prevent hair regrowth. Not a peep. What we did find though was a cosmetic chemist who did an analysis of the oil as sold, and found its main ingredient appears to be furan-2-carbaldehyde, or Furfural, to its friends.
Surprise! There’s also no science that we could find about the effect of Furfural (we love the name, though! Fur for all!) on hair, except that it’s bad for rodents (and their hair) if they eat a lot of it. So please don’t eat it. Especially if you’re a mouse.
And yet, many ostensibly real reviews out in the wild claim it works wonders. So, we took the investigative reporting approach and tried it ourselves.
That’s right, a plucky member of our team tried it, and she reports:
❝ At first glance, it seems like olive oil. There’s something else though, adding a darker colour and a slight bitterness to the smell.
After waxing, I applied a little every few days. When the hair eventually regrew (and it did), it grew back thinner, and removing the new hairs was a strangely easy experience, like pulling hairs out of soft soap instead of out of skin. It didn’t hurt at all, either.
I had more of the oil, so I kept going with the treatment, and twelve weeks later there are very few hairs regrowing at all; probably there will be none left soon. Whatever’s in this, be it from ant eggs or wheat bran or something else entirely, it worked for me!❞
So in short: it remains a mystery for now! If you try it, let us know how it went for you.
Here’s the “interesting” website that sells it, though you may find it for less on eBay or similar. (Note, we aren’t earning any commissions from these links. We just wanted to make it easier for you to dive deeper).
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The Whole Heart Solution – by Dr. Joel Kahn
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If there’s a single central focus here is on the evidence for including a lot of plants in our diet, and in particular, certain ones that are particularly impactful (positively) for our health. However, it’s not all about diet; Dr. Kahn also discusses (as the subtitle suggests) making the most of every safe, useful tool available for us for good heart health. Including, where appropriate, drugs and surgery, but definitely with a preference to avoid their necessity with lifestyle adjustments and regular pre-emptive testing of various kinds.
Indeed, the promised “75 low-cost things you can do right away” are mostly lifestyle adjustments, and as well as the dietary tips, they include non-dietary things such as opening your windows and walking barefoot, for example—we’ll learn tips relating to all areas of life, in fact.
An interesting note on diet, though: he also talks about how all requests for reimbursement for Medicare and Medicaid services are evaluated with regard to whether they are appropriate, and of all the programs for intensive cardiac rehabilitation that have been requested, only two have been approved (at time of going to press, at least). Both are plan-based programs, of which, one is the dietary approach described in this book. Bearing in mind that Medicare and Medicate have a mandate to save money, they will only approve a program that results in costing them less in hospital care and prescriptions. Which means that their interests are aligned with yours, in this case!
The style is enthusiastic pop science, that is to say, it is written with extreme conviction—there is plenty of science cited to back it up, of course, but certainly this is not an indifferent book.
Bottom line: if you’d like to improve your heart health, this book is a top-tier one-stop solution (if you implement its contents, anyway!)
Click here to check out the Whole Heart Solution, and live wholeheartedly!
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How (And Why) To Train Your Pre-Frontal Cortex
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Dr. Chapman’s Keys For Mental Focus
This is Dr. Sandra Chapman; she’s a cognitive neuroscientist, on a mission to, in her words, further our understanding of:
- what makes the brain stronger, faster and last longer
- what enhances human cognitive capacity, and
- what enhances the underlying brain systems across the lifespan.
To this end, she’s also the founder and Chief Director of the Center For Brain Health, where she has worked on her mission for the past 25 years (clocking up hundreds of peer-reviewed publications to her name), as well as being a professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at UT Dallas.
What does she want us to know?
Get your brain into gear
When it comes to your brainpower, it is “use it or lose it”, but it is also perfectly possible to use it and lose it.
Why?
Very often, what we are using our brains for is high-strain, low-yield stuff, such as multitasking, overthinking, or overthinking while multitasking. And to make it worse, we often do it without sufficient rest.
This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but trying to drive it in second and third gear at once by switching between the two as rapidly as possible. And doing that for 18 hours each day.
Suffice it to say, you’ll be going nowhere quickly.
An alternative “use” of brainpower is low-strain, low-yield stuff, such as having to pay close attention to a boring conversation. It’s enough to stop your mind from doing anything else, but not enough to actually stimulate you.
This is the equivalent of owning a Ferrari but keeping it idling. The wear and tear is minimal this time, but you’re not actually going anywhere either.
Better, of course, are the other two quadrants:
- low-strain, high-yield: consistently using our brain in relatively non-taxing ways that encourage its development
- high-strain, high-yield: here the Ferrari metaphor definitely fails, because unlike cars, our bodies (including our brains) are machines that benefit from judicious regular progressive overloading (but just by a bit, and with adequate recovery time between overloads).
See also: 12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain
How to do the “low-strain, low-yield” part
When it comes to “what’s the most important part of the brain to help in the face of cognitive decline?” the usual answer is either to focus on memory (hippocampi) or language (various parts, but for example Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area), since people most fear losing memory, and language is very important both socially and practically.
Those are indeed critical, and we at 10almonds stand by them, but Dr. Chapman (herself having originally trained as speech and language pathologist!) makes a strong case for adding a third brain part to the list.
Specifically, she advocates for strengthening the pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for inhibition, task-switching, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. If that seems like a lot, do remember it’s a whole cortex and not one of the assorted important-but-small brain bits we mentioned above.
How? She has developed training programs for this, based on what she calls Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART), to support support attention, planning, judgment and emotional management.
