The Oh She Glows Cookbook – by Angela Liddon

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Let’s get the criticism out of the way first: notwithstanding the subtitle promising over 100 recipes, there are about 80-odd here, if we discount recipes that are no-brainer things like smoothies, sides such as for example “roasted garlic”, or meta-ingredients such as oat flour (instructions: blend the oats and you get oat flour).

The other criticism is more subjective: if you are like this reviewer, you will want to add more seasonings than recommended to most of the recipes. But that’s easy enough to do.

As for the rest: this is a very healthy cookbook, and quite wide-ranging and versatile, with recipes that are homely, with a lot of emphasis on comfort foods (but still, healthy), though certainly some are perfectly worthy of entertaining too.

A nice bonus of this book is that it offers a lot of available substitutions (much like we do at 10almonds), and also ways of turning the recipe into something else entirely with just a small change. This trait more than makes up for the slight swindle in terms of number of recipes, since some of the recipes have bonus recipes snuck in.

Bottom line: if you’d like to broaden your plant-based cooking range, this book is a fine option for expanding your repertoire.

Click here to check out The Oh She Glows Cookbook, and indeed glow!

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Recommended

  • The Polyvagal Theory – by Dr. Stephen Porges
  • People on Ozempic may have fewer heart attacks, strokes and addictions – but more nausea, vomiting and stomach pain
    GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic may reduce heart attacks and strokes, but they also come with risks like gastrointestinal issues.

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  • The Gym For Your Mental Health

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    Getting The Most Out Of Therapy

    If you’ve never had therapy, what image do you have of it? Perhaps you imagine a bearded and bespectacled man in a suit, impassively making notes on a clipboard. Perhaps you imagine an empathetic woman, with tissues and camomile tea on standby.

    The reality is: the experience of therapy can vary, a lot.

    In its results, too! Sometimes we may try therapy and think “well that was a waste of time and money”. Sometimes we may try therapy and it’ll change our life.

    So… Is there any way to make it less of a lottery?

    First: knowledge is power

    And while the therapist-client relationship certainly shouldn’t be a power struggle, you do want to be empowered.

    So, read about different styles of therapy, and also, read some how-to guides for self-therapy. We’ve recommended some before in previous editions of 10almonds; you can check those books out here:

    This will serve two purposes:

    • You’ll know what to expect out of a therapist
    • You can more efficiently “get to work” in therapy

    It also, of course, could help you already, without even going to therapy!

    Second: begin with the end in mind

    A person who does not know what they want to get out of therapy, will likely not get much out of therapy. Or rather, their first task will be to figure that out. So, figure it out in advance, if you can.

    Maybe you have a problem that has a specific name, for example poor self-esteem, anxiety, stress, depression, trauma, neuroticism, phobia, etc.

    This isn’t Alcoholics Anonymous, and in this case you don’t want a lifetime of “Hello, my name is ______ and I have ______”, if you can help it.

    So, what do you want?

    • Maybe you want to be able to go to social events without feeling anxious
    • Maybe you want your relationship(s) to be more secure and fulfilling
    • Maybe you want to no longer have nightmares about that traumatic thing
    • Maybe you want to be able to greet each day’s tasks with confidence and without overwhelm

    …etc.

    A good therapist will help you to set such goals (if you haven’t already), and attain them.

    If you’re going the self-therapy route, then this is your job now!

    It will probably start with the question: imagine that everything currently troubling you is now healed.

    What would that look like, to you?

    Third: get a good match for you

    Unless you are going entirely the self-therapy route (which can work for some), you will want a therapist who’s a good match for you.

    It may take a degree of “suck it and see” trial runs before you find the right one, but that takes time and money, so you’ll want to streamline the process as much as you can. If you do this well, you may be able to find a good therapist for you first time.

    For this, personal recommendations (such as from friends) may help more than exmaining academic and institutional affiliations.

    Yes, you want a well-qualified therapist who is a member in good standing of a respectable regulated body… but whether your therapist is easy for you to “get on with” will matter at least as much as whether their approach is psychodynamic, or 4th wave CBT, or IFS, or whatever seems popular in your time and place.

