The Vagus Nerve’s Power for Weight Loss
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Dr. Arun Dhir is a university lecturer, a gastrointestinal surgeon, an author, and a yoga and meditation instructor, and he has this to say:
Gut feelings
The vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve, also known as “vagus” (“the wanderer”), because it travels from the brain to many other body parts, including the ears, throat, heart, respiratory system, gut, pancreas, liver, and reproductive system. It’s no surprise then, that it plays a key role in brain-gut communication and metabolism regulation.
The vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for rest, digestion, and counteracting the stress response. Most signals through the vagus nerve travel from the gut to the brain, though there is communication in both directions.
You may be beginning to see how this works and its implications for weight management: the vagus nerve senses metabolites from the liver, pancreas, and small intestine, and regulates insulin production by stimulating beta cells in the pancreas, which is important for avoiding/managing insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome in general.
Dr. Dhir cites a study in which vagus nerve stimulation (originally used for treating epilepsy and depression) was shown to cause unintentional weight loss (6-11%) in patients, revealing a link to weight management. Of course, that is quite a specific sample, so more research is needed to say for sure, but because the principle is very sound and the mechanism of action is clear, it’s not being viewed as a controversial conclusion.
As for how get these benefits, here are seven ways:
- Cold water on the face: submerge your face in cold water in the morning while holding water in your mouth, or cover your face with a cold wet washcloth (while holding your breath please; no need to waterboard yourself!), which activates the “mammalian dive response” in which your body activates the parasympathetic nervous system in order to remain calm and thus survive for longer underwater
- Alternate hot and cold showers: switch between hot and cold water during showers for 10-second intervals; this creates eustress and activates the process of hormesis, improving your overall stress management and reducing any chronic stress response you may otherwise have going on
- Humming and gargling: the vibrations in the throat stimulate the nearby vagus nerve
- Deep breathing (pranayama): yoga breathing exercises, especially combined with somatic exercises such as the sun salutation, can stimulate the vagus nerve
- Intermittent fasting: helps recalibrate the metabolism and indirectly improves vagus nerve function
- Massage and acupressure: stimulates lymphatic channels and the vagus nerve
- Long walks in nature (“forest bathing”): helps trigger relaxation in general
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:
The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)
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Overcoming Gravity – by Steven Low
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The author, a professional gymnast and coach with a background in the sciences, knows his stuff here. This is what it says on the tin: it’s rigorously systematic. It’s also the most science-based calisthenics book this reviewer has read to date.
If you just wanted to know how to do some exercises, then this book would be very much overkill, but if you want to be able to go from no knowledge to expert knowledge, then the nearly 600 pages of this weighty tome will do that for you.
This is a textbook, it’s a “the bible of…” style book, it’s the one that if you’re serious, will engage you thoroughly and enable you to craft the calisthenics-forged body you want, head to toe.
As if it weren’t already overdelivering, it also has plenty of information on injury avoidance (or injury/condition management if you have some existing injury or chronic condition), and building routines in a dynamic fashion that avoids becoming a grind, because it’s going from strength to strength while cycling through different body parts.
Bottom line: if you’d like to get serious about calisthenics, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Overcoming Gravity, and do just that!
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Scheduling Tips for Overrunning Tasks
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Your Questions, Our Answers!
Q: Often I schedule time for things, but the task takes longer than I think, or multiplies while I’m doing it, and then my schedule gets thrown out. Any ideas?
A: A relatable struggle! Happily, there are remedies:
- Does the task really absolutely need to be finished today? If not, just continue it in scheduled timeslots until it’s completed.
- Some tasks do indeed need to be finished today (hi, writer of a daily newsletter here!), so it can be useful to have an idea of how long things really take, in advance. While new tasks can catch us unawares, recurring or similar-to-previous tasks can be estimated based on how long they took previously. For this reason, we recommend doing a time audit every now and again, to see how you really use your time.
