Once-A-Week Strategy to Stop Procrastination – by Brad Meir

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.

Procrastination is perhaps the most frustrating bad habit to kick!

We know we should do the things. We know why we should do the things. We want to do the things. We’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t do the things. And then we… don’t do the things? What is going on?!

Brad Meir has answers, and—what a relief—solutions. But enough about him, because first he wants to focus a little on you:

Why do you procrastinate? No, you’re probably not “just lazy”, and he’ll guide you through figuring out what it is that makes you procrastinate. There’s an exploration of various emotions here, as well as working out: what type of procrastinator are you?

Then, per what you figured out with his guidance, exercises, and tests, it’s time for an action plan.

But, importantly: one you can actually do, because it won’t fall foul of the problems you’ve been encountering so far. The exact mechanism you’ll use may vary a bit based on you, but some tools here are good for everyone—as well as an outline of the mistakes you could easily make, and how to avoid falling into those traps. And, last but very definitely not least, his “once a week plan”, per the title.

All in all, a highly recommendable and potentially life-changing book.

Grab Your Copy of “Once-A-Week Strategy to Stop Procrastination” NOW (don’t put it off!)

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • The Whole-Body Approach to Osteoporosis – by Keith McCormick
  • This Is Your Brain on Food – by Dr. Uma Naidoo
    Dr. Naidoo, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and chef, demystifies nutritional psychiatry, busts food myths, and explains the brain’s diet connection in a reader-friendly way.

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • What Happens To Your Body When You Do 100 Glute Bridges Every Day

    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.

    Not just for a sculpted butt:

    Benefits

    With consistent daily glute bridge practice, you may expect:

    • Rounder, toned butt: targets the gluteus maximus, toning and lifting the butt for a rounder appearance.
    • Improved posture: strengthens glutes to support the spine and pelvis, alleviating lower back and hip pain. Stretches tight hip flexors from prolonged sitting.
    • Stronger lower back: glutes support the lower back and spine, reducing pain and making it easier to lift heavy objects. Activating the glutes transfers force from legs to core, preventing injuries.
    • Stronger knees: stabilizes the knee joint and promotes alignment by engaging glutes, hamstrings, and quadriceps, reducing knee pain.
    • Sculpted hamstrings: contracts hamstrings during lifts for strength, while stretching them on the way down increases flexibility.
    • Increased hip flexibility: strengthens muscles around the hip joint, improving mobility and counteracting tight hips from sedentary habits.
    • Reduced back pain: strengthens glutes to correct pelvic tilt and reduce strain on the lower back.
    • Faster running speed: improves hip extension, strengthens hamstrings, and activates the gluteus medius for better running power and balance.
    • Enhanced strength training performance: strengthens glutes, back, and knees, improving performance in exercises like squats and deadlifts.

    As for how to get going, the video offers the following very sound advice: begin with 25–30 reps per session and gradually increase to sets of 100 daily. It should take about 5 minutes (that’s 3 seconds per repetition). Results can be seen in as little as 2 weeks, with significant changes after a month of consistent practice.

    For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Strong Curves: A Woman’s Guide to Building a Better Butt and Body – by Bret Contreras & Kellie Davis

    Take care!

    Share This Post

  • Potatoes & Anxiety

    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

    ❝My other half considers potatoes a wonder food, except when fried. I don’t. I find, when I am eating potatoes I put on weight; and, when I’m not eating them, I lose it. Also, although I can’t swear to it, potatoes also make me feel a little anxious (someone once told me it could have something to do with where they are on the “glycemic index”). What does the science say?❞

    The glycemic index of potatoes depends on the kind of potato (obviously) and also, less obviously, how it’s prepared. For a given white potato, boiling (which removes a lot of starch) might produce a GI of around 60, while instant mash (basically: potato starch) can be more like 80. For reference, pure glucose is 100. And you probably wouldn’t take that in the same quantity you’d take potato, and expect to feel good!

    So: as for anxiety, it could be, since spiked blood sugars can cause mood swings, including anxiety.

    Outside of the matter of blood sugars, the only reference we could find for potatoes causing anxiety was fried potatoes specifically:

    ❝frequent fried food consumption, especially fried potato consumption, is strongly associated with 12% and 7% higher risk of anxiety and depression, respectively❞

    Source: High fried food consumption impacts anxiety and depression due to lipid metabolism disturbance and neuroinflammation

    …which heavily puts the blame not on the potatoes themselves, but on acrylamide (the orange/brown stuff that is made by the Maillard reaction of cooking starches in the absence of water, e.g. by frying, roasting, etc).