    Bear in mind:

    • Some therapists are specialized in helping with some kinds of things and not others. It will obviously help if the therapist you choose is specialized in the thing you are seeking help for.
    • Some therapists may be able to relate to you better (or not), based on simple factors of who they are. To this end, while your therapist certainly doesn’t have to be a mirror image of you, factors like age, gender, race, etc can be relevant and may be worth considering, depending on what you are seeking help with, and what factors impact that thing.

    Prefer keeping things to yourself?

    Therapy isn’t for everyone, but having a good relationship with oneself definitely is. You might want to invest in one of the books whose reviews we linked above, and you might also get value from previous Psychology Sunday articles, which you can find in our archive (every seventh edition here has a Psychology Sunday main feature):

    Click Here To Check Out The 10almonds Archive

    To borrow the catchphrase of Dr. Kirk Honda (a therapist and therapy educator with decades of experience):

    ❝Take care of yourself, because you deserve it; you really, really do.❞

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  • Unlimited Memory – by Kevin Horsley

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    Premise: there are easily learnable techniques to rapidly (and greatly) improve one’s memory. We’ve touched on some of these methods before at 10almonds, but being a newsletter rather than a book, we’ve not been able to go as deeply into it as Horsley!

    Your memory is far, far, far more powerful than you might realize, and this book will help unlock that. To illustrate…

    Some of the book is given over to what are for most purposes “party tricks”, such as remembering pi to 10,000 places. Those things are fun, even if not as practical in today’s world of rarely needing to even know the actual digits of a phone number. However, they do also serve as a good example of just how much of “super memory” isn’t a matter of hard work, so much as being better organized about it.

    Most of the book is focused on practical methods to improve the useful aspects of memory—including common mistakes!

    If the book has any flaw it’s that the first chapter or so is spent persuading the reader of things we presumably already believe, given that we bought the book. For example, that remembering things is a learnable skill and that memory is functionally limitless. However, we still advise to not skip those chapters as they do contain some useful reframes as well.

    Bottom line: if you read this book you will be astonished by how much you just learned—because you’ll be able to recall whole sections in detail! And then you can go apply that whatever areas of your life you wanted to when you bought the book.

    Get your copy of Unlimited Memory from Amazon today!

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  • To Err Is Human; To Forgive, Healthy

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    How To Forgive (And Why)

    There’s an old saying that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. If only it were so simple and easy as just choosing to let go!

    But it’s not, is it?

    When people have wronged us and/or wronged our loved ones, it’s hard to forgive, especially if they have not changed. For that matter, it can be hard to forgive ourselves for mistakes that we made, too.

    Either way, “drinking that poison” can be close to literal, in terms of what harboring such anger and resentment can do for our cortisol levels.

    So, what to do about it?

    If you have a dialogue with the person, our previous article on communication may help a lot.

    If you don’t, there are various other angles that can be taken:

    The Unsent Letter

    You can even send it, if you like, but it’s not the point here. The idea is to write to the person, expressing your grievances. But, (as per the above-linked article on communication) try to focus at least as much on your feelings as their actions. “When you did/said x, I felt y”, etc.

    This is important for helping you process your feelings. If you send the letter, it’s also important for the other person to be able to understand your feelings.

    Sometimes, we feel the things we do so strongly because we don’t have an outlet for them. Pouring out our emotions in such a fashion, on the other hand, means (to labor the metaphor) they’re no longer bottled up. Even just in and of itself, that can provide us a lot of relief.

    And when we the negative emotions are no longer such high pressure, it can be easier to let go of them.

    Mindfulness

    Following on from the above idea, a good strategy can be simply sitting and feeling everything you need to feel, noticing it without judgement, like a curious observer.

    Sometimes what we need is just to be heard, and that starts with hearing ourselves.

    Compassion

    There’s a Buddhist exercise that involves actively feeling compassion for three people: a loved one, a stranger, and an enemy. Many people report that it’s actually harder to feel compassion for a random stranger, than an enemy. Why? Because we don’t know them; we don’t know what’s good and bad about them in our estimation.

    If you’re reading this because you want to be able to gain the peace of being able to forgive someone (even if that someone is yourself), then in at least some respect right now, that person is in the “enemy” category. So how do we unpack that?

    To err is human. Everybody screws up sometimes. And also, everyone has a reason (or a complex of reasons) for acting the way they do. This does not mean that those reasons excuse the behavior, but it can explain it.

