It’s easy to think of ageism as being 80% “nobody will hire me because I am three years away from standard retirement age”, but it’s a lot more pervasive than that. And some of it, perhaps the most insidious, is the ageism that we can sometimes internalize without thinking it through.

10almonds readers love to avoid/reverse aging (and this reviewer is no different!), but it’s good once in a while to consider our priorities and motivations, for example:

• There is merit in being able to live without disability or discomfort
• There is harm in feeling a need to pass for younger than we are

And yet, even things such as disabilities are, Applewhite fairly argues, not to be feared. Absolutely avoided if reasonably possible of course, yes, but if they happen they happen and it’s good that we be able to make our peace with that, because most people have at least some kind of disability before the end, and can still strive to make the most of the precious gift that is life. The goal can and should be to play the hand we’re dealt and to live as well as we can—whatever that latter means for us personally.

Many people’s life satisfaction goes up in later years, and Applewhite hypothesizes that while some of that can be put down to circumstances (often no longer overwhelmed with work etc, often more financially stable), a lot is a matter of having come to terms with “losing” youth and no longer having that fear. Thus, a new, freer age of life begins.

The book does cover many other areas too, more than we can list here (but for example: ranging from pro/con brain differences to sex and intimacy), and the idea that long life is a team sport, and that we should not fall into the all-American trap of putting independence on a pedestal. Reports of how aging works with close-knit communities in the supercentenarian Blue Zones can be considered to quash this quite nicely, for instance.

The style is casual and entertaining, and yet peppered with scholarly citations, which stack up to 30 pages of references at the back.

Bottom line: getting older is a privilege that not everyone gets to have, so who are we to squander it? This book shares a vital sense of perspective, and is a call-to-arms for us all to do better, together.

Click here to check out This Chair Rocks, and indeed rock it!

We’ve covered heart-healthy cooking books before, but variety is good, and boredom is an enemy of health, so let’s shake it up with a fresh stack of recipes!

After a brief overview of the relevant science (which if you’re a regular 10almonds reader, probably won’t be new to you), the author takes the reader on a 28-day journey. Yes, we know the subtitle says 30 days, but unless they carefully hid the other two days somewhere we didn’t find, there are “only” 28 inside. Perhaps the publisher heard it was a month and took creative license. Or maybe there’s a different edition. Either way…

Rather than merely giving a diet plan (though yes, he also does that), he gives a wide range of “spotlight ingredients”, such that many of the recipes, while great in and of themselves, can also be jumping-off points for those of us who like to take recipes and immediately do our own things to them.

Each day gets a breakfast, lunch, dinner, and he also covers drinks, desserts, and such like.

Notwithstanding the cover art being a lot of plants, the recipes are not entirely plant-based; there are a selection of fish dishes (and other seafood, e.g. shrimp) and also some dairy products (e.g. Greek yoghurt). The recipes are certainly very “plant-forward” though and many are just plants. If you’re a strict vegan though, this probably isn’t the book for you.

Bottom line: if you’d like to cook heart-healthy but are often stuck wondering “aaah, what to cook again today?”, then this is the book to get you out of any culinary creative block!

Click here to check out the Heart Healthy Diet Plan, and widen your heart-healthy repertoire!

The very title “What Happened To You?” starts with an assumption that the reader has suffered trauma. This is not just a sample bias of “a person who picks up a book about healing from trauma has probably suffered trauma”, but is also a statistically safe assumption. Around 60% of adults report having suffered some kind of serious trauma.

The authors examine, as the subtitle suggests, these matters in three parts:

1. Trauma
2. Resilience
3. Healing

Trauma can take many forms; sometimes it is a very obvious dramatic traumatic event; sometimes less so. Sometimes it can be a mountain of small things that eroded our strength leaving us broken. But what then, of resilience?

Resilience (in psychology, anyway) is not imperviousness; it is the ability to suffer and recover from things.

Healing is the tail-end part of that. When we have undergone trauma, displayed whatever amount of resilience we could at the time, and now have outgrown our coping strategies and looking to genuinely heal.

The authors present many personal stories and case studies to illustrate different kinds of trauma and resilience, and then go on to outline what we can do to grow from there.

Bottom line: if you or a loved one has suffered trauma, this book may help a lot in understanding and processing that, and finding a way forwards from it.

Click here to check out “What Happened To You?” and give yourself what you deserve.