    Here’s a very good overview of that, by the way:

    A Review on Acrylamide in Food: Occurrence, Toxicity, and Mitigation Strategies

    Back on the core topic of potatoes and GI and blood sugar spikes and anxiety, you might benefit from a few tweaks that will allow you to enjoy potatoes without spiking blood sugars:

    10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars

    Enjoy!

    Share This Post

  • Why Lung Cancer Is On The Rise In Women Who’ve Never Smoked

    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 easy to assume that if you’ve never smoked, lung cancer is just not a risk for you, unless you got very unlucky with an asbestos-laden environment or such.

    And yes, smoking is indeed the most overwhelmingly strong risk factor:

    ❝It is estimated that cigarette smoking explains almost 90% of lung cancer risk in men and 70 to 80% in women

    Which is a lot (and we’ll address that discrepancy by sex shortly), but meanwhile first let’s mention:

    ❝Compared with non-smokers, smokers have as much as a 30-fold increased risk of developing cancer.

    31% and 26% of all cancer deaths in men and women, respectively, result from lung cancer in the United States.

    Overall 5-year survival is only 15%, and 1-year survival is approximately 42%.

    In total, lung cancer is responsible for more deaths than prostate, colon, pancreas, and breast cancers combined

    Source: Smoking and Lung Cancer

    Sobering statistics for any smoker, certainly.

    But, “smoking is bad for the health” is not the breaking news of the century, so we’ll look now at the other risk factors.

    Before we do though, let’s just drop this previous main feature of ours for anyone who does smoke or perhaps who has a loved one who smokes:

    Which Addiction-Quitting Methods Work Best? ← it’s not specific just to smoking, but it does cover such also

    So, Why the extra risk for women, even if we don’t smoke?

    Let’s reframe that first statistic we gave, now presenting the same information differently:

    Women who do not smoke are 2–3x more likely to get lung cancer than men who do not smoke.

    So… why?

    There are three main reasons:

    Genetic risks

    Cancer often arises from genetic mutations. In the case of lung cancer, genes such as ALK, ROS1, TP53, KRAS, and EGFR are implicated, and some of those are much more likely to mutate in women than in men.

    In some cases, it’s because if you have XX chromosomes (as most women do), there are genes you have redundant copies of that people with XY chromosomes don’t. Other less common karyotypes, such as XXY, probably carry higher risks, but that’s just a hypothesis we’re making based on “more copies of a gene = more chances for it to mutate”.

    See also: Frequency and Distinctive Spectrum of KRAS Mutations in Never Smokers with Lung Adenocarcinoma

    In other cases, it’s because estrogen interacts with the gene mutations, making lung cancer more likely to develop in women over time:

    See also: Lung cancer in never-smoker female Asians is driven by oncogenic mutations, most often involving EGFR

    Hormonal risks (but not what you might think)

    When something affects women more, it’s easy to blame hormones, but, as researchers have concluded…

    ❝A reduced lung cancer risk was found for OC and HRT ever users. Both oestrogen only and oestrogen+progestin HRT were associated with decreased risk. No dose-response relationship was observed with years of OC/HRT use. The greatest risk reduction was seen for squamous cell carcinoma in OC users and in both adenocarcinoma and small cell carcinoma in HRT users.❞

    OC = oral contraceptive
    HRT = hormone replacement therapy

    Note: we snipped out the statistical calculations for readability and brevity, so if you are interested in those, check out the paper below:

    Source: Hormone use and risk for lung cancer: a pooled analysis from the International Lung Cancer Consortium (ILCCO)

    Meanwhile, another research review of 22 studies with nearly a million participants found:

    ❝Current or ever HRT use is partly correlated with the decreased incidence of lung cancer in women.

    Concerns about the incidence of lung cancer can be reduced when perimenopausal and postmenopausal women use current HRT to reduce menopausal symptoms.❞

    Source: The association between different hormone replacement therapy use and the incidence of lung cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

    So, the problem seems to at least a lot of the time be not estrogen (notwithstanding what we mentioned previously about mutations—sometimes a thing can have both pros and cons), but rather, untreated menopause being the higher risk factor.