- A great resource that you should include in your schedule is a “spare” timeslot, ideally at least one per day. Call it a “buffer” or a “backup” or whatever (in my schedule it’s labelled “discretionary”), but the basic idea is that it’s a scheduled timeslot with nothing scheduled in it, and it works as an “overflow” catch-all.
Additionally:
- You can usually cut down the time it takes you to do tasks by setting “Deep Work” rules for yourself. For example: cut out distractions, single-task, work in for example 25-minute bursts with 5-minute breaks, etc
- You can also usually cut down the time it takes you to do tasks by making sure you’re prepared for them. Not just task-specific preparation, either! A clear head on, plenty of energy, the resources you’ll need (including refreshments!) to hand, etc can make a huge difference to efficiency.
See Also: Time Optimism and the Planning Fallacy
Do you have a question you’d like to see answered here? Hit reply or use the feedback widget at the bottom; we’d love to hear from you!
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Early Dementia Screening From Your Blood & More
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Dementia is, statistically speaking, the most feared disease in the US. Notwithstanding…
- heart disease killing more
- COVID being more of a lottery
- cancer being the “yes you can modify risk factors but it can come for anyone” life-changing (and often life-ending) disease,
…it’s still dementia that Americans report fearing the most.
And yet… Early dementia screening is seriously underused
It may be a case of a head-in-sand approach to avoid unwanted news, or it could be a case of not knowing what’s available.
So, with that in mind…
How to watch out: first line warning signs
You walk into a room of your house, and suddenly stop: “what did I come in here for?”, you wonder.
A moment later, you’re worrying whether this is a sign of age-related cognitive decline.
The good news: it usually isn’t. In fact, you did that when you were younger, too, you just didn’t pay enough attention at the time to remember it now.
Dementia-related memory loss is less “where did I put my car keys?”, and more “what is this thing for?” (it’s your car keys). Or at a less advanced stage: “whose are these car keys?” (they are yours).
You can read about some of the nuances here:
Is It Dementia? Spot The Signs (Because None Of Us Are Immune) ← If you’d like an objective test of memory and other cognitive impairments, this article also has a link to the industry’s gold standard test (it’s free)
(The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is designed to detect early signs of cognitive, memory or thinking impairments)
Tests you can’t do at home
We wrote a little while back about how one kind of blood testing for Alzheimer’s disease works:
The Brain Alarm Signs That Warn Of Dementia
Why “Brain Alarm Signs” if it’s a blood test? Because the blood gets (in very lay terms) bits of broken brain in it. Or more specifically, they tested the blood for density of cerebrovascular endothelial extracellular vesicles (CEEVs), which are bits of the cells from the lining of blood vessels in the brain. These cerebrovascular endothelial extracellular vesicles should not, ideally, be falling off and riding around your bloodstream, and the greater the density of them, the greater likelihood of mild cognitive impairment now, and by extension, dementia later.
It’s not the only blood test available though, see:
Highly accurate blood test for Alzheimer’s disease is similar or superior to clinical cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) tests ← this one checks the ratio of phosporylated-tau217 to non-phosphorylated tau (which is a protein antibody), which equalled or outperformed FDA-approved CSF tests in classifying amyloid-β positron emission topography (PET, as in a PET scan) status, with a confidence interval as high as, or better than, industry standards.
If you don’t like having your blood taken, trust us that you’d find having your cerebrospinal fluid taken even less enjoyable, so this is a very welcome improvement!
In case you’re curious about how the CSF test works, here you go: NPTX2 in Cerebrospinal Fluid Predicts the Progression From Normal Cognition to Mild Cognitive Impairment ← NPTX2 is a protein biomarker of Alzheimer’s risk
…but again, we really think the blood test is preferable.
Tests beyond the physiological
There are, of course, psychological tests that can be done, including a linguistic analysis of your conversation, compared with a vast database of other people’s conversations, with and without various degrees of cognitive impairment
As Dr. Ioannis Paschalidis explains:
❝We wanted to predict what would happen in the next six years—and we found we can reasonably make that prediction with relatively good confidence and accuracy.
Rather than using acoustic features of speech, like enunciation or speed, the model is just pulling from the content of the interview—the words spoken, how they’re structured.
You can think of the score as the likelihood, the probability, that someone will remain stable or transition to dementia. It had significant predictive ability.
Digital is the new blood. You can collect it, analyze it for what is known today, store it, and reanalyze it for whatever new emerges tomorrow.❞
You can read the full paper here: Prediction of Alzheimer’s disease progression within 6 years using speech: A novel approach leveraging language models
See also: AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?
What if the news isn’t good?
While bad news is never welcome per se, it is preferable to not knowing, insofar as we can then take steps to manage the situation.
You may be wondering: what can be done that I wouldn’t already be doing to minimize my dementia risk in the first place?
And the answer is: yes, do continue those things of course, but there is more to do:
See: Beyond Guarding Against Dementia: When Age’s Brain-Changes Come Knocking
Take care!
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How To Stay A Step Ahead Of Peripheral Artery Disease
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Far less well-known than Coronary Artery Disease, it can still result in loss of life and limb (not in that order). Fortunately, there are ways to be on your guard:
What it is
Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) is the same thing as Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), just, in the periphery—which by definition means “outside of the heart and brain”, but in practice, it starts with the extremities. And of the extremities, it tends to start with the feet and legs, for the simple reason that if someone’s circulation is sluggish, then because of gravity, that’s where’s going to get blocked first.
In both CAD and PAD, the usual root cause is atherosclerosis, that is to say, the build-up of fatty material inside the arteries, usually commensurate to LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, especially in men (high LDL is still a predictor of cardiovascular disease in women though, just more modestly so, at least pre-menopause or in cases of treated menopause whereby HRT has returned hormones to pre-menopause levels).
See also: Demystifying Cholesterol
And for that about sex differences: His & Hers: The Hidden Complexities of Statins and Cardiovascular Disease (CVD)
Why it is
This one’s straightforward, as it’s the same things as any kind of cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, older age, obesity, smoking, drinking, diabetes, and genetic factors (so, a risk factor is: family history of heart disease).
However, while those are the main causes and/or risk factors, it absolutely can still strike other people, so it’s as well to be watch out for…
What to look out for
Many people first notice signs and symptoms that turn out to be PAD when they experience pain or numbness in the foot or feet, and/or a discoloration of the feet (especially toes), and slow wound healing.
At that stage, chances are you will need to go urgently to a specialist, and surgery is a likely necessity. With a little luck, it’ll be a minimally-invasive surgery to unblock an artery; failing that, an amputation will be in order.
At that stage, under 50% will be alive 5 years from diagnosis:
You probably want to avoid those. Good news is, you can, by catching it earlier!
What to look out for before that
The most common test for PAD is one you can do at home, but enlisting a nurse to do it for you will help ensure accurate readings. It’s called the Ankle-Brachial Index (ABI) test, and it involves comparing the blood pressure in your ankle with the blood pressure in your arm, and expressing them as a ratio.
Here’s how to do it (instructions and a video demonstration if you want it):
Do Try This At Home: ABI Test For Clogged Arteries
If you need a blood pressure monitor, by the way, here’s an example product on Amazon.
- A healthy ABI score is between 1.0 and 1.4; anything outside this range may indicate arterial problems.
- Low ABI scores (below 0.8) suggest plaque is likely obstructing blood flow
- High ABI scores (above 1.4) may indicate artery hardening
Do note also that yes, if you have plaque obstructing blood flow and hardened arteries, your scores may cancel out and give you a “healthy” score, despite your arteries being very much not healthy.
For this reason, this test can be used to raise the alarm, but not to give the “all clear”.
There are other tests that clinicians can do for you, but you can’t do at home unless you have an MRI machine, a CT scanner, an x-ray machine, a doppler-and-ultrasound machine, etc. We’ll not go into those in detail here, but ask your doctor about