    You don’t get angry at a storm for soaking you through. Even if you might not understand the physics of it in the way a meteorologist might, you understand that there were things that led to that, and you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    So why do we get angry at someone else for wronging us? Even if we might not understand the personal background of it in the way their psychologist or therapist might, we (hopefully) understand that there were things that caused them to be the way they were, and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    And ourselves? We probably know, when we made a mistake, why we made it. Maybe we were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Whatever it was, we did our best at the time and, apparently, our best wasn’t as good as we’d like.

    If we didn’t deserve forgiveness, we wouldn’t be critical of our past selves in the first place.

    And, the science is very clear that it’s important for our health for other reasons besides cortisol management, too.

    And as for others? They did the best they knew how. Maybe they were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Same story, different character.

    Remembering that can be key to “accepting the apology we never received”.

    Forgiving without forgetting

    Developing the ability to forgive is a useful tool for our own mental health. It doesn’t mean we must or even should make ourselves a doormat.

    “I forgive you” does not have to mean a clean slate; it means remembering that the thing happened, and just not holding on to the anger/resentment associated with it.

    It may be water under the bridge now, but it might have been a devastatingly destructive wave at the time, and continuing to acknowledge truth that is sensible. Just, from a position of peace now, hopefully.

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Related Posts

  • The Polyvagal Theory – by Dr. Stephen Porges
  • The Best Menopause Advice You Don’t Want To Hear About

    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.

    Nutritionist and perimenopause coach Claudia Canu, whom we’ve featured before in our Expert Insights segment, has advice:

    Here’s to good health

    When it comes to alcohol, the advice is: don’t.

    Or at least, cut back, and manage the effects by ensuring good hydration, having an “alcohol curfew” and so forth.

    What’s the relation to menopause? Well, alcohol’s not good for anyone at any time of life, but there are some special considerations when it comes to alcohol and estrogenic hormonal health:

    • The liver works hard to process the alcohol as a matter of urgency, delaying estrogen processing, which can increase the risk of breast and uterine cancer.
    • Alcohol has no positive health effects and is also linked to higher risks of breast and colorectal cancer.
    • Alcohol can also trigger some menopausal symptoms, such as night sweats and hot flashes. So, maybe reaching for that “cooling drink” isn’t the remedy it might seem.
    • During menopause, the body becomes more insulin-resistant, making it more susceptible to blood sugar spikes caused by alcohol. Also not good.

    Common reasons women turn to alcohol include stress, frustration, the need for reward, and social pressure, and all of these can be heightened when undergoing hormonal changes. Yet, alcohol will ultimately only worsen each of those things.

    For more on the science of some of the above, plus tips on how to make positive changes with minimum discomfort, enjoy:

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

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • The Sugar Alcohol That Reduces BMI!

    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.

    Inositol Does-It-Ol’!

    First things first, a quick clarification up-front:

    Myo-inositol or D-chiro-inositol?

    We’re going to be talking about inositol today, which comes in numerous forms, but most importantly:

    • Myo-inositol (myo-Ins)
    • D-chiro-inositol (D-chiro-Ins)

    These are both inositol, (a sugar alcohol!) and for our purposes today, the most relevant form is myo-inositol.

    The studies we’ll look at today are either:

    • just about myo-inositol, or
    • about myo-inositol in the presence of d-chiro-inositol at a 40:1 ratio.

    You have both in your body naturally; wherever supplementation is mentioned, it means supplementing with either:

    • extra myo-inositol (because that’s the one the body more often needs more of), or
    • both, at the 40:1 ratio that we mentioned above (because that’s one way to help balance an imbalanced ratio)

    With that in mind…

    Inositol against diabetes?

    Inositol is known to:

    • decrease insulin resistance
    • increase insulin sensitivity
    • have an important role in cell signaling
    • have an important role in metabolism

    The first two things there both mean that inositol is good against diabetes. It’s not “take this and you’re cured”, but:

    • if you’re pre-diabetic it may help you avoid type 2 diabetes
    • if you are diabetic (either type) it can help in the management of your diabetes.

    It does this by allowing your body to make better use of insulin (regardless of whether that insulin is from your pancreas or from the pharmacy).

    How does it do that? Research is still underway and there’s a lot we don’t know yet, but here’s one way, for example:

    ❝Evidence showed that inositol phosphates might enhance the browning of white adipocytes and directly improve insulin sensitivity through adipocytes❞

    Read: Role of Inositols and Inositol Phosphates in Energy Metabolism

    We mentioned its role in metabolism in a bullet-point above, and we didn’t just mean insulin sensitivity! There’s also…

    Inositol for thyroid function?

