Owning Your Weight – by Henri Marcoux
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A lot of diet books—which this isn’t—presuppose that the reader wants to lose weight, and varyingly encourage and shame the reader into trying to do so.
Dr. Henri Marcoux takes a completely different approach.
He starts by assuming we are—whether consciously or not—the weight we want to be, and looks at the various physical and psychological factors that influence us to such. Ranging from food poverty to eating our feelings to social factors and more, he bids us examine our relationship with food and eating—not just in the sense of mindful eating, but from multiple scientific angles too.
From this, Dr. Marcoux gives us questions and suggestions to ensure that our relationship with food and eating is what we want it to be, for us.
Much of the latter part of the book covers not just how to go about the requisite lifestyle changes… But also how to implement things in a way that sticks, and is a genuine pleasure to implement. If this sounds over-the-top, the truth is that it’s just because it honestly is a lower-stress way of living.
Bottom line: if you want to gain or lose weight, there’s a good chance this book will help you. If you want to be happier and healthier at the weight you are, there’s a good chance this book will help you with that, too.
Click here to check out Owning Your Weight, and take control of yours!
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Shoe Wear Patterns: What They Mean, Why It Matters, & How To Fix It
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If you look under your shoes, do you notice how the tread is worn more in some places than others? Specific patterns of shoe wear correspond to how our body applies force, weight, and rotational movement. This reveals how we move, and uneven wear can indicate problematic movement dynamics.
The clues in your shoes
Common shoe wear patterns include:
- Diagonal wear on the outside of the heel: caused by foot angle, leg position, and instability, leading to joint stress.
- Rotational wear at specific points: due to internal or external rotation, often originating from the hip, pelvis, or torso.
- Wear above the big toe: caused by excessive toe lifting, often associated with a “lighter” or kicking leg.
Fixing movement issues to prevent wear involves correcting posture, improving balance, and adjusting how the legs land during walking/running.
Key fixes include:
- Aligning the center of gravity properly to prevent leg overcompensation.
- Ensuring feet land under the hips and not far in front.
- Stabilizing the torso to avoid unnecessary rotation.
- Engaging the glutes effectively to reduce hip flexor dominance and improve leg mechanics.
- Maintaining even weight distribution on both legs to prevent excessive lifting or twisting.
Posture and walking mechanics are vital to reducing uneven wear, but meaningful, lasting change takes time and focused effort, to build new habits.
For more on all 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:
Steps For Keeping Your Feet A Healthy Foundation
Take care!
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The Hidden Risk of Stretching: Avoiding Hamstring Injuries in Yoga
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What is Yoga Butt
Have you ever experienced a mysterious pain while stretching, or perhaps during yoga? You might be dealing with “yoga butt,” a common—although rarely discussed—injury. In the below video, the Lovely Liv from Livinleggings shares her journey of discovering, and overcoming, “yoga butt”.
Dealing With Yoga Butt
Yoga butt, or proximal hamstring tendinopathy, occurs when the hamstrings are overstretched without adequate strengthening. Many yoga poses help stretch the hamstrings, but often don’t focus on strengthening said hamstrings; this imbalance is what can lead to damage over time.
To help prevent Yoga butt, it’s essential to balance stretching with strengthening. You can look into incorporating hamstring-strengthening exercises like Romanian deadlifts, hamstring curls, and modified yoga poses into your routine.
(If you’re new to strengthening exercises, we recommend reading Women’s Strength Training Anatomy Workouts or Strength Training for Seniors).
Watch the full video to learn more and hopefully protect yourself from long-term injuries:
Let us know your thoughts, and whether you have any other topics you’d like us to cover.
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Synergistic Brain-Training
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Let The Games Begin (But It Matters What Kind)
Exercise is good for brain health; we’ve written about this before, for example:
How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← there are many advices here, but exercise, especially cardiovascular exercise in this case, is an important item on the list!
Today it’s Psychology Sunday though, and we’re going to talk about looking after brain health by means of brain-training, via games.
