
How To Avoid Slipping Into (Bad) Old Habits
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.
Treating Bad Habits Like Addictions
How often have you started a healthy new habit (including if it’s a “quit this previous thing” new habit), only to find that you slip back into your old ways?
We’ve written plenty on habit-forming before, so here’s a quick recap before we continue:
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
…and even how to give them a boost:
How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!
But how to avoid the relapses that are most likely to snowball?
Borrowing from the psychology of addiction recovery
It’s well known that someone recovering from substance addiction should not have even a small amount of the thing they were addicted to. Not one sip of champagne at a wedding, not one drag of a cigarette, and so forth.
This can go for other bad habits too; make one exception, and suddenly you have a whole string of “exceptions”, and before you know it, it’s not the exception anymore; it’s the new rule—again.
Three things that can help guard against this are:
- Absolutely refuse to romanticize the bad habit. Do not fall for its marketing! And yes, everything has marketing even if not advertising; for example, consider the Platonic ideal of a junk-food-eating couch-potato who is humble, unassuming, agreeable, the almost-holy idea of homely comfort, and why shouldn’t we be comfortable after all, haven’t we earned our chosen hedonism, and so on. It’s seductive, and we need to make the choice to not be seduced by it. In this case for example, yes pleasure is great, but being sick tired and destroying our bodies is not, in fact, pleasurable in the long run. Which brings us to…
- Absolutely refuse to forget why you dropped that behavior in the first place. Remember what it did to you, remember you at your worst. Remember what you feared might become of you if you continued like that. This is something where journaling helps, by the way; remembering our low points helps us to avoid finding ourselves in the same situation again.
- Absolutely refuse to let your guard down due to an overabundance of self-confidence in your future self. We all can easily feel that tomorrow is a mystical land in which all productivity is stored, and also where we are strong, energized, iron-willed, and totally able to avoid making the very mistakes that we are right now in the process of making. Instead, be that strong person now, for the benefit of tomorrow’s you. Because after all, if it’s going to be easy tomorrow, it’s easy now, right?
The above is a very simple, hopefully practical, set of rules to follow. If you like hard science more though, Yale’s Dr. Steven Melemis offers five rules (aimed more directly at addiction recovery, so this may be a big “heavy guns” for some milder habits):
- change your life
- be completely honest
- ask for help
- practice self-care
- don’t bend the rules
You can read his full paper and the studies it’s based on, here:
Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery
“What if I already screwed up?”
Draw a line under it, now, and move forwards in the direction you actually want to go.
Here’s a good article, that saves us taking up more space here; it’s very well-written so we do recommend it:
The Abstinence Violation Effect and Overcoming It
this article gives specific, practical advices, including CBT tools to use
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
10 Mistakes To Sabotage Your Ozempic Progress
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.
Ozempic has a good reputation for getting reliable results, but there are ways to mess it up:
It’s not just inject-and-go
We’ll not keep the 10 ways a secret; they are:
- Increasing the dose too quickly: avoid cranking doses up too high too quickly, to prevent severe nausea, appetite suppression, and muscle loss. It’s worth being aware that high doses without proper management can lead to metabolic health disasters.
- Pushing through side effects: severe nausea or vomiting means you probably have an unhelpfully high dose; consult your prescribing doctor—it’s easy to feel “more is better; I don’t want to have less!”, but there really is a sweet spot, and if you’re not in it, then adjustments are needed in order to find it.
- Eating nutritionally scant food: reducing the quantity of unhealthy food isn’t enough—please prioritize nutrient-rich foods instead. Remember, “it’s not the calories in your food; it’s the food in your calories”.
- Consuming fried food and refined carbs: their general metabolic woes aside, fried foods and ultra-refined carbs can exacerbate nausea and other side effects, so it really is best to skip them. The good news is that Ozempic will help overcome those cravings more easily.
- Neglecting muscle protection: especially women, especially middle-aged or older, are at higher risk of osteoporosis and should maintain muscle mass (strong muscles and strong bones go together, by necessity). So, eat protein and do resistance training!