    The thyroid is one of the largest endocrine glands in the body, and it controls how quickly the body burns energy, makes proteins, and how sensitive the body should be to other hormones. So, it working correctly or not can have a big impact on everything from your mood to your weight to your energy levels.

    How does inositol affect thyroid function?

    • Inositol has an important role in thyroid function and dealing with autoimmune diseases.
    • Inositol is essential to produce H2O2 (yes, really) required for the synthesis of thyroid hormones.
    • Depletion of inositol may lead to the development of some thyroid diseases, such as hypothyroidism.
    • Inositol supplementation seems to help in the management of thyroid diseases.

    Read: The Role of Inositol in Thyroid Physiology and in Subclinical Hypothyroidism Management

    Inositol for PCOS?

    A systematic review published in the Journal of Gynecological Endocrinology noted:

    • Inositol can restore spontaneous ovarian activity (and consequently fertility) in most patients with PCOS.
    • Myo-inositol is a safe and effective treatment to improve:
      • ovarian function
      • healthy metabolism
      • healthy hormonal balance

    While very comprehensive (which is why we included it here), that review’s a little old, so…

    Check out this cutting edge (Jan 2023) study whose title says it all:

    Inositol is an effective and safe treatment in polycystic ovary syndrome: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

    Inositol for fertility?

    Just last year, Mendoza et al published that inositol supplementation, together with antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, could be an optimal strategy to improve female fertility.

    This built from Gambiole and Forte’s work, which laid out how inositol is a safe compound for many issues related to fertility and pregnancy. In particular, several clinical trials demonstrated that:

    • inositol can have therapeutic effects in infertile women
    • inositol can also be useful as a preventive treatment during pregnancy
    • inositol could prevent the onset of neural tube defects
    • inositol also reduces the occurrence of gestational diabetes

    Due to the safety and efficiency of inositol, it can take the place of many drugs that are contraindicated in pregnancy. Basically: take this, and you’ll need fewer other drugs. Always a win!

    Read: Myo-Inositol as a Key Supporter of Fertility and Physiological Gestation

    Inositol For Weight Loss

    We promised you “this alcohol sugar can reduce your BMI”, and we weren’t making it up!

    Zarezadeh et al conducited a very extensive systematic review, and found:

    • Oral inositol supplementation has positive effect on BMI reduction.
    • Inositol in the form of myo-inositol had the strongest effect on BMI reduction.
    • Participants with PCOS and/or who were overweight, experienced the most significant improvement of all.

    Want some inositol?

    As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, here’s myo-inositol and d-chiro-inositol at a 40:1 ratio, available on Amazon!

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  • Young Mind Young Body – by Sue Ziang

    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.

    This is a very “healthy mind in a healthy body” book, consistent with the author’s status as a holistic health coach. Sometimes that produces a bit of a catch-22 regarding where to start, but for Ziang, the clear answer is to start with the mind, and specifically, one’s perception of one’s own age.

    She advocates for building a young mind in a young body, and yes, that’s mind-building much like body-building. This does not mean any kind of wilful self-delusion, but rather, choosing the things that we do get to choose along the way.

    The bridge between mind and body, for Ziang, is meditation—which is reasonable, as it’s very much mind-stuff and also very much neurological and has a very real-world impact on the body’s broader health, even simply by such mechanisms as changing breathing, heart rate, neurotransmitter levels, endocrine functions, and the like.

    When it comes to the more physical aspects of health, her dietary advice is completely in line with what we write here at 10almonds. Hydrate well, eat more plants, especially beans and greens and whole grains, get good fats in, enjoy spices, practice mindful eating, skip the refined carbohydrates, be mindful of bio-individuality (e.g. one’s own personal dietary quirks that stem from physiology; some of us react differently to this kind of food or that for genetic reasons, and that’s not something to be overlooked).

    In the category of exercise, she’s simply about moving more, which while not comprehensive, is not bad advice either.

    Bottom line: if you’re looking for an “in” to holistic health and wondering where to start, this book is a fine and very readable option.

    Click here to check out “Young Mind Young Body”, and transform yours!

    Don’t Forget…

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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