Gut Feelings – by Dr Will Cole
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More and more, science is uncovering links between our gut health and the rest of our health—including our mental health! We all know “get some fiber and consider probiotics”, but what else is there that we can do?
Quite a lot, actually. And part of it, which Dr. Cole also explores, is the fact that the gut-brain highway is a two-way street!
The book looks a lot especially at the particular relationship between shame and eating. The shame need not initially be about eating, though it can certainly end up that way too. But any kind of shame—be it relating to one’s body, work, relationship, or anything else, can not only have a direct effect on the gut, but indirect too:
Once our “eating our feelings” instinct kicks in, things can spiral from there, after all.
So, Dr. Cole walks us through tackling this from both sides—nutrition and psychology. With chapters full of tips and tricks, plus a 21-day plan (not a diet plan, a habit integration plan), this book hits shame (and inflammation, incidentally) hard and leads us into much healthier habits and cycles.
In short: if you’d like to have a better relationship with your food, improve your gut health, and/or reduce inflammation, this is definitely a book for you!
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Sizing Aside: Are You Wearing The Right Bra For Your Breast Shape?
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It’s well-known that most women wear incorrectly-fitting bras. Even with careful measurements, buying “off-the-rack” can be a challenge, because the sizing system only takes two measurements, when there are actually many more things to consider. Today’s video demystifies a lot of what else is going on!
For example…
Some of the different breast shapes/arrangements to consider:
- Wide-set breasts: likely to find there’s a bit of a gap between your breasts and the inside (nearest to your sternum) parts of the cups—while spilling out a little at the outside edges. The solution? Bras that offer side-support, to keep things pointing more forwards. Central-closing bras can also help gather things together, and a balconette bra can redistribute things more evenly. Any of these options will be a lot more comfortable.
- Small breasts: bralettes are your friend, keeping things comfortable while not wearing more bra than necessary to do the job (of course going braless is also an option, but we’re talking bra-fitting here, not bra-flinging-off never to be seen again)
- Deflated breasts: often the case for someone who used to have larger breasts, but they lost size for hormonal reasons rather than for weight loss reasons. This often occurs a little while after childbirth, and also happens a lot in menopause. The bra recommendation for this? A push-up plunge bra with ¾ coverage not only provides cleavage if that’s wanted, but also, will keep things much more snug and thus more evenly-distributed. If ever you’ve found yourself needing to adjust yourself every now and gain while out, this will fix that and keep you comfortable for much longer.
There’s more, along with a visual guide, so do check it out:
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Further reading
While we haven’t written about this specifically (maybe we’ll do a “Life Hacks” edition one of these days), we have written about…
Keeping Abreast Of Your Cancer Risk
Take care!
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What Loneliness Does To Your Brain And Body
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Spoiler: it’s nothing good (but it can be addressed!)
Not something to be ignored
Loneliness raises the risk of heart disease by 29% and the risk of stroke by 32%. It also brings about higher susceptibility to illness (flu, COVID, chronic pain, etc), as well as poor sleep quality and cognitive decline, possibly leading to dementia. Not only that, but it also promotes inflammation, and premature death (comparable to smoking).
This is because the lack of meaningful social connections activates the body’s stress response, which in turn increases paranoia, suspicion, and social withdrawal—which makes it harder to seek the social interaction needed to alleviate it.
On a neurological level, cortisol levels become imbalanced, and a faltering dopamine response leads to impulsive behaviors (e.g., drinking, gambling) to try to make up for it. Decreased serotonin, oxytocin, and natural opioids reduce feelings of happiness and negate pain relief.
As for combatting it, the first-line remedy is the obvious one: connecting with others improves emotional and physical wellbeing. However, it is recommended to aim for deep, meaningful connections that make you happy rather than just socializing for its own sake. It’s perfectly possible to be lonely in a crowd, after all.
A second-line remedy is to simply mitigate the harm by means of such things as art therapy and time in nature—they can’t completely replace human connection, but they can at least improve the neurophysiological situation (which in turn, might be enough of a stop-gap solution to enable a return to human connection).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation
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The Gut-Healthiest Yogurt
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Not only is this yogurt, so it’s winning from the start with its probiotic goodness, but also it’s full of several kinds of fiber, and gut-healthy polyphenols too. Plus, it’s delicious. The perfect breakfast, but don’t let us stop you from enjoying it at any time of day!
