Most adults will gain half a kilo this year – and every year. Here’s how to stop ‘weight creep’
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As we enter a new year armed with resolutions to improve our lives, there’s a good chance we’ll also be carrying something less helpful: extra kilos. At least half a kilogram, to be precise.
“Weight creep” doesn’t have to be inevitable. Here’s what’s behind this sneaky annual occurrence and some practical steps to prevent it.
Small gains add up
Adults tend to gain weight progressively as they age and typically gain an average of 0.5 to 1kg every year.
While this doesn’t seem like much each year, it amounts to 5kg over a decade. The slow-but-steady nature of weight creep is why many of us won’t notice the extra weight gained until we’re in our fifties.
Why do we gain weight?
Subtle, gradual lifestyle shifts as we progress through life and age-related biological changes cause us to gain weight. Our:
- activity levels decline. Longer work hours and family commitments can see us become more sedentary and have less time for exercise, which means we burn fewer calories
- diets worsen. With frenetic work and family schedules, we sometimes turn to pre-packaged and fast foods. These processed and discretionary foods are loaded with hidden sugars, salts and unhealthy fats. A better financial position later in life can also result in more dining out, which is associated with a higher total energy intake
- sleep decreases. Busy lives and screen use can mean we don’t get enough sleep. This disturbs our body’s energy balance, increasing our feelings of hunger, triggering cravings and decreasing our energy
- stress increases. Financial, relationship and work-related stress increases our body’s production of cortisol, triggering food cravings and promoting fat storage
- metabolism slows. Around the age of 40, our muscle mass naturally declines, and our body fat starts increasing. Muscle mass helps determine our metabolic rate, so when our muscle mass decreases, our bodies start to burn fewer calories at rest.
We also tend to gain a small amount of weight during festive periods – times filled with calorie-rich foods and drinks, when exercise and sleep are often overlooked. One study of Australian adults found participants gained 0.5 kilograms on average over the Christmas/New Year period and an average of 0.25 kilograms around Easter.
Why we need to prevent weight creep
It’s important to prevent weight creep for two key reasons:
1. Weight creep resets our body’s set point
Set-point theory suggests we each have a predetermined weight or set point. Our body works to keep our weight around this set point, adjusting our biological systems to regulate how much we eat, how we store fat and expend energy.
When we gain weight, our set point resets to the new, higher weight. Our body adapts to protect this new weight, making it challenging to lose the weight we’ve gained.
But it’s also possible to lower your set point if you lose weight gradually and with an interval weight loss approach. Specifically, losing weight in small manageable chunks you can sustain – periods of weight loss, followed by periods of weight maintenance, and so on, until you achieve your goal weight.
2. Weight creep can lead to obesity and health issues
Undetected and unmanaged weight creep can result in obesity which can increase our risk of heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and several types of cancers (including breast, colorectal, oesophageal, kidney, gallbladder, uterine, pancreatic and liver).
A large study examined the link between weight gain from early to middle adulthood and health outcomes later in life, following people for around 15 years. It found those who gained 2.5 to 10kg over this period had an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, strokes, obesity-related cancer and death compared to participants who had maintained a stable weight.
Fortunately, there are steps we can take to build lasting habits that will make weight creep a thing of the past.
7 practical steps to prevent weight creep
1. Eat from big to small
Aim to consume most of your food earlier in the day and taper your meal sizes to ensure dinner is the smallest meal you eat.
A low-calorie or small breakfast leads to increased feelings of hunger, specifically appetite for sweets, across the course of the day.
We burn the calories from a meal 2.5 times more efficiently in the morning than in the evening. So emphasising breakfast over dinner is also good for weight management.
2. Use chopsticks, a teaspoon or an oyster fork
Sit at the table for dinner and use different utensils to encourage eating more slowly.
This gives your brain time to recognise and adapt to signals from your stomach telling you you’re full.
3. Eat the full rainbow
Fill your plate with vegetables and fruits of different colours first to support eating a high-fibre, nutrient-dense diet that will keep you feeling full and satisfied.
Meals also need to be balanced and include a source of protein, wholegrain carbohydrates and healthy fat to meet our dietary needs – for example, eggs on wholegrain toast with avocado.
4. Reach for nature first
Retrain your brain to rely on nature’s treats – fresh vegetables, fruit, honey, nuts and seeds. In their natural state, these foods release the same pleasure response in the brain as ultra-processed and fast foods, helping you avoid unnecessary calories, sugar, salt and unhealthy fats.