You can read more about those programs here:
Center For Brain Health | Our Programs
Participation in those is mostly not free, however, if you join their…
Center For Brain Health | BrainHealth Project
…then they will periodically invite you to join pilot programs, research programs, and the like, which will either be free or they-pay-you affairs—because this is how science is done, and you can read about yourself (anonymized, of course) later in peer-reviewed papers of the kind we often cite here.
If you’re not interested in any of that though, we will say that according to Dr. Chapman, the keys are:
Inhibition: be conscious of this function of your brain, and develop it. This is the function of your brain that stops you from making mistakes—or put differently: stops you from saying/doing something stupid.
Switching: do this consciously; per “I am now doing this task, now I am switching to this other task”, rather than doing the gear-grinding thing we discussed earlier
Working memory: this is effectively your brain’s RAM. Unlike the RAM of a computer (can be enhanced by adding another chip or replacing with a bigger chip), our brain’s RAM can be increased by frequent use, and especially by judicious use of progressive overloading (with rests between!) which we’ll discuss in the high-strain, high-yield section.
Flexibility: this is about creative problem-solving, openness to new ideas, and curiosity
See also: Curiosity Kills The Neurodegeneration
How to do the “high-strain, high-yield” part
Delighting this chess-playing writer, Dr. Chapman recommends chess. Although, similar games such as go (a Chinese game that looks simpler than chess but actually requires more calculation) work equally well too.
Why?
Games like chess and go cause structural changes that are particularly helpful, in terms of engaging in such foundational tasks as learning, abstract reasoning, problem-solving and self-control:
Chess Practice as a Protective Factor in Dementia
Basically, it checks (so to speak) a lot of boxes, especially for the pre-frontal cortex. Some notes:
- Focusing on the game is required for brain improvement; simply pushing wood casually will not do it. Ideally, calculating several moves ahead will allow for strong working memory use (because to calculate several moves ahead, one will have to hold increasingly many possible positions in the mind while doing so).
- The speed of play must be sufficiently slow as to allow not only for thinking, but also for what in chess is called “blunder-checking”, in other words, having decided on one’s move, pausing to consider whether it is a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is. This is the crucial “inhibition habit”, and when one does it reflexively, one will make fewer mistakes. Tying this to dementia, see for example how one of the common symptoms of dementia is falling for scams that one wouldn’t have previously. How did cognitive decline make someone naïve? It didn’t, per se; it just took away their ability to, having decided what to do, pause to consider whether it was a mistake, and actively trying to find evidence that it is.
- That “conscious switching” that we talked about, rather than multitasking? In chess, there is a difference between strategy and tactics. Don’t worry about what that difference is for now (learn it if you want to take up chess), but know that strong players will only strategize while it is their opponent’s turn, and only calculate (tactics) while it is their own turn. It’s very tempting to flit constantly between one and the other, but chess requires players to have the mental discipline be able to focus on one task or the other and stick with that task until it’s the appointed time to switch.
If you feel like taking up chess, this site (and related app, if you want it) is free (it’s been funded by voluntary donations for a long time now) and good and even comes with free tuition and training tools: LiChess.org
Here’s another site that this writer (hi, it’s me) personally uses—it has great features too, but many are paywalled (I’m mostly there just because I’ve been there nearly since its inception, so I’m baked into the community now): Chess.com
Want to know more?
You might like this book by Dr. Chapman, which we haven’t reviewed yet but it did inform large parts of today’s article:
Make Your Brain Smarter: Increase Your Brain’s Creativity, Energy, and Focus – by Dr. Sandra Chapman
Enjoy!
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Is Fast Food Really All That Bad?
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Yes, yes it is. However, most people misunderstand the nature of its badness, which is what causes problems. The biggest problem is not the acute effects of one afternoon’s burger and fries; the biggest problem is the gradual slide into regularly eating junk food, and the long-term effects of that habit as our body changes to accommodate it (of which, people tend to focus on subcutaneous fat gain as it’s usually the most visible, but that’s really the least of our problems).
Cumulative effects
There are, of course, immediate negative effects too, and they’re not without cause for concern. Because of the composition of most junk food, it will almost by definition result in immediate blood sugar spikes, rising insulin levels, and a feeling of fatigue not long afterwards.
- Within a week of regularly consuming junk food, gut bacteria will change, resulting in moderate cravings, as well as a tendency towards depression and anxiety. Mood swings are likely, as are the gastrointestinal woes associated with any gut microbiota change.
- Within two weeks, those effects will be greater, the cravings will increase, energy levels will plummet, and likely skin issues may start to show up (our skin mostly works on a 3-week replacement cycle; some things can show up in the skin more quickly or slowly than that, though).
- Within three weeks, the rest of our blood metrics (e.g. beyond blood sugar imbalances) will start to stray from safe zones. Increased LDL, decreased HDL, and the beginnings of higher cardiovascular disease risk and diabetes risk.
- Within a month, we will likely see the onset of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and chronic inflammation sets in, raising the risk of a lot of other diseases, especially immune disorders and cancer.
If that seems drastic, along the lines of “eat junk food for a month and get cancer”, well, it’s an elevated risk, not a scheduled diagnosis, but the body is constantly rebuilding itself, for better or for worse, and if we sabotage its efforts by consuming a poor diet, then it will be for worse.
The good news is: this works both ways, and we can get our body back on track in fairly short order too, by enjoying a healthier diet; our body will be thrilled to start repairing itself. And of course, all these effects, good and bad, are proportional to how well or badly we eat. There’s a difference between doing a “Supersize Me” month-long 100% junk food diet, and “merely” getting a junk food breakfast each day and eating healthily later.
In short, if your diet is only moderately bad, then you will only be moderately unwell.
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:
- Fix Chronic Fatigue & Regain Your Energy, By Science
- How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
- How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
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