Reinventing Your Life – by Dr. Jeffrey Young & Dr. Janet Klosko
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This book is quite unlike any other broadly-CBT-focused books we’ve reviewed before. How so, you may wonder?
Rather than focusing on automatic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions with a small-lens focus on an immediate problem, this one zooms out rather and tackles the cause rather than the symptom.
The authors outline eleven “lifetraps” that we can get stuck in:
- Abandonment
- Mistrust & abuse
- Vulnerability
- Dependence
- Emptional deprivation
- Social exclusion
- Defectiveness
- Failure
- Subjugation
- Unrelenting standards
- Entitlement
They then borrow from other areas of psychology, to examine where these things came from, and how they can be addressed, such that we can escape from them.
The style of the book is very reader-friendly pop-psychology, with illustrative (and perhaps apocryphal, but no less useful for it if so) case studies.
The authors then go on to give step-by-step instructions for dealing with each of the 11 lifetraps, per 6 unmet needs we probably had that got us into them, and per 3 likely ways we tried to cope with this using maladaptive coping mechanisms that got us into the lifetrap(s) we ended up in.
Bottom line: if you feel there’s something in your life that’s difficult to escape from (we cannot outrun ourselves, after all, and bring our problems with us), this book could well contain the key that you need to get out of that cycle.
Click here to check out “Reinventing Your Life” and break free from any lifetrap(s) of your own!
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Anti-Inflammatory Piña Colada Baked Oats
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If you like piña coladas and getting songs stuck in your head, then enjoy this very anti-inflammatory, gut-healthy, blood-sugar-balancing, and frankly delicious dish:
You will need
- 9 oz pineapple, diced
- 7 oz rolled oats
- 3 oz desiccated coconut
- 14 fl oz coconut milk (full fat, the kind from a can)
- 14 fl oz milk (your choice what kind, but we recommend coconut, the kind for drinking)
- Optional: some kind of drizzling sugar such as honey or maple syrup
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 350℉ / 180℃.
2) Mix all the ingredients (except the drizzling sugar, if using) well, and put them in an ovenproof dish, compacting the mixture down gently so that the surface is flat.
3) Drizzle the drizzling sugar, if drizzling.
4) Bake in the oven for 30–40 minutes, until lightly golden-brown.
5) Serve hot or cold:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More ← as found (uniquely!) in pineapple
- Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy? ← coconut certainly can!
- The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s β-glucan, as found in abundance in oats
Take care!
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The Blood Sugar Solution – by Dr. Mark Hyman
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The main purpose of this book is combating metabolic disease, the amalgam of what’s often prediabetes (sometimes fully-fledged diabetes) and cardiovascular disease (sometimes fully-fledged heart disease).
To achieve this (after an introductory section explaining what the sociomedical problems are and why the sociomedical problems are happening), he offers a seven-step program; we’ll not keep those steps a mystery; they are:
- Boost your nutrition
- Regulate your hormones
- Reduce inflammation
- Improve your digestion
- Maximize detoxification
- Enhance energy metabolism
- Soothe your mind
Thereafter, it’s all about leading the reader by the hand through the steps; he also offers a six-week action plan, and a six-week meal plan with recipes.
The style is very sensationalist (too sensationalist for this reviewer’s personal taste) but nevertheless backed up with hard science when it comes to hard claims. So, if you don’t mind wading through (or skipping) some early chapters that are a bit “used car salesman” in feel, there’s actually a lot of good information, especially in the middle of the book, and useful practical guides in the middle and end.
Bottom line: if you want a good comprehensive science-based practical guide to addressing the risk of metabolic disease, this is that.
Click here to check out The Blood Sugar Solution, and look after yours!
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Simple, 10-Minute Hip Opening Routine
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Hips Feeling Stiff?
If so, Flow with Adee’s video (below) has just the solution with a quick 10-minute hip-opening routine. Designed for intermediates but open to all, we love Adee’s work and recommend that you reach out to her to tell her what you’d like to see next.
Other Methods
If you’re a book lover, we’ve reviewed a fantastic book on reducing hip pain. Alternatively, learn stretching from a ballerina with Jasmine McDonald’s ballet stretching routine.
Otherwise, enjoy today’s video:
How was the video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!
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Beat The Heat, With Fat
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Surviving Summer
Summer is upon us, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, and given that nowadays each year tends to be hotter than the one before, on average, it pays to be prepared.
We’ve talked about dealing with the heat before:
Sun, Sea, And Sudden Killers To Avoid
All the above advice stands this summer too, but today we’re going to speak a little extra on not having a “default body”.
For much of medical literature and common health advice, the default body is that of a slim and/or athletic white cis man aged 25–35 with no disabilities.
When it comes to “women’s health”, this is often confined to “the bikini zone” and everything else is commonly treated based on research conducted with men.
Today we’ll be looking at a particular challenge for a wide variety of people, when it comes to heat…
Beating the heat, with fat
If you are fat, and/or have a bit of a tummy, and/or have breasts, this one’s for you.
Fat acts as an insulator, which naturally does no favors in hot weather. Carrying the weight around is also extra exercise, which also becomes a problem in hot weather. Fat people usually sweat more than thin people do, as a result.
Sweat is great for cooling down the body, because it takes heat with it when it evaporates off. However, that only works if it can evaporate off, and it can’t evaporate off if it’s trapped in a skin fold / fat roll.
If you’re fat, you may have plenty of those; if you have a bit of a tummy (if you’re not fat generally, this might be a leftover from pregnancy, or weight loss, or something else; how it got there doesn’t matter for our purposes today), you’ll have at least one under it, and if you have breasts, unless they’re quite small, you’ll have one under each breast, and potentially your cleavage may become an issue too.
Note: if you are perhaps a man who has fat in the place where breasts go, then medically this goes for you too, except that there’s not a societal expectation that you wear bra. Use today’s information as you see fit.
Sweat-wicking hacks
We don’t want sweat to stay in those folds—both because then it’s not doing its cooling-down job, and also, because it can cause a rash, and even yeast infections and/or bacterial infections.
So, we want there to be some barrier there. You could use something like vaseline or baby powder, as to prevent chafing, but fat better (more effective, and less messy) is to have some kind of cloth there that can wick the sweat away.
There are made-for-purpose curved cotton bands that exist, called “tummy liners”; here’s an example product on Amazon, or you could make your own if you’re so inclined. They’re breathable, absorbent, and reduce friction too, making everything a lot more comfortable.
And for breasts? Same deal, there are made-for-purpose cotton bra-liners that exist; here’s an example product on Amazon, or again, you could make your own if you feel so inclined. The important part is that it makes things so much comfortable, because let’s face it: wearing a bra in the summer is not comfortable.
So with these, it can become more comfortable (and the cotton liners are flat, so they’re not visible if one’s wearing a t-shirt or similar-coverage garment). You could go braless, of course, but then you’re back to having sweaty folds, so if you’re doing something other than swimming or lying on your back, you might want something there.
Different hydration rules
“People should drink this much per day” and guess what, those guidelines were based on, drumroll please, not fat people.
Sweating more means needing to hydrate more, and even without breaking a sweat, having a larger body than average (be it muscle, fat, or both) means having more body to hydrate. That’s simple math.
So instead, a good general guideline is half an ounce of water per your weight in pounds, per day:
How much water do I need each day?
Another good general guideline is to simply drink “little and often”, that is to say, always have a (hydrating!) drink on the go.
Take care!
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What Most People Don’t Know About Hearing Aids
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Dr. Juliëtte Sterkens, a doctor of audiology, makes things clearer in this TEDx talk:
The sound of the future
Half of all adults experience hearing loss by the age of 75, and by 85, that goes up to two thirds. Untreated hearing loss leads to depression, social isolation, cognitive decline, and even an increased fall risk.
It’s not just about reduced volume though; Dr. Sterkens points out that for many (like this writer!) it’s more a matter of unequal pitch perception and difficulty in speech clarity. Most hearing aids just amplify sound, and don’t fully restore clarity, especially beyond a short range.
However, technology keeps marching forwards there have been improvements in the move from analog to digital, and today’s bluetooth-enabled hearing aids often do a lot better, especially in the case of things like TV transmitters and clip-on microphones.
Out and about, you might see signs sometimes saying “Hearing Loop Enabled”, and those transmit sound directly to telecoil-equipped hearing aids—venues with public address systems are legally required to provide hearing accommodations like this. Many hearing aids include telecoils, but users often aren’t informed or don’t have them activated, which is unfortunate, because telecoils improve hearing dramatically in loop-enabled venues.
Dr. Sterkens makes a plea for us to, as applicable,
- Activate telecoils and insist on them in new hearing aids.
- Advocate for assistive listening systems in public venues.
- Use available resources like the Hearing Loss Association of America for tools and information.