5. Choose to move
Look for ways to incorporate incidental activity into your daily routine – such as taking the stairs instead of the lift – and boost your exercise by challenging yourself to try a new activity.
Just be sure to include variety, as doing the same activities every day often results in boredom and avoidance.
6. Prioritise sleep
Set yourself a goal of getting a minimum of seven hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, and help yourself achieve it by avoiding screens for an hour or two before bed.
7. Weigh yourself regularly
Getting into the habit of weighing yourself weekly is a guaranteed way to help avoid the kilos creeping up on us. Aim to weigh yourself on the same day, at the same time and in the same environment each week and use the best quality scales you can afford.
At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register here to express your interest.
Nick Fuller, Clinical Trials Director, Department of Endocrinology, RPA Hospital, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Red Cabbage vs Brussels Sprouts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing red cabbage to Brussels sprouts, we picked the sprouts.
Why?
First let’s note that we have an interesting comparison today, because these two plants are the exact same species (and indeed, also the exact same species as broccoli, cauliflower. and kale)—just a different cultivar. All of these plants and more are simply cultivars of Brassica oleracea.
Them being the same species notwithstanding, there are nutritional differences:
In terms of macros, the sprouts have more than 2x the protein, slightly more carbs, and nearly 2x the fiber. An easy win for sprouts here.
Looking at vitamins next, red cabbage has more vitamin A (whence the color), while Brussels sprouts have more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline. Another easy win for sprouts.
In the category of minerals, red cabbage has a tiny bit more calcium, while Brussels sprouts have more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc—while being literally just a few mg/100g behind red cabbage on calcium anyway. So, once again, sprouts are sweeping the victory.
Both vegetables are a rich source of assorted polyphenols; for most polyphenols, Brussels sprouts scores higher—an exception being that red cabbage is very slightly higher in quercetin. So, we’ll call this category a win for Brussels sprouts, too.
In short: enjoy both; diversity is great and so is pretty much any iteration of Brassica oleracea. Standing next to Brussels sprouts made red cabbage look bad, but we assure you that cabbage in general is a nutritional powerhouse, and in this case it was hot the heels of sprouts in most of those micronutrients. If you’re going to pick one though, the Brussels sprouts are indeed the more nutritionally dense.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc ← sprout your Brassica oleracea, too!
Take care!
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Chromium Picolinate For Blood Sugar Control & Weight Loss
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First, a quick disambiguation:
- chromium found in food, trivalent chromium of various kinds, is safe (in the quantities usually consumed) and is sometimes considered an essential mineral, sometimes considered unnecessary but beneficial. It’s hard to know for sure, since it’s in a lot of foods (naturally, like many trace elements)
- chromium found in pollution, hexavalent chromium (so: twice as many cationic bonds, if this writer’s chemistry serves her correctly) is poisonous.
We’re going to be writing about the food kind, which is also possible to take as a supplement.
In this case, supplementing vs getting from food is quite a big difference, by the way, since (unlike for a lot of things, which are often the other way around) the bioavailability of chromium from food is very low (around 2.5%), whereas chromium picolinate, one of the most commonly-used supplement forms, boasts higher bioavailability.
Does it work for blood sugars?
Yes, it does! At least, it does in the case of people with type 2 diabetes. Rather than bombard you with many individual studies, here’s a systematic review and meta-analysis of 22 criteria-meeting randomized clinical trials that found:
❝The available evidence suggests favourable effects of chromium supplementation on glycaemic control in patients with diabetes.
Chromium monosupplement may additionally improve triglycerides and HDL-C levels.❞
Type 1 diabetes does not have anything like the same weight of evidence, and indeed,
we couldn’t find a single human study. It was beneficial for mice with artificially-induced T1D, thoughwait no, we have an update! We found literally a single human study:Chromium picolinate supplementation for diabetes mellitus
Literally, as in: it’s a case study of one person, and the results were a modest reduction in Hb A1c levels after 3 months of 600μg daily; the researchers concluded that ❝chromium picolinate continues to fall squarely within the scope of “alternative medicine,” with both unproven benefits and unknown risks❞.
As for people without diabetes, it may reduce the risk of diabetes:
Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Is Lower in US Adults Taking Chromium-Containing Supplements
However! This was an observational study, and correlation ≠ causation.