“Brain-training” gets a lot of hype and flak:
- Hype: do sudoku every day and soon you will have an IQ of 200 and still have a sharp wit at the age of 120
- Flak: brain-training is usually training only one kind of cognitive function, with limited transferability to the rest of life
The reality is somewhere between the two. Brain training really does improve not just outwardly measurable cognitive function, but also internally measurable improvements visible on brain scans, for example:
- Cognitive training modified age-related brain changes in older adults with subjective memory decline
- Functional brain changes associated with cognitive training in healthy older adults: A preliminary ALE meta-analysis
But what about the transferability?
Let us play
This is where game-based brain-training comes in. And, the more complex the game, the better the benefits, because there is more chance of applicability to life, e.g:
- Sudoku: very limited applicability
- Crosswords: language faculties
- Chess: spatial reasoning, critical path analysis, planning, memory, focus (also unlike the previous two, chess tends to be social for most people, and also involve a lot of reading, if one is keen)
- Computer games: wildly varied depending on the game. While an arcade-style “shoot-em-up” may do little for the brain, there is a lot of potential for a lot of much more relevant brain-training in other kinds of games: it could be planning, problem-solving, social dynamics, economics, things that mirror the day-to-day challenges of running a household, even, or a business.
- It’s not that the skills are useful, by the way. Playing “Stardew Valley” will not qualify you to run a real farm, nor will playing “Civilization” qualify you to run a country. But the brain functions used and trained? Those are important.
It becomes easily explicable, then, why these two research reviews with very similar titles got very different results:
- A Game a Day Keeps Cognitive Decline Away? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Commercially-Available Brain Training Programs in Healthy and Cognitively Impaired Older Adults
- Game-based brain training for improving cognitive function in community-dwelling older adults: A systematic review and meta-regression
The first review found that game-based brain-training had negligible actual use. The “games” they looked at? BrainGymmer, BrainHQ, CogMed, CogniFit, Dakim, Lumosity, and MyBrainTrainer. In other words, made-for-purpose brain-trainers, not actual computer games per se.
The second reviewfound that game-based training was very beneficial. The games they looked at? They didn’t name them, but based on the descriptions, they were actual multiplayer online turn-based computer games, not made-for-purpose brain-trainers.
To summarize the above in few words: multiplayer online turn-based computer games outperform made-for-purpose brain-trainers for cognitive improvement.
Bringing synergy
However, before you order that expensive gaming-chair for marathon gaming sessions (research suggests a tail-off in usefulness after about an hour of continuous gaming per session, by the way), be aware that cognitive training and (physical) exercise training combined, performed close in time to each other or simultaneously, perform better than the sum of either alone:
See also:
❝Simultaneous training was the most efficacious approach for cognition, followed by sequential combinations and cognitive training alone, and significantly better than physical exercise.
Our findings suggest that simultaneously and sequentially combined interventions are efficacious for promoting cognitive alongside physical health in older adults, and therefore should be preferred over implementation of single-domain training❞
~ Dr. Hanna Malmberg Gavelin et al.
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The Yoga of Breath – by Richard Rosen
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You probably know to breathe through your nose, and to breathe with your diaphragm. But did you know you’re usually only breathing through one nostril at a time, and alternate between nostrils every few hours? And did you know how to breathe through both nostrils equally instead, and the benefits that can bring?
The above is one example of many, of things that make this book stand out from the crowd when it comes to breathing exercises. Author Richard Rosen has a deep expertise in this topic, and explains everything clearly and comprehensively, without leaving room for ambiguity.
While most of the book focuses on the mechanics and physical techniques of breathing, he does also cover some more mindstate-related things too—without which, it wouldn’t be yoga.
If the book has a downside, it’s that its comprehensive nature could be off-putting to readers new to breathing work in general. However, since he does explain everything from the ground up, that’s no reason to be put off this book, iff you’re serious about learning.
Bottom line: if you’d like a deeper understanding of breathwork than “breathe slowly through your nose, using your diaphragm”, this book will teach you depths of breathing you probably didn’t know were possible.
Click here to check out The Yoga of Breath, and catch yours!
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Death by Food Pyramid – by Denise Minger
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This one is less about “here’s the perfect way of eating” or even “these specific foods are ontologically evil”, but more about teaching science literacy.
The author explores various health trends from the 70s until time of writing (the book was published in 2014), what rationales originally prompted them, and what social phenomena either helped them to persist, or caused them to get dropped quite quickly.
