Healthy Habits for Managing & Reversing Prediabetes – by Dr. Marie Feldman

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The book doesn’t assume prior knowledge, and does explain the science of diabetes, prediabetes, the terms and the symptoms, what’s going on inside, etc—before getting onto the main meat of the book, the tips.

The promised 100 tips are varied in their application; they range from diet and exercise, to matters of sleep, stress, and even love.

There are bonus tips too! For example, an appendix covers “tips for healthier eating out” (i.e. in restaurants etc) and a grocery list to ensure your pantry is good for defending you against prediabetes.

The writing style is very accessible pop-science; this isn’t like reading some dry academic paper—though it does cite its sources for claims, which we always love to see.

Bottom line: if you’d like to proof yourself against prediabetes, and are looking for “small things that add up” habits to get into to achieve that, this book is an excellent first choice.

Click here to check out Healthy Habits For Managing & Reversing Prediabetes, and enjoy the measurable health results!

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Recommended

  • Master Your Core – by Dr. Bohdanna Zazulak
  • Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts – by Frédéric Delavier
    Delavier’s guide shatters myths about women’s strength training and offers targeted exercises for aesthetics and functionality, from glute rounding to back protection.

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  • 4 Tips To Stand Without Using Hands

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    The “sit-stand” test, getting up off the floor without using one’s hands, is well-recognized as a good indicator of healthy aging, and predictor of longevity. But what if you can’t do it? Rather than struggling, there are exercises to strengthen the body to be able to do this vital movement.

    Step by step

    Teresa Shupe has been teaching Pilates professionally full-time for over 25 years, and here’s what she has to offer in the category of safe and effective ways of improving balance and posture while doing the sitting-to-standing movement:

    • Squat! Doing squats (especially deep ones) regularly strengthens all the parts necessary to effectively complete this movement. If your knees aren’t up to it at first, do the squats with your back against a wall to start with.
    • Roll! On your back, cross your feet as though preparing to stand, and rock-and-roll your body forwards. To start with you can “cheat” and use your fingertips to give a slight extra lift. This exercise builds mobility in the various necessary parts of the body, and also strengthens the core—as well as getting you accustomed to using your bodyweight to move your body forwards.
    • Lift! This one’s focusing on that last part, and taking it further. Because it may be difficult to get enough momentum initially, you can practice by holding small weights in your hands, to shift your centre of gravity forwards a bit. Unlike many weights exercises, in this case you’re going to transition to holding less weight rather than more, though.
    • Complete! Continue from the above, without weights now; use the blades of your feet to stand. If you need to, use your fingertips to give you a touch more lift and stability, and reduce the fingers that you use until you are using none.

    For more on each of these as well as a visual demonstration, enjoy this short video:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Further reading

    For more exercises with a similar approach, check out:

    Mobility As A Sporting Pursuit

    Take care!

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  • Built from Broken – by Scott Hogan, CPT, COES

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    So many exercise programs come with the caveat “consult your doctor before engaging in any new activity”, and the safe-but-simple “do not try to train through an injury”.

    Which is all very well and good for someone in fabulous health who sprained an ankle while running and can just wait a bit, but what about those of us carrying…

    • long-term injuries
    • recurring injuries
    • or just plain unfixable physical disabilities?

    That’s where physiotherapist Scott Hogan comes in. The subtitle line goes:

    ❝A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body❞

    …but he does also recognize that there are some things that won’t bounce back.

    On the other hand… There are a lot of things that get written off by doctors as “here’s some ibuprofen” that, with consistent mindful training, could actually be fixed.

    Hogan delivers again and again in this latter category! You’ll see on Amazon that the book has thousands of 4- and 5-star ratings and many glowing reviews, and it’s for a reason or three:

    • The book first lays a foundational knowledge of the most common injuries likely to impede us from training
    • It goes on to give step-by-step corrective exercises to guide your body through healing itself. Your body is trying to heal itself anyway; you might as well help it accomplish that!
    • It finishes up with a comprehensive (and essential) guide to train for the strength and mobility that will help you avoid future problems.

    In short: a potentially life-changing book if you have some (likely back- or joint-related) problem that needs overcoming!

    And if you don’t? An excellent pre-emptive guide all the same. This is definitely one of those “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure” things.

    Get your copy of Built from Broken from Amazon today!

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  • Undoing The Damage Of Life’s Hard Knocks

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    Sometimes, What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Insecure

    We’ve written before about Complex PTSD, which is much more common than the more popularly understood kind:

    PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.

    Given that C-PTSD affects so many people (around 1 in 5, but really, do read the article above! It explains it better than we have room to repeat today), it seems like a good idea to share tips for managing it.

    (Last time, we took all the space for explaining it, so we just linked to some external resources at the end)

    What happened to you?