Furthermore, they said:
❝Over one-half the adult US population consumes nutritional supplements, and over one-quarter consumes supplemental chromium. The odds of having T2D were lower in those who, in the previous 30 d, had consumed supplements containing chromium❞
That “over one-quarter consumes supplemental chromium” brought our attention to the fact that this is not talking about specifically chromium “monosupplements” (definitely not quarter of the adult population take those), but rather, “multivitamin and mineral” supplements that also contain a tiny amount (often under 50μg) of chromium.
In other words, this ruins the data and honestly the benefit could have been from anything in the “multivitamin and mineral” supplement, or indeed, could just be “the kind of person who takes supplements is the kind of person who lives a lifestyle that is less conducive to becoming diabetic”.
Does it work for weight loss?
We’re running out of space here, so we’ll be brief:
No.
There are many papers that have concluded this, but here are two:
Chromium picolinate supplementation for overweight or obese adults
and
Is it safe?
Science’s current best answer is “we don’t know; it hasn’t been tested enough; we haven’t even established the tolerable upper limit, which is usually step 1 of establishing safety”.
Nor is there an estimated average requirement (if indeed there even is a requirement, which question is also not as yet answered conclusively by science), and science falls back to “here’s an average of what people consume in their diet, so that’s probably safe, we guess”.
(that average was reckoned as 25μg/day for young women and 25μg/day for young men, by the way; older ages not as yet reckoned)
You can read about this sorry state of affairs here.
Want to try some?
Notwithstanding the above lack of data for safety, it does have benefits for blood sugars, so if that’s a gamble you’re willing to make, then here’s an example product on Amazon.
Note: the dosage per capsule there (800μg) is half of the low end of the dose that was implicated in the serious kidney condition caused in this case study (1200–2400μg), so if you are going to try it, we strongly recommend not taking more than one per day.
Take care!
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Good news: midlife health is about more than a waist measurement. Here’s why
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You’re not in your 20s or 30s anymore and you know regular health checks are important. So you go to your GP. During the appointment they measure your waist. They might also check your weight. Looking concerned, they recommend some lifestyle changes.
GPs and health professionals commonly measure waist circumference as a vital sign for health. This is a better indicator than body mass index (BMI) of the amount of intra-abdominal fat. This is the really risky fat around and within the organs that can drive heart disease and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes.
Men are at greatly increased risk of health issues if their waist circumference is greater than 102 centimetres. Women are considered to be at greater risk with a waist circumference of 88 centimetres or more. More than two-thirds of Australian adults have waist measurements that put them at an increased risk of disease. An even better indicator is waist circumference divided by height or waist-to-height ratio.
But we know people (especially women) have a propensity to gain weight around their middle during midlife, which can be very hard to control. Are they doomed to ill health? It turns out that, although such measurements are important, they are not the whole story when it comes to your risk of disease and death.
How much is too much?
Having a waist circumference to height ratio larger than 0.5 is associated with greater risk of chronic disease as well as premature death and this applies in adults of any age. A healthy waist-to-height ratio is between 0.4 to 0.49. A ratio of 0.6 or more places a person at the highest risk of disease.
Some experts recommend waist circumference be routinely measured in patients during health appointments. This can kick off a discussion about their risk of chronic diseases and how they might address this.
Excessive body fat and the associated health problems manifest more strongly during midlife. A range of social, personal and physiological factors come together to make it more difficult to control waist circumference as we age. Metabolism tends to slow down mainly due to decreasing muscle mass because people do less vigorous physical activity, in particular resistance exercise.
For women, hormone levels begin changing in mid-life and this also stimulates increased fat levels particularly around the abdomen. At the same time, this life phase (often involving job responsibilities, parenting and caring for ageing parents) is when elevated stress can lead to increased cortisol which causes fat gain in the abdominal region.
Midlife can also bring poorer sleep patterns. These contribute to fat gain with disruption to the hormones that control appetite.
Finally, your family history and genetics can make you predisposed to gaining more abdominal fat.
Why the waist?
This intra-abdominal or visceral fat is much more metabolically active (it has a greater impact on body organs and systems) than the fat under the skin (subcutaneous fat).
Visceral fat surrounds and infiltrates major organs such as the liver, pancreas and intestines, releasing a variety of chemicals (hormones, inflammatory signals, and fatty acids). These affect inflammation, lipid metabolism, cholesterol levels and insulin resistance, contributing to the development of chronic illnesses.