- Assuming it’s a monotherapy: GLP-1 drugs work best as part of a holistic protocol, including proper nutrition, strength training, and hormone therapy if appropriate.
- Not addressing metabolic health first: GLP-1 drugs are less effective in people with poor baseline metabolic health, so there’s a bit of a catch-22 here, but it’s important to be aware of. Fortunately, Ozempic and adopting a healthy lifestyle will each make the other work better.
- Neglecting comprehensive treatment plans: in other words, going through the motions of a holistic protocol and then expecting Ozempic to do all the work.
- Upping doses to overcome plateaus: plateaus often signal other issues (e.g. lack of protein, no strength training), so do address these before increasing dosage.
- Lack of collaboration with doctors: the human body is complex, and what’s going on metabolically is complex too, so there’s a lot a layperson can easily miss. For that matter, there’s a lot that doctors can easily miss too, but more heads are better than one.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
5 Ways To Naturally Boost The Ozempic Effect
Take care!
Share This Post
-
Which Vitamin Brands Are Effective?
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.
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
❝As far as specific brands of vitamin…some are good some not. I don’t like being told what buy but I guess I want to know which are effective. Could there be some brands recognized as good given to us?❞
The most reliable brands are generally those with the most transparency:
- They tell you what is in the supplement; not just the active ingredient(s), with doses, but also any buffers etc.
- They tell you, in the case of ingredients that can have various different sources, what the source is.
- They are, ideally, well-certified and independently tested.
Our previous sponsor Ora is a good example of a company that does this.
Additionally, in terms of bioavailability, generally speaking the order of preference goes liquid > capsule/softgel > tablet, so that’s something to look out for, too.
Note: “liquid” includes powders that are ingested when dissolved/suspended in water, and also includes tablets that become a liquid when dissolved/dispersed in water and ingested that way.
Share This Post
-
Human, Bird, or Dog Waste? Scientists Parsing Poop To Aid DC’s Forgotten River
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.
KFF Health News Peggy Girshman reporting fellow Jackie Fortiér joined a boat tour to spotlight a review of microbes in the Anacostia River, a step toward making the river healthier and swimmable. The story was featured on WAMU’s “Health Hub” on Feb. 26.
On a bright October day, high schoolers from Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus piled into a boat on the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Most had never been on the water before.
Their guide, Trey Sherard of the Anacostia Riverkeeper, started the tour with a well-rehearsed safety talk. The nonprofit advocates for the protection of the river.
A boy with tousled black hair casually dipped his fingers in the water.
“Don’t touch it!” Sherard yelled.
Why was Sherard being so stern? Was it dangerously cold? Were there biting fish?
Because of the sewage.
“We get less sewage than we used to. Sewage is a code word for what?” Sherard asked the teenagers.
“Poop!” one student piped up.
“Human poop,” Sherard said. “Notice I didn’t say we get none. I said we get what? Less.”
Tours like this are designed to get young people interested in the river’s ecology, but it’s a fine line to tread — interacting with the water can make people sick. Because of the health risks, swimming hasn’t been legal in the Anacostia for more than half a century. The polluted water can cause gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, as well as eye, nose, and skin infections.
The river is the cleanest it’s been in years, according to environmental experts, but they still advise you not to take a dip in the Anacostia — not yet, at least.
About 40 million people in the U.S. live in a community with a combined sewer system, where wastewater and stormwater flow through the same pipes. When pipe capacities are reached after heavy rains, the overflow sends raw wastewater into the rivers instead of to a treatment plant.
Federal regulations, including sections of the Clean Water Act, require municipalities such as Washington to reduce at least 85% of this pollution or face steep fines.
To achieve compliance, Washington launched a $2.6 billion infrastructure project in 2011. DC Water’s Clean Rivers Project will eventually build multiple miles-long underground storage basins to capture stormwater and wastewater and pump it to treatment plants once heavy rains have subsided.