    This is very reminiscent of what we talked about in one of our main features about Alzheimer’s disease:

    Alzheimer’s Sex Differences May Not Be What They Appear ← Women get Alzheimer’s at nearly 2x the rate than men do, and deteriorate more rapidly after onset, too.

    Chronic inflammation

    For reasons that have not been tied to genetics or hormones*, women suffer from autoimmune diseases at much higher rates than men.

    *presumably it is at least one or the other, because there aren’t a lot of other options that seem plausible, but (as with many “this thing mainly affects women” maladies), science hasn’t yet determined the cause.

    Because cancer is in part a disease of immune dysfunction (cells fail to kill cells they should be killing), having an autoimmune disease, or indeed chronic inflammation in general, will result in a higher risk of cancer.

    For general theory, see: Cancer and Autoimmune Diseases: A Tale of Two Immunological Opposites?

    For specifics, see: Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer: Role of the Immune System and Potential for Immunotherapy

    And this one is the most likely explanation of why lung cancer in women who’ve never smoked is on the rise—it’s because chronic inflammation in women is on the rise. While people regardless of gender are getting chronic inflammation at increased rates nowadays (probably due in large part to the rise of ultra-processed food, as well as the higher stress of modern life, but again, we’re hypothesizing), if all other factors are equal, women will still get it more than men.

    However!

    Like the consideration of HRT’s protective effects (and unlike the genetic factors), this is one we can do something about.

    For how, check out: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

    Want to know more?

    For lung health in general, see:

    Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!

    Take care!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • The Whole-Body Approach to Osteoporosis – by Keith McCormick
  • How to Read a Book – by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

    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.

    Are you a cover-to-cover person, or a dip-in-and-out person?

    Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren have made a science out of getting the most from reading books.

    They help you find what you’re looking for (Maybe you want to find a better understanding of PCOS… maybe you want to find the definition of “heuristics”… maybe you want to find a new business strategy… maybe you want to find a romantic escape… maybe you want to find a deeper appreciation of 19th century poetry, maybe you want to find… etc).

    They then help you retain what you read, and make sure that you don’t miss a trick.

    Whether you read books so often that optimizing this is of huge value for you, or so rarely that when you do, you want to make it count, this book could make a real difference to your reading experience forever after.

    Pick Up Today’s Book On Amazon!

    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:

  • Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – by Dr. Lindsay Gibson

    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.

    Not everyone had the best of parents, and the harm done can last well beyond childhood. This book looks at healing that.

    Dr. Gibson talks about four main kinds of “difficult” parents, though of course they can overlap:

    1. The emotional parent, with their unpredictable outbursts
    2. The driven parent, with their projected perfectionism
    3. The passive parent, with their disinterest and unreliability
    4. The rejecting parent, with their unavailability and insults

    For all of them, it’s common that nothing we could do was ever good enough, and that leaves a deep scar. To add to it, the unfavorable dynamic often persists in adult life, assuming everyone involved is still alive and in contact.

    So, what to do about it? Dr. Gibson advocates for first getting a good understanding of what wasn’t right/normal/healthy, because it’s easy for a lot of us to normalize the only thing we’ve ever known. Then, beyond merely noting that no child deserved that lack of compassion, moving on to pick up the broken pieces one by one, and address each in turn.

    The style of the book is anecdote-heavy (case studies, either anonymized or synthesized per common patterns) in a way that will probably be all-too-relatable to a lot of readers (assuming that if you buy this book, it’s for a reason), science-moderate (references peppered into the text; three pages of bibliography), and practicality-dense—that is to say, there are lots of clear usable examples, there are self-assessment questionnaires, there are worksheets for now making progress forward, and so forth.

    Bottom line: if one or more of the parent types above strikes a chord with you, there’s a good chance you could benefit from this book.

    Click here to check out Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and rebuild yourself!

    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:

  • Mediterranean Diet Book Suggestions

    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

    ❝What is Mediterranean diet which book to read?❞

    We did a special edition about the Mediterranean Diet! So that’s a great starting point.

    As to books, there are so many, and we review books about it from time to time, so keep an eye out for our daily “One-Minute Book Review” section. We do highly recommend “How Not To Die”, which is a science-heavy approach to diet-based longevity, and essentially describes the Mediterranean Diet, with some tweaks.

    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: