The Green Roasting Tin – by Rukmini Iyer
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You may be wondering: “do I really need a book to tell me to put some vegetables in a roasting tin and roast them?” and maybe not, but the book offers a lot more than that.
Indeed, the author notes “this book was slightly in danger of becoming the gratin and tart book, because I love both”, but don’t worry, most of the recipes are—as you might expect—very healthy.
As for formatting: the 75 recipes are divided first into vegan or vegetarian, and then into quick/medium/slow, in terms of how long they take.
However, even the “slow” recipes don’t actually take more effort, just, more time in the oven.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is that not only does it offer a wide selection of wholesome mains, but also, if you’re putting on a big spread, these can easily double up as high-class low-effort sides.
Bottom line: if you’d like to eat more vegetables in 2024 but want to make it delicious and with little effort, put this book on your Christmas list!
Click here to check out The Green Roasting Tin, and level-up yours!
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Elderly loss of energy
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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
❝Please please give some information on elderly loss of energy and how it can be corrected. Please!❞
A lot of that is the metabolic slump described above! While we certainly wouldn’t describe 60 as elderly, and the health impacts from those changes at 45–55 get a gentler curve from 60 onwards… that curve is only going in one direction if we don’t take exceptionally good care of ourselves.
And of course, there’s also a degree of genetic lottery, and external factors we can’t entirely control (e.g. injuries etc).
One factor that gets overlooked a lot, though, is really easy to fix: B-vitamins.
In particular, vitamins B1, B5, B6, and B12. Of those, especially vitamins B1 and B12.
(Vitamins B5 and B6 are critical to health too, but relatively few people are deficient in those, while many are deficient in B1 and/or B12, especially as we get older)
Without going so detailed as to make this a main feature: these vitamins are essential for energy conversion from food, and they will make a big big difference.
You might especially want to consider taking sulbutiamine, which is a synthetic version of thiamin (vitamin B1), and instead of being water-soluble, it’s fat-soluble, and it easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, which is a big deal.
As ever, always check with your doctor because your needs/risks may be different. Also, there can be a lot of reasons for fatigue and you wouldn’t want to overlook something important.
You might also want to check out yesterday’s sponsor, as they offer personalized at-home health testing to check exactly this sort of thing.
❝What are natural ways to lose weight after 60? Taking into account bad knees or ankles, walking may be out as an exercise, running certainly is.❞
Losing weight is generally something that comes more from the kitchen than the gym, as most forms of exercise (except HIIT; see below) cause the metabolism to slow afterwards to compensate.
However, exercise is still very important, and swimming is a fine option if that’s available to you.
A word to the wise: people will often say “gentle activities, like tai chi or yoga”, and… These things are not the same.
Tai chi and yoga both focus on stability and suppleness, which are great, but:
- Yoga is based around mostly static self-support, often on the floor
- Tai chi will have you very often putting most of your weight on one slowly-increasingly bent knee at a time, and if you have bad knees, we’ll bet you winced while reading that.
So, maybe skip tai chi, or at least keep it to standing meditations and the like, not dynamic routines. Qigong, the same breathing exercises used in tai chi, is also an excellent way to improve your metabolism, by the way.
Ok, back onto HIIT:
You might like our previous article: How To Do HIIT* (Without Wrecking Your Body)
*High-Intensity Interval Training (the article also explains what this is and why you want to do it)
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Just One Heart – by Dr. Jonathan Fisher
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First, what this is not: a book to say eat fiber, go easy on the salt, get some exercise, and so forth.
What this rather is: a book about the connection between the heart and mind; often written poetically, the simple biological reality is that our emotional state does have a genuine impact on our heart health, and as such, any effort to look after our heart (healthwise) would be incomplete without an effort to look after our heart (emotionally).
Dr. Fisher talks about the impact of stress and uncertainty, as well as peace and security, on heart health—and then, having sorted emotional states into “heart breakers” and “heart wakers”, he goes about laying out a plan for what is, emotionally and thus also physiologically, good for our heart.
Chapter by chapter, he walks us through the 7 principles to live by:
- Steadiness: how to steady your heart amid chaos
- Wisdom: how to develop a wise heart in uncertain times
- Openness: how to safely open your heart in a threatening world
- Wholeness: how to show up with your whole heart without going to pieces
- Courage: how to lead with a courageous heart when fear surrounds you
- Lightness: how to live with a light heart in a heavy world
- Warmth: how to love with a warm heart when life feels cold
The style is anything but clinical; it’s well-written, certainly, and definitely informed in part by his medical understanding of the heart, but it’s entirely the raw human element that shines throughout, and that makes the ideas a lot more tangible.
Bottom line: if you’d like your heart to be healthy (cardiac health) and your heart to be healthy (emotional health), this book is a very worthwhile read.
Click here to check out Just One Heart, and take care of yours!
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Cilantro vs Parsley – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing cilantro to parsley, we picked the parsley.
Why?
Notwithstanding that some of our recipes include “cilantro, or if you have the this-tastes-like-soap gene, parsley”, that choice is more for the taste profile than the nutrition profile. Both are good, though, and it is quite close!
Like many herbs, they’re both full of vitamins and minerals and assorted phytochemicals.
In the category of vitamins, they’re both very good sources of vitamins A, C, and K, but parsley has more of each (and in vitamin K’s case, 4–5 times more). Parsley also has about twice as much folate. For the other vitamins, they’re mostly quite equal except that cilantro has more vitamin E.
When it comes to minerals, again they’re both good but again parsley is better on average, with several times more iron, and about twice as much calcium, zinc, and magnesium. Cilantro only wins noticeably for selenium.
Both have an array of anti-inflammatory phytochemicals, and each boasts antioxidants with anticancer potential.
Both have mood-improving qualities and have research for their anxiolytic and antidepressant effects—sufficient that these deserve their own main feature sometime.
For now though, we’ll say: healthwise, these two wonderful herbs are equal on most things, except that parsley has the better micronutrient profile.
Enjoy!
Further reading
You might also enjoy:
Herbs For (Evidence-Based) Health & Healing
Take care!
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Willpower: A Muscle To Flex, Or Spoons To Conserve?
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Willpower: A Muscle To Flex, Or Spoons To Conserve?
We have previously written about motivation; this one’s not about that.
Rather, it’s about willpower itself, and especially, the maintenance of such. Which prompts the question…
Is willpower something that can be built up through practice, or something that is a finite resource that can be expended?
That depends on you—and your experiences.
- Some people believe willpower is a metaphorical “muscle” that must be exercised to be built up
- Some people believe willpower is a matter of metaphorical “spoons” that can be used up
A quick note on spoon theory: this traces its roots to Christine Miserandino’s 2003 essay about chronic illness and the management of limited energy. She details how she explained this to a friend in a practical fashion, she gave her a bunch of spoons from her kitchen, as an arbitrary unit of energy currency. These spoons would then need to be used to “pay” for tasks done; soon her friend realised that if she wanted to make it through the day, she was going to have to give more forethought to how she would “spend” her spoons, or she’d run out and be helpless (and perhaps hungry and far from home) before the day’s end. So, the kind of forethought and planning that a lot of people with chronic illnesses have to give to every day’s activities.
You can read it here: But You Don’t Look Sick? The Spoon Theory
So, why do some people believe one way, and some believe the other? It comes down to our experiences of our own willpower being built or expended. Researchers (Dr. Vanda Siber et al.) studied this, and concluded:
❝The studies support the idea that what people believe about willpower depends, at least in part, on recent experiences with tasks as being energizing or draining.❞
Source: Autonomous Goal Striving Promotes a Nonlimited Theory About Willpower
In other words, there’s a difference between going out running each morning while healthy, and doing so with (for example) lupus.
On a practical level, this translates to practicable advice:
- If something requires willpower but is energizing, this is the muscle kind! Build it.
- If something requires willpower and is draining, this is the spoons kind! Conserve it.
Read the above two bullet-points as many times as necessary to cement them into your hippocampus, because they are the most important message of today’s newsletter.
Do you tend towards the “nonlimited” belief, despite getting tired? If so, here’s why…
There is something that can continue to empower us even when we get physically fatigued, and that’s the extent to which we truly get a choice about what we’re doing. In other words, that “Autonomous” at the front of the title of the previous study, isn’t just word salad.
- If we perceive ourselves as choosing to do what we are doing, with free will and autonomy (i.e., no externally created punitive consequences), we will feel much more empowered, and that goes for our willpower too.
- If we perceive ourselves as doing what we have to (or suffer the consequences), we’ll probably do it, but we’ll find it draining, and that goes for our willpower too.
Until such a time as age-related physical and mental decline truly take us, we as humans tend to gradually accumulate autonomy in our lives. We start as literal babies, then are children with all important decisions made for us, then adolescents building our own identity and ways of doing things, then young adults launching ourselves into the world of adulthood (with mixed results), to a usually more settled middle-age that still has a lot of external stressors and responsibilities, to old age, where we’ve often most things in order, and just ourselves and perhaps our partner to consider.
Consequently…
Age differences in implicit theories about willpower: why older people endorse a nonlimited theory
…which explains why the 30-year-old middle-manager might break down and burn out and stop going to work, while an octogenarian is busy training for a marathon daily before getting back to their daily book-writing session, without fail.
One final thing…
If you need a willpower boost, have a snack*. If you need to willpower boost to avoid snacking, then plan for this in advance by finding a way to keep your blood sugars stable. Because…
The physiology of willpower: linking blood glucose to self-control
*Something that will keep your blood sugars stable, not spike them. Nuts are a great example, unless you’re allergic to such, because they have a nice balance of carbohydrates, protein, and healthy fats.
Want more on that? Read: 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
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Anti-Cholesterol Cardamom & Pistachio Porridge
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This tasty breakfast’s beta-glucan content binds to cholesterol and carries it out of the body; there are lots of other nutritional benefits too!
You will need
- 1 cup coconut milk
- ⅓ cup oats
- 4 tbsp crushed pistachios
- 6 cardamom pods, crushed
- 1 tsp rose water or 4 drops edible rose essential oil
- Optional sweetener: drizzle of honey or maple syrup
- Optional garnishes: rose petals, chopped nuts, dried fruit
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Heat the coconut milk, adding the oats and crushed cardamom pods. Simmer for 5–10 minutes depending on how cooked you want the oats to be.
2) Stir in the crushed pistachio nuts, as well as the rose water.
3) Serve in a bowl, adding any optional toppings:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s beta-glucan, which is fund abundantly in oats
- Pistachios vs Pecans – Which is Healthier? ← have a guess
- Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy? ← coconut can!
Take care!
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Tell Yourself a Better Lie – by Marissa Peer
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As humans, we generally lie to ourselves constantly. Or perhaps we really believe some of the things we tell ourselves, even if they’re not objectively necessarily true:
- I’ll always be poor
- I’m destined to be alone
- I don’t deserve good things
- Etc.
Superficially, it’s easy to flip those, and choose to tell oneself the opposite. But it feels hollow and fake, doesn’t it? That’s where Marissa Peer comes in.
Our stories that we tell ourselves don’t start where we are—they’re generally informed by things we learned along the way. Sometimes good lessons, sometimes bad ones. Sometimes things that were absolutely wrong and/or counterproductive.
Peer invites the reader to ask “What if…”, unravel how the unhelpful lessons got wired into our brains in the first place, and then set about untangling them.
“Tell yourself a better lie” does not mean self-deceit. It means that we’re the authors of our own stories, so we might as well make them work for us. Many things in life are genuinely fixed; others are open to interpretation.
Sorting one from the other, and then treating them correctly in a way that’s helpful to us? That’s how we can stop hurting ourselves, and instead bring our own stories around to uplift and fortify us.
Get Your Copy of “Tell Yourself A Better Lie” on Amazon Today!
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