You will need
- 1 cup yogurt with minimal additives. Live Greek yogurt is a top-tier choice, and plant-based varieties are fine too (just watch out, again, for needless additives)
- 7 dried figs, roughly chopped
- 6 fresh figs, thinly sliced
- 5 oz chopped pitted dates
- 4 tbsp mixed seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, and chia are a great combination)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Soak the dried figs, the dates, and half the seeds in hot water for at least 5 minutes. Drain (be careful not to lose the chia seeds) and put in a blender with ¼ cup cold water.
2) Blend the ingredients from the last step into a purée (you can add a little more cold water if it needs it).
3) Mix this purée into the yogurt in a bowl, and add in the remaining seeds, mixing them in thoroughly.
4) Top with the sliced figs, and serve (or refrigerate, up to a few days, until needed).
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
- Dates vs Figs – Which is Healthier?
- The Tiniest Seeds With The Most Value
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The Power of Fun – by Catherine Price
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It’s said that nobody’s dying regret is to wish they’d spent more time at the office, yet many of don’t make enough time for fun.
This book has been published with two different subtitles:
- Why fun is the key to a happy and healthy life
- How to feel alive again
One offers a sensible reason to read this book; the other offers a deeply emotional reason. Both are entirely valid.
Catherine Price sets out in this work to identify what fun actually is (she puts it at the intersection of playfulness, connection and flow) and how to have more of it (she gives a five-step method to build and integrate it into life).
In the category of criticism, this 334-page book is (in this reviewer’s opinion) a little padded and could have been an article instead. But the advice contained within it is sound, and the impact it can have might be profound.
Bottom line: if you find you’ve settled into a routine that’s perhaps comfortable, but not actually that much fun, this book will help you to liven things up.
Click here to check out The Power Of Fun, and feel more alive!
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Endure – by Alex Hutchinson
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Life is a marathon, not a sprint. For most of us, at least. But how do we pace ourselves to go the distance, without falling into complacency along the way?
According to our author Alex Hutchinson, there’s a lot more to it than goal-setting and strategy.
Hutchinson set out to write a running manual, and ended up writing a manual for life. To be clear, this is still mostly centered around the science of athletic endurance, but covers the psychological factors as much as the physical… and notes how the capacity to endure is the key trait that underlies great performance in every field.
The writing style is both personal and personable, and parts read like a memoir (Hutchinson himself being a runner and sports journalist), while others are scientific in nature.
As for the science, the kind of science examined runs the gamut from case studies to clinical studies. We examine not just the science of physical endurance, but the science of psychological endurance too. We learn about such things as:
- How perception of ease/difficulty plays its part
- What factors make a difference to pain tolerance
- How mental exhaustion affects physical performance
- What environmental factors increase or lessen our endurance
- …and many other elements that most people don’t consider
Bottom line: whether you want to run a marathon in under two hours, or just not quit after one minute forty seconds on the exercise bike, or to get through a full day’s activities while managing chronic pain, this book can help.
Click here to check out Endure, and find out what you are capable of when you move your limits!
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Why Do We Have Pores, And Could We Not?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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
❝Do we really need pores, and why are they bigger on the face?❞
Pores secrete sweat or sebum (there are different kinds of pores for each).
If we didn’t have sweat pores, we’d be unable to sweat, which superficially may seem like a bonus, but it’d make us prone to overheating (like dogs, pigs, and other mammals that cannot sweat).
If we didn’t have sebum pores (usually called hair follicles, which are supplied by a sebaceous gland), we’d be completely hairless, and also unable to supply our skin with natural oils that keep it healthy. So we’d have no hair and very unhappy skin.
Which is ironic, because to believe beauty magazines, we must at all costs minimize our pores (and indeed, interventions like botox* can kill them).
*Let’s give that its full name though:
Suffice it to say, we do not recommend getting injected with neurotoxins unless it is truly necessary to ward off a greater harm.
As for being bigger on the face, they need not be, but sebaceous glands are more active and numerous there, being most active and numerous in the face/forehead—which is why oily skin is more likely to appear there than other parts of the body.
If your facial sebaceous glands are too active for your liking…
…there are ways to reduce that, a simple and relatively gentle way (relative, for example, botox) is with retinoids, including retinols or retinoic acids. Here’s some of the science of that; the paper is about treating acne, but the mechanism of action is the same (down-regulating the sebaceous glands’ action):
The potential side-effects, however were noted as:
- Cheilitis
- Desquamation of the skin
- Pruritus
Which, in translation from sciencese, means:
- Chapped lips
- Flaky skin
- Itchiness
Which aren’t necessarily fun, which is why with retinoids are best taken in very small doses at first to see how your skin reacts.
Remember when we said what your skin would be like without pores? This is what would happen, only much worse.
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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