- Familiarize ourselves with accessibility laws and report non-compliance.
- Aim to make the world more accessible for people with hearing loss through advocacy, technology, and awareness.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Vitamin D2 vs Vitamin D3: What You Would Benefit From Knowing
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
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 😎
❝Hi, is there any important difference between vitamin d2 and vitamin d3? Is one better than the other?❞
There is indeed! And one is better than the other!
Where they come from
You’ll find a lot of sources that will tell you “Vitamin D2 is from plants, D3 is from animals”, and in fact only the second half of that is true.
In nature, there are no plants that are known to produce vitamin D.
Vitamin D2, however, is produced by many fungi, as well as algae, neither of which are part of the Kingdom Plantae.
Vitamin D3, meanwhile, is produced by many animals (including humans).
When “the sun” is sometimes considered a source of vitamin D, that’s true only insofar as the sun is also a source of tomatoes, for example, which required the sun to grow. While we humans (and other animals) cannot photosynthesize in general, producing vitamin D is something we can do if exposed to UV light (such as from the sun).
However, of course exposure to UV light (such as from the sun) comes with other problems, so… Should we get sun exposure or not?
We weighed up the balance of evidence, here: The Sun Exposure Dilemma
If, like this writer, you are a mostly crepuscular being who avoids the sun, we have good news: mushrooms can do the sunbathing for us!
❝Exposing mushrooms to UV (from sunlight or in a laboratory) increases the amount of vitamin D in mushrooms by nearly eightfold. Putting five store-bought button mushrooms in the sun, or just one portobello mushroom, produces 24 µg of vitamin D, which translates to nearly 1000 international units, providing the amount of vitamin D one needs in an entire day, and the equivalent found in most vitamin D supplements.
If you’re wondering if the vitamin D from mushrooms actually makes it into your bloodstream, it does. A recent meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials showed that tanned (UV-exposed) mushrooms may be effective in increasing active vitamin D levels in adults with low levels of vitamin D, and studies (randomised controlled trials) have shown that it may be just as effective as supplements at increasing vitamin D levels in the blood (here, and here).
Some research is very positive, saying that putting your mushrooms in direct sunlight for 10–15 minutes may provide you with 100% of your daily vitamin D needs, and the vitamin D content in sunlight-exposed mushrooms may be retained with refrigeration for up to 8 days.
The production of vitamin D may be increased by a further 30% by placing them in the sun with the underside, or gills, facing up, or by 60% if you slice them.❞
Read all about it: Tan your mushrooms, not your skin
Which is better?
In few words: D3 is better.
They both do the exact same job, but with D3, you simply get more bang-for-buck:
❝The WMD in change in total 25(OH)D based on 12 daily dosed vitamin D2-vitamin D3 comparisons, analyzed using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, was 10.39 nmol/L (40%) lower for the vitamin D2 group compared with the vitamin D3 group.
Vitamin D3 leads to a greater increase of 25(OH)D than vitamin D2, even if limited to daily dose studies, but vitamin D2 and vitamin D3 had similar positive impacts on their corresponding 25(OH)D hydroxylated forms.❞
Note: “WMD” here means “weighted mean difference”, not “weapons of mass destruction”
About that “and importance of BMI”, by the way: in persons with a BMI >25, there was no longer a difference between the two forms. Literally, no difference at all; the difference was reduced to 0%.
Another study found similarly, but with different numbers (finding a greater difference), and without recording BMI as a factor:
❝D3 is approximately 87% more potent in raising and maintaining serum 25(OH)D concentrations and produces 2- to 3-fold greater storage of vitamin D than does equimolar D2.❞
See the paper: Vitamin D3 Is More Potent Than Vitamin D2 in Humans
“Well that sucks, because I’m vegan”
Fear not, you can get vegan D3 too.
Much like “you can’t get vegan B12” (but you can; it’s made by yeast), there are vegan D3 supplements, made by lichen.
The trouble with lichen, when it comes to classifying it, it that it’s actually a hybrid colony of many small, strange things (beyond the scope of this article, but they are fascinating, so this writer is holding herself back by the scruff of the neck from explaining in detail), some of which are technically part of Kingdom Animalia, but it is hard to find even the most ardent vegan who will object to consuming bacteria, for example.
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
But watch out with the doses, if supplementing vitamin D in either form, because…
Vit D + Calcium: Too Much Of A Good Thing? ← this also talks about safe and effective doses, and what goes wrong if you take too much
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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