Of course, even in the case of fads that are societally dropped quite quickly, on an individual level there will always be someone just learning about it for the first time, reading some older material, and thinking “that sounds like just the miracle life-changer I need!”
What she teaches the reader to do is largely what we do a lot of here at 10almonds—examine the claims, go to the actual source material (studies! Not just books about studies!), and see whether the study conclusions actually support the claim, to start with, and then further examine to see if there’s some way (or sometimes, a plurality of ways) in which the study itself is methodologically flawed.
Which does happen sometimes, do actually watch out for that!
The style is quite personal and entertaining for the most part, and yet even moving sometimes (the title is not hyperbole; deaths will be discussed). As one might expect of a book teaching science literacy, it’s very easy to read, with copious footnotes (well, actually they are at the back of the book doubling up as a bibliography, but they are linked-to throughout) for those who wish to delve deeper—something the author, of course, encourages.
Bottom line: if you’d like to be able to sort the real science from the hype yourself, then this book can set you on the right track!
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The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
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The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
This is Dr. Elissa Epel, whose work has for the past 20 years specialized in the effect of stress on aging. She’s led groundbreaking research on cortisol, telomeres, and telomerase, all in the context of aging, especially in women, as well as the relationship between stress and weight gain. She was elected member of the National Academy of Medicine for her work on stress pathways, and has been recognized as a key “Influencer in Aging” by the Alliance for Aging Research.
Indeed, she’s also been named in the top 0.1% of researchers globally, in terms of publication impact.
What’s that about stress and aging?
In her words,
❝Women with the highest levels of perceived stress have telomeres shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging compared to low stress women❞
Source: Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress
We say “in her words”, as she is the top-listed author on this paper—an honour reserved for the lead researcher of any given study/paper.
However, we’d be remiss not to note that the second-listed author is Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. What a team! Maybe we’ll do a spotlight feature on Dr. Blackburn’s work one of these days, but for now, back to Dr. Epel…
What does she want us to do about it?
She has the following advice for us:
Let go of what we can’t control
This one is simple enough, and can be as simple as learning how to set anxiety aside, and taking up the practice of radical acceptance of what we cannot control.
Be challenged, not afraid
This is about eustress, and being the lion, not the gazelle. Dr. Epel uses the example of how when lions are hunting gazelles, both are stressed, but both are feeling the physiological effects of that stress in terms of the augmentation to their immediate abilities, but only one of them is suffering by it.
We’ll let her explain how to leverage this:
TED ideas | Here’s how you can handle stress like a lion, not a gazelle | Dr. Elissa Epel
Build resilience through controlled discomfort
Don’t worry, you don’t have to get chased by lions. A cold shower will do it! This is about making use of hormesis, the body’s ability to build resilience to stressors by small doses of controlled cortisol release—as for example when one undergoes thermal shock, which sounds drastic, but for most people, a cold shower (or even an ice bath) is safe enough.
You can read more about this here:
A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away
Connect with nature
You don’t have to hug a tree, but you do have get to a natural (or at least, natural-seeming) environment once in a while. Simply put, we did not evolve to be in the urban or even suburban settings where most of us spend most of our time. Getting to be around greenery with at least some kind of regularity is hugely beneficial. It doesn’t have to be a national park; a nice garden or local park can suffice, and potted plants at home are better than nothing. Even spending time in virtual reality “nature” is an option:
(you can see an example there, of the kind of scenery this study used)
Breathe deeply, and rest deeply
Mindful breathing, and good quality sleep, are very strongly evidence-based approaches to reduce stress, for example:
Practice gratitude to build optimism
Optimism has a huge positive impact on health outcomes, even when other factors (including socioeconomic factors, pre-existing conditions, and general reasons for one person to be more optimistic than another) are controlled for.
Read: Optimism and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study
There are various ways to increase optimism, and practising gratitude is one of them—but that doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning realism, either:
How To Practise (Non-Toxic) Positivity
There are other ways too, though, and Dr. Epel discusses some with her friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, here:
Want to learn more from Dr. Epel?
We reviewed one of her books, The Telomere Effect, previously. It’s about what we can do to lengthen our telomeres (a key factor in health aging; effectively, being biologically younger). You also might enjoy her newer book, The Stress Prescription, as well as her blog.
Enjoy!
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