Exercise can limit visceral fat gains in mid-life. Shutterstock/Zamrznuti tonovi The issue is particularly evident during menopause. In addition to the direct effects of hormone changes, declining levels of oestrogen change brain function, mood and motivation. These psychological alterations can result in reduced physical activity and increased eating – often of comfort foods high in sugar and fat.
But these outcomes are not inevitable. Diet, exercise and managing mental health can limit visceral fat gains in mid-life. And importantly, the waist circumference (and ratio to height) is just one measure of human health. There are so many other aspects of body composition, exercise and diet. These can have much larger influence on a person’s health.
Muscle matters
The quantity and quality of skeletal muscle (attached to bones to produce movement) a person has makes a big difference to their heart, lung, metabolic, immune, neurological and mental health as well as their physical function.
On current evidence, it is equally or more important for health and longevity to have higher muscle mass and better cardiorespiratory (aerobic) fitness than waist circumference within the healthy range.
So, if a person does have an excessive waist circumference, but they are also sedentary and have less muscle mass and aerobic fitness, then the recommendation would be to focus on an appropriate exercise program. The fitness deficits should be addressed as priority rather than worry about fat loss.
Conversely, a person with low visceral fat levels is not necessarily fit and healthy and may have quite poor aerobic fitness, muscle mass, and strength. The research evidence is that these vital signs of health – how strong a person is, the quality of their diet and how well their heart, circulation and lungs are working – are more predictive of risk of disease and death than how thin or fat a person is.
For example, a 2017 Dutch study followed overweight and obese people for 15 years and found people who were very physically active had no increased heart disease risk than “normal weight” participants.
Getting moving is important advice
Physical activity has many benefits. Exercise can counter a lot of the negative behavioural and physiological changes that are occurring during midlife including for people going through menopause.
And regular exercise reduces the tendency to use food and drink to help manage what can be a quite difficult time in life.
Measuring your waist circumference and monitoring your weight remains important. If the measures exceed the values listed above, then it is certainly a good idea to make some changes. Exercise is effective for fat loss and in particular decreasing visceral fat with greater effectiveness when combined with dietary restriction of energy intake. Importantly, any fat loss program – whether through drugs, diet or surgery – is also a muscle loss program unless resistance exercise is part of the program. Talking about your overall health with a doctor is a great place to start.
Accredited exercise physiologists and accredited practising dietitians are the most appropriate allied health professionals to assess your physical structure, fitness and diet and work with you to get a plan in place to improve your health, fitness and reduce your current and future health risks.
Rob Newton, Professor of Exercise Medicine, Edith Cowan University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal
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Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
Piperine, a compound found in Piper nigrum (black pepper, to its friends), has many health benefits. It’s included as a minor ingredient in some other supplements, because it boosts bioavailability. In its form as a kitchen spice, it’s definitely a superfood.
What does it do?
First, three things that generally go together:
These things often go together for the simple reason that oxidative stress, inflammation, and cancer often go together. In each case, it’s a matter of cellular wear-and-tear, and what can mitigate that.
For what it’s worth, there’s generally a fourth pillar: anti-aging. This is again for the same reason. That said, black pepper hasn’t (so far as we could find) been studied specifically for its anti-aging properties, so we can’t cite that here as an evidence-based claim.
Nevertheless, it’s a reasonable inference that something that fights oxidation, inflammation, and cancer, will often also slow aging.
Special note on the anti-cancer properties
We noticed two very interesting things while researching piperine’s anti-cancer properties. It’s not just that it reduces cancer risk and slows tumor growth in extant cancers (as we might expect from the above-discussed properties). Let’s spotlight some studies:
It is selectively cytotoxic (that’s a good thing)
Piperine was found to be selectively cytotoxic to cancerous cells, while not being cytotoxic to non-cancerous cells. To this end, it’s a very promising cancer-sniper:
Piperine as a Potential Anti-cancer Agent: A Review on Preclinical Studies
It can reverse multi-drug resistance in cancer cells
P-glycoprotein, found in our body, is a drug-transporter that is known for “washing out” chemotherapeutic drugs from cancer cells. To date, no drug has been approved to inhibit P-glycoprotein, but piperine has been found to do the job:
Targeting P-glycoprotein: Investigation of piperine analogs for overcoming drug resistance in cancer
What’s this about piperine analogs, though? Basically the researchers found a way to “tweak” piperine to make it even more effective. They called this tweaked version “Pip1”, because calling it by its chemical name,
((2E,4E)-5-(benzo[d][1,3]dioxol-5-yl)-1-(6,7-dimethoxy-3,4-dihydroisoquinolin-2(1 H)-yl)penta-2,4-dien-1-one)
…got a bit unwieldy.
The upshot is: Pip1 is better, but piperine itself is also good.
Other benefits
Piperine does have other benefits too, but the above is what we were most excited to talk about today. Its other benefits include:
- Neuroprotective effects (against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more)
- Blood-sugar balancing / antidiabetic effect
- Good for gut microbiome diversity
- Heart health benefits, including cholesterol-balancing
- Boosts bioavailability of other nutrients/drugs
Enjoy!
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When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
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When knowing what to do isn’t the problem
Often, we know what we need to do. Sometimes, knowing isn’t the problem!
The topic today is going to be a technique used by therapeutic service providers to help people to enact positive changes in their lives.
While this is a necessarily dialectic practice (i.e., it involves a back-and-forth dialogue), it’s still perfectly possible to do it alone, and that’s what we’ll be focussing on in this main feature.
What is Motivational Interviewing?
❝Motivational interviewing (MI) is a technique that has been specifically developed to help motivate ambivalent patients to change their behavior.❞
Read in full: Motivational Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Approach for Use in Medical Practice
It’s mostly used for such things as helping people reduce or eliminate substance abuse, or manage their weight, or exercise more, things like that.
However, it can be employed for any endeavour that requires motivation and sustained willpower to carry it through.
Three Phases
Motivational Interviewing traditionally has three phases:
- Exploring and understanding the issue at hand
- Guiding and deciding importance and goals
- Choosing and setting an action plan
In self-practice, maybe you can already know and understand what it is that you want/need to change.
If not, consider asking yourself such questions as:
- What does a good day look like? What does a bad day look like?
- If things are not good now, when were they good? What changed?
- If everything were perfect now, what would that look like? How would you know?
Once you have a clear idea of where you want to be, the next thing to know is: how much do you want it? And how confident are you in attaining it?
This is a critical process:
- Give your answers numerically on a scale from 0 to 10
- Whatever your score, ask yourself why it’s not lower. For example, if you scored your motivation 4 and your confidence 2, what factors made your motivation not a lower number? What factors made your confidence not a lower number?
- In the unlikely event that you gave yourself a 0, ask whether you can really afford to scrap the goal. If you can’t, find something, anything, to bring it to at least a 1.
- After you’ve done that, then you can ask yourself the more obvious question of why your numbers aren’t higher. This will help you identify barriers to overcome.
Now you’re ready to choose what to focus on and how to do it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew; it’s fine to start low and work up. You should revisit this regularly, just like you would if you had a counsellor helping you.
Some things to ask yourself at this stage of the motivational self-interviewing:
- What’s a good SMART goal to get you started?
- What could stop you from achieving your goal?
- How could you overcome that challenge?
- What is your backup plan, if you have to scale back your goal for some reason?
A conceptual example: if your goal is to stick to a whole foods Mediterranean diet, but you are attending a wedding next week, then now is the time to decide in advance 1) what personal lines-in-the-sand you will or will not draw 2) what secondary, backup plan you will make to not go too far off track.
The same example in practice: wedding menus often offer meat/fish/vegetarian options, so you might choose the fish or vegetarian, and as for sugar and alcohol, you might limit yourself to “a small slice of wedding cake only; coffee/cheese option instead of dessert”, and “alcohol only for toasts”.
Giving yourself the permission well in advance for small (clearly defined and boundaried!) diversions from the plan, will stop you from falling into the trap of “well, since today’s a cheat-day now…”
Secret fourth stage
The secret here is to keep going back and reassessing at regular intervals. Set your own calendar; you might want to start out weekly and then move to monthly when you’re more strongly on-track.
For this reason, it’s good to keep a journal with your notes from your self-interview sessions, the scores you gave yourself, the goals and plans you set, etc.
When conducting your regular review, be sure to examine what worked for you, and what didn’t (and why). That way, you can practice trial-and-improvement as you go.
Want to learn more?
We only have so much room here, but there are lots of resources out there.
Here’s a high-quality page that:
- explains motivational interviewing in more depth than we have room for here
- offers a lot of free downloadable resource packs and the like
Check it out: Motivational Interviewing Theory & Resources
Enjoy!
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Tips For Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
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Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
Arthritis is the umbrella term for a cluster of joint diseases involving inflammation of the joints, hence “arthr-” (joint) “-itis” (suffix used to denote inflammation). These are mostly, but not all, autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks our own joints.
Inflammatory vs Non-Inflammatory Arthritis
Arthritis is broadly divided into inflammatory arthritis and non-inflammatory arthritis.
You may be wondering: how does one get non-inflammatory inflammation of the joints?
The answer is, in “non-inflammatory” arthritis, such as osteoarthritis, the damage comes first (by general wear-and-tear) and inflammation generally follows as part of the symptoms, rather than the cause. So the name can be a little confusing. In the case of osteo- and other “non-inflammatory” forms of arthritis, you definitely still want to keep your inflammation at bay as best you can, but it’s not as absolutely critical a deal as it is for “inflammatory” forms of arthritis.
We’ll tackle the beast that is osteoarthritis another day, however.
Today we’re going to focus on…
Rheumatoid Arthritis
This is the most common of the autoimmune forms of arthritis. Some quick facts:
- It affects a little under 1% of the global population, but the older we get, the more likely it becomes
- Early onset of rheumatoid arthritis is most likely to show up around the age of 50 (but it can show up at any age)
- However, incidence (not onset) of rheumatoid arthritis peaks in the 70s age bracket
- It is 2–4 times more common in women than in men
- Approximately one third of people stop work within two years of its onset, and this increases thereafter.
Well, that sounds gloomy.
Indeed it’s not fun. There’s a lot of stiffness and aching of joints (often with swelling too), loss of joint function can be common, and then there are knock-on effects like fatigue, weakness, and loss of appetite.
Beyond that it’s an autoimmune disorder, its cause is not known, and there is no known cure.
Is there any good news?
If you don’t have rheumatoid arthritis at the present time, you can reduce your risk factors in several ways:
- Having an anti-inflammatory diet. Get plenty of fiber, greens, and berries. Fatty fish is great too, as are oily nuts. On the other side of things, high consumption of salt, sugar, alcohol, and red meat are associated with a greater risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
- Not smoking. Smoking is bad for pretty much everything, including your chances of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
- Not being obese. This one may be more a matter of correlation than causation, because of the dietary factors (if one eats an anti-inflammatory diet, obesity is less likely), but the association is there.
There are other risk factors that are harder to control, such as genetics, age, sex, and having a mother who smoked.
See: Genetic and environmental risk factors for rheumatoid arthritis
What if I already have rheumatoid arthritis?
If you already have rheumatoid arthritis, it becomes a matter of symptom management.
First, reduce inflammation any (reasonable) way you can. We did a main feature on this before, so we’ll just drop that again here:
Next, consider the available medications. Your doctor may or may not have discussed all of the options with you, so be aware that there are more things available than just pain relief. To talk about them all would require a whole main feature, so instead, here’s a really well-compiled list, along with explanations about each of them, up to date as of this year:
Rheumatoid Arthritis Medication List (And What They Do, And How)
Finally, consider other lifestyle adjustments to manage your symptoms. These include:
- Exercise—gently, though! You do not want to provoke a flare-up, but you do want to maintain your mobility as best you can. There’s a use-it-or-lose-it factor here. Swimming and yoga are great options, as is tai chi. You may want to avoid exercises that involve repetitive impacts to your joints, like running.
- Rest—while keeping mobility going. Get good sleep at night (this is important), but don’t make your bed your new home, or your mobility will quickly deteriorate.
- Hot & cold—both can help, and alternating them can reduce inflammation and stiffness by improving your body’s ability to respond appropriately to these stimuli rather than getting stuck in an inappropriate-response state of inflammation.
- Mobility aids—if it helps, it helps. Maybe you only need something during a flare-up, but when that’s the case, you want to be as gentle on your body as possible while keeping moving, so if crutches, handrails etc help, then by all means get them and use them.
- Go easy on the use of braces, splints, etc—these can offer short-term relief, but at a long term cost of loss of mobility. Only you can decide where to draw the line when it comes to that trade-off.
You can also check out our previous article:
Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
Take good care of yourself!
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