The Anacostia tunnel is the first of these storage basins to be completed. It can collect 190 million gallons of bacteria-laden wastewater for later treatment, said Moussa Wone, vice president of the Clean Rivers Project.
Climate change is causing more intense rainstorms in Washington, so even after construction is complete in 2030, Wone said, untreated stormwater will be discharged into the river, though much less frequently.
“On the Anacostia, we’re going to be reducing the frequency of overflows from 82 to two in an average year,” Wone said.
But while the Anacostia sewershed covers 176 square miles, he noted, only 17% is in Washington.
“The other 83% is outside the district,” Wone said. “We can do our part, but everybody else has to do their part also.”
Upstream in Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, miles of sewer lines are in the process of being upgraded to divert raw sewage to a treatment plant instead of the river.
The data shows that poop is a problem for river health — but knowing what kind of poop it is matters. Scientists monitor E. coli to indicate the presence of feces in river water, but since the bacteria live in the guts of most warm-blooded animals, the source is difficult to determine.
“Is it human feces? Or is it deer? Is it gulls’? Is it dogs’?” said Amy Sapkota, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Maryland.
Bacterial levels can fluctuate across the river even without rainstorms. An Anacostia Riverkeeper report found that in 2023 just three of nine sites sampled along the Washington portion of the watershed had consistently low E. coli levels throughout the summer season.
Sapkota is heading a new bacterial monitoring program measuring the amount of E. coli that different animal species deposit along the river.
The team uses microbial source tracking to analyze samples of river water taken from different locations each month by volunteers. The molecular approach enables scientists to target specific gene sequences associated with fecal bacteria and determine whether the bacteria come from humans or wildlife. Microbial source tracking also measures fecal pollution levels by source.
“We can quantify the levels of different bacterial targets that may be coming from a human fecal source or an animal fecal source,” Sapkota said.
Her team expects to have preliminary results this year.
The health risk to humans from river water will never be zero, Sapkota said, but based on her team’s research, smart city planning and retooled infrastructure could lessen the level of harmful bacteria in the water.
“Let’s say that we’re finding that actually there’s a lot of deer fecal signatures in our results,” Sapkota said. “Maybe this points to the fact that we need more green buffers along the river that can help prevent fecal contaminants from wildlife from entering the river during stormwater events.”
Washington is hoping to recoup some of the cost of building green spaces and other river cleanup. In January, the office of D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages from the federal government over decades of alleged pollution of the Anacostia River.
Brenda Lee Richardson, coordinator of the Anacostia Parks & Community Collaborative, said the efforts to cut down on trash and sewage are paying off. She sees a river on the mend, with more plant and animal life sprouting up.
“The ecosystem seems a lot greener,” she said. “There’s stuff in the river now that wasn’t there before.”
But any changes to the waterfront need to be done with residents of both sides of the river in mind, she said.
“We want there to be some sense of equity as it relates to who has access,” she said. “When I look at who is recreating, it’s not people who look like me.”
Richardson has lived for 40 years in Ward 8 — a predominantly Black area on the east side of the river whose residents are generally less affluent than those on the west side. She and her neighbors don’t consider the Anacostia a place to get out and play, she said.
As the water quality slowly improves, Richardson said, she hopes the Anacostia’s reputation is also rehabilitated. Even if it’s not safe to swim in, Richardson enjoys boating trips like the one with the Anacostia Riverkeeper.
“To see all those creatures along the way and the greenery. It was comforting,” she said. “So rather than take a pill to settle my nerves, I can just go down the river.”
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.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Ice Baths: To Dip Or Not To Dip?
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.
We asked you for your (health-related) view of ice baths, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 31% said “ice baths are great for the health; we should take them”
- About 29% said “ice baths’ risks outweigh their few benefits”
- About 26% said “ice baths’ benefits outweigh their few risks”
- About 14% said “ice baths are dangerous and can kill you; best avoided”
So what does the science say?
Freezing water is very dangerous: True or False?
True! Water close to freezing point is indeed very dangerous, and can most certainly kill you.