    PTSD has (as a necessity, as part of its diagnostic criteria) a clear event that caused it, which makes the above question easy to answer.

    C-PTSD often takes more examination to figure out what tapestry of circumstances (and likely but not necessarily: treatment by other people) caused it.

    Often it will feel like “but it can’t be that; that’s not that bad”, or “everyone has things like that” (in which case, you’re probably one of the one in five).

    The deeper questions

    Start by asking yourself: what are you most afraid of, and why? What are you most ashamed of? What do you fear that other people might say about you?

    Often there is a core pattern of insecurity that can be summed up in a simple, harmful, I-message, e.g:

    • I am a bad person
    • I am unloveable
    • I am a fake
    • I am easy to hurt
    • I cannot keep my loved ones safe

    …and so forth.

    For a bigger list of common insecurities to see what resonates, check out:

    Basic Fears/Insecurities, And Their Corresponding Needs/Desires

    Find where they came from

    You probably learned bad beliefs, and consequently bad coping strategies, because of bad circumstances, and/or bad advice.

    • When a parent exclaimed in anger about how stupid you are
    • When a partner exclaimed in frustration that always mess everything up
    • When an employer told you you weren’t good enough

    …or maybe they told you one thing, and showed you the opposite. Or maybe it was entirely non-verbal circumstances:

    • When you gambled on a good idea and lost everything
    • When you tried so hard at some important endeavour and failed
    • When you thought someone could be trusted, and learned the hard way that you were wrong

    These are “life’s difficult bits”, but when we’ve lived through a whole stack of them, it’s less like a single shattering hammer-blow of PTSD, and more like the consistent non-stop tap tap tap that ends up doing just as much damage in the long run.

    Resolve them

    That may sound a bit like a “and quickly create world peace” level of task, but we have tools:

    Ask yourself: what if…

    …it had been different? Take some time and indulge in a full-blown fantasy of a life that was better. Explore it. How would those different life lessons, different messages, have impacted who you are, your personality, your behaviour?

    This is useful, because the brain is famously bad at telling real memories from false ones. Consciously, you’ll know that one was an exploratory fantasy, but to your brain, it’s still doing the appropriate rewiring. So, little by little, neuroplasticity will do its thing.

    Tell yourself a better lie

    We borrowed this one from the title of a very good book which we’ve reviewed previously.

    This idea is not about self-delusion, but rather that we already express our own experiences as a sort of narrative, and that narrative tends to contain value judgements that are often not useful, e.g. “I am stupid”, “I am useless”, and all the other insecurities we mentioned earlier. Some simple examples might be:

    • “I had a terrible childhood” → “I have come so far”
    • “I should have known better” → “I am wiser now”
    • “I have lost so much” → “I have experienced so much”

    So, replacing that self-talk can go a long way to re-writing how secure we feel, and therefore how much trauma-response (ideally: none!) we have to stimuli that are not really as threatening as we sometimes feel they are (a hallmark of PTSD in general).

    Here’s a guide to more ways:

    How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Master Your Core – by Dr. Bohdanna Zazulak
  • Marrakesh Sorghum Salad

    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.

    As the name suggests, it’s a Maghreb dish today! Using sorghum, a naturally gluten-free whole grain with a stack of vitamins and minerals. This salad also comes with fruit and nuts (apricots and almonds; a heavenly combination for both taste and nutrients) as well as greens, herbs, and spices.

    Note: to keep things simple today, we’ve listed ras el-hanout as one ingredient. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a spice blend; you can probably buy a version locally, but you might as well know how to make it yourself—so here’s our recipe for that!

    You will need

    • 1½ cups sorghum, soaked overnight in water (if you can’t find it locally, you can order it online (here’s an example product on Amazon), or substitute quinoa) and if you have time, soaked overnight and then kept in a jar with just a little moisture for a few days until they begin to sprout—this will be best of all. But if you don’t have time, don’t worry about it; overnight soaking is sufficient already.
    • 1 carrot, grated
    • ½ cup chopped parsley
    • 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
    • ½ tbsp chopped chives
    • 2 tbsp ras el-hanout
    • 3 cloves garlic, crushed
    • 2 tbsp almond butter
    • 1 tbsp lemon juice
    • 1 tsp white miso paste
    • ½ cup sliced almonds
    • 4 fresh apricots, pitted and cut into wedges
    • 1 cup mint leaves, chopped
    • To serve: your choice of salad greens; we suggest chopped romaine lettuce and rocket

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Cook the sorghum, which means boiling it for about 45 minutes, or 30 in a pressure cooker. If unsure, err on the side of cooking longer—even up to an hour will be totally fine. You have a lot of wiggle room, and will soon get used to how long it takes with your device/setup. Drain the cooked sorghum, and set it aside to cool. If you’re entertaining, we recommend doing this part the day before and keeping it in the fridge.

    2) When it’s cool, add the carrot, the parsley, the chives, the vinegar, and 1 tbsp of the ras el-hanout. Toss gently but thoroughly to combine.

    3) Make the dressing, which means putting ¼ cup water into a blender with the other 1 tbsp of the ras el-hanout, the garlic, the almond butter, the lemon juice, and the miso paste. Blend until smooth.

    4) Assemble the salad, which means adding the dressing to sorghum-and-ingredients bowl, along with the almonds, apricots, and mint leaves. Toss gently, but sufficiently that everything is coated.

    5) Serve on a bed of salad greens.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Cows’ Milk, Bird Flu, & You

    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.

    When it comes to dairy products, generally speaking, fermented ones (such as most cheeses and yogurts) are considered healthy in moderation, and unfermented ones have their pros and cons that can be argued and quibbled “until the cows come home”. We gave a broad overview, here:

    Is Dairy Scary?

    Furthermore, you may recall that there’s some controversy/dissent about when human babies can have cows’ milk:

    When can my baby drink cow’s milk? It’s sooner than you think

    So, what about bird flu now?

    Earlier this year, the information from the dairy industry was that it was nothing to be worried about for the time being:

    Bird Flu Is Bad for Poultry and Dairy Cows. It’s Not a Dire Threat for Most of Us — Yet.

    More recently, the latest science has found:

    ❝We found a first-order decay rate constant of −2.05 day–1 equivalent to a T99 of 2.3 days. Viral RNA remained detectable for at least 57 days with no degradation. Pasteurization (63 °C for 30 min) reduced infectious virus to undetectable levels and reduced viral RNA concentrations, but reduction was less than 1 log10.

    The prolonged persistence of viral RNA in both raw and pasteurized milk has implications for food safety assessments and environmental surveillance❞

    You can find the study here:

    Infectivity and Persistence of Influenza A Virus in Raw Milk

    In short: raw milk keeps the infectious virus; pasteurization appears to render it uninfectious, though viral RNA remains present.

    This is relevant, because of the bird flu virus being found in milk:

    World Health Organization | H5N1 strain of bird flu found in milk

    To this end, a moratorium has been placed on the sale of raw milk, first by the California Dept of Public Health (following an outbreak in California):

    California halts sales of raw milk due to bird flu virus contamination

    And then, functionally, by the USDA, though rather than an outright ban, it’s requiring testing for the virus:

    USDA orders testing of milk supply for presence of bird flu virus

    So, is pasteurized milk safe?

    The official answer to this, per the FDA, is… Honestly, a lot of hand-wringing and shrugging. What we do know is:

    • the bird flu virus has been found in pasteurized milk too
    • the test for this is very sensitive, and has the extra strength/weakness that viral fragments will flag it as a positive
    • it is assumed that the virus was inactivated by the pasteurization process
    • it could, however, have been the entire virus, the test simply does not tell us which

    In the FDA’s own words:

    ❝The pasteurization process has served public health well for more than 100 years. Even if the virus is detected in raw milk, pasteurization is generally expected to eliminate pathogens to a level that does not pose a risk to consumer health❞

    So, there we have it: the FDA does not have a reassurance exactly, but it does have a general expectation.

    Source: US Officials: Bird flu viral fragments found in pasteurized milk

    Want to know more?

    You might like this mythbusting edition we did a little while back:

    Pasteurization: What It Does And Doesn’t Do ← this is about its effect on risks and nutrients

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Top 5 Anti-Aging Exercises

    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.

    There are some exercises that get called such things as “The King of Exercises!”, but how well-earned is that title and could it be that actually a mix of the top few is best?

    The Exercises

    While you don’t have to do all 5, your body will thank you if you are able to:

    • Plank: strengthens most of the body, and can reduce back pain while improving posture.
    • Squats: another core-strengthening exercise, this time with an emphasis on the lower body, which makes for strong foundations (including strong ankles, knees, and hips). Improves circulation also, and what’s good for circulation is good for the organs, including the brain!
    • Push-ups: promotes very functional strength and fitness; great for alternating with planks, as despite their similar appearance, they work the abs and back more, respectively.
    • Lunges: these are great for lower body strength and stability, and doing these greatly reduces the risk of falling.
    • Glute Bridges: this nicely rounds off one’s core strength, increasing stability and improving posture, as well as reducing lower back pain too.

    If the benefits of these seem to overlap a little, it’s because they do! But each does some things that the others don’t, so put together, they make for a very well-balanced workout.

    For advice on how to do each of them, plus more about the muscles being used and the benefits, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Take care!

    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

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