Fun fact, though: many such people are still saveable with timely medical intervention, in part because the same hypothermia that is killing them also slows down the process* of death
Source (and science) for both parts of that:
Cold water immersion: sudden death and prolonged survival
*and biologically speaking, death is a process, not an event, by the way. But we don’t have room for that today!
(unless you die in some sudden violent way, such as a powerful explosion that destroys your brain instantly; then it’s an event)
Ice baths are thus also very dangerous: True or False?
False! Assuming that they are undertaken responsibly and you have no chronic diseases that make it more dangerous for you.
What does “undertaken responsibly” mean?
Firstly, the temperature should not be near freezing. It should be 10–15℃, which for Americans is 50–59℉.
You can get a bath thermometer to check this, by the way. Here’s an example product on Amazon.
Secondly, your ice bath should last no more than 10–15 minutes. This is not a place to go to sleep.
What chronic diseases would make it dangerous?
Do check with your doctor if you have any doubts, as no list we make can be exhaustive and we don’t know your personal medical history, but the main culprits are:
- Cardiovascular disease
- Hypertension
- Diabetes (any type)
The first two are for heart attack risk; the latter is because diabetes can affect core temperature regulation.
Ice baths are good for the heart: True or False?
True or False depending on how they’re done, and your health before starting.
For most people, undertaking ice baths responsibly, repeated ice bath use causes the cardiovascular system to adapt to better maintain homeostasis when subjected to thermal shock (i.e. sudden rapid changes in temperature).
For example: Respiratory and cardiovascular responses to cold stress following repeated cold water immersion
And because that was a small study, here’s a big research review with a lot of data; just scroll to where it has the heading“Specific thermoregulative adaptations to regular exposure to cold air and/or cold water exposure“ for many examples and much discussion:
Health effects of voluntary exposure to cold water: a continuing subject of debate
Ice baths are good against inflammation: True or False?
True! Here’s one example:
Uric acid and glutathione levels (important markers of chronic inflammation) are also significantly affected:
Uric acid and glutathione levels during short-term whole body cold exposure
Want to know more?
That’s all we have room for today, but check out our previous “Expert Insights” main feature looking at Wim Hof’s work in cryotherapy:
A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Who Will Take Care of Me When I’m Old? – by Joy Loverde
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.
Regular readers of 10almonds will know we’ve written before about how isolation kills (in numerous ways), and this book tackles that in much greater length and depth than we ever have room for here.
Specifically, she talks about preparing for medical and related (financial, living will in case of dementia, housing, etc) considerations down the line, with checklists and worksheets and such to make it easy, and help you make sure it actually gets done.
She also talks about creating a support network, from scratch if necessary (“foraging a family”), so that even if you will now be prepared to handle things alone, you’ll become a lot less likely to need to do so.
Unlike many books of this genre, she also covers managing your mortality; that “just shoot me” is not a plan, and what lessons can be learned from the dying to make our own last years the best they can be.
The style is upbeat and positive in outlook; less “prepare for doom” and more “get ready to do things right”, and it’s worth mentioning that the format is particularly helpful, outlining objectives towards the beginning of each chapter, and additional resources at the end of each chapter.
Over on Amazon, most of the reviews that contain any criticism are some manner of “I’m in my 70s and wish I had read this sooner”. Still, better late than never.
Bottom line: if you do not have an overabundance of support network around you, then this is an important book to read and to put into action.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
New research suggests intermittent fasting increases the risk of dying from heart disease. But the evidence is mixed
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.
Kaitlin Day, RMIT University and Sharayah Carter, RMIT University
Intermittent fasting has gained popularity in recent years as a dietary approach with potential health benefits. So you might have been surprised to see headlines last week suggesting the practice could increase a person’s risk of death from heart disease.
The news stories were based on recent research which found a link between time-restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting, and an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease, or heart disease.
So what can we make of these findings? And how do they measure up with what else we know about intermittent fasting and heart disease?
The study in question
The research was presented as a scientific poster at an American Heart Association conference last week. The full study hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a long-running survey that collects information from a large number of people in the United States.
This type of research, known as observational research, involves analysing large groups of people to identify relationships between lifestyle factors and disease. The study covered a 15-year period.
It showed people who ate their meals within an eight-hour window faced a 91% increased risk of dying from heart disease compared to those spreading their meals over 12 to 16 hours. When we look more closely at the data, it suggests 7.5% of those who ate within eight hours died from heart disease during the study, compared to 3.6% of those who ate across 12 to 16 hours.
We don’t know if the authors controlled for other factors that can influence health, such as body weight, medication use or diet quality. It’s likely some of these questions will be answered once the full details of the study are published.
It’s also worth noting that participants may have eaten during a shorter window for a range of reasons – not necessarily because they were intentionally following a time-restricted diet. For example, they may have had a poor appetite due to illness, which could have also influenced the results.
Other research
Although this research may have a number of limitations, its findings aren’t entirely unique. They align with several other published studies using the NHANES data set.
For example, one study showed eating over a longer period of time reduced the risk of death from heart disease by 64% in people with heart failure.
Another study in people with diabetes showed those who ate more frequently had a lower risk of death from heart disease.
A recent study found an overnight fast shorter than ten hours and longer than 14 hours increased the risk dying from of heart disease. This suggests too short a fast could also be a problem.
But I thought intermittent fasting was healthy?
There are conflicting results about intermittent fasting in the scientific literature, partly due to the different types of intermittent fasting.
There’s time restricted eating, which limits eating to a period of time each day, and which the current study looks at. There are also different patterns of fast and feed days, such as the well-known 5:2 diet, where on fast days people generally consume about 25% of their energy needs, while on feed days there is no restriction on food intake.
Despite these different fasting patterns, systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) consistently demonstrate benefits for intermittent fasting in terms of weight loss and heart disease risk factors (for example, blood pressure and cholesterol levels).
RCTs indicate intermittent fasting yields comparable improvements in these areas to other dietary interventions, such as daily moderate energy restriction.
There are a variety of intermittent fasting diets. Fauxels/Pexels So why do we see such different results?
RCTs directly compare two conditions, such as intermittent fasting versus daily energy restriction, and control for a range of factors that could affect outcomes. So they offer insights into causal relationships we can’t get through observational studies alone.
However, they often focus on specific groups and short-term outcomes. On average, these studies follow participants for around 12 months, leaving long-term effects unknown.
While observational research provides valuable insights into population-level trends over longer periods, it relies on self-reporting and cannot demonstrate cause and effect.
Relying on people to accurately report their own eating habits is tricky, as they may have difficulty remembering what and when they ate. This is a long-standing issue in observational studies and makes relying only on these types of studies to help us understand the relationship between diet and disease challenging.
It’s likely the relationship between eating timing and health is more complex than simply eating more or less regularly. Our bodies are controlled by a group of internal clocks (our circadian rhythm), and when our behaviour doesn’t align with these clocks, such as when we eat at unusual times, our bodies can have trouble managing this.
So, is intermittent fasting safe?
There’s no simple answer to this question. RCTs have shown it appears a safe option for weight loss in the short term.
However, people in the NHANES dataset who eat within a limited period of the day appear to be at higher risk of dying from heart disease. Of course, many other factors could be causing them to eat in this way, and influence the results.
When faced with conflicting data, it’s generally agreed among scientists that RCTs provide a higher level of evidence. There are too many unknowns to accept the conclusions of an epidemiological study like this one without asking questions. Unsurprisingly, it has been subject to criticism.
That said, to gain a better understanding of the long-term safety of intermittent fasting, we need to be able follow up individuals in these RCTs over five or ten years.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in trying intermittent fasting, you should speak to a health professional first.
Kaitlin Day, Lecturer in Human Nutrition, RMIT University and Sharayah Carter, Lecturer Nutrition and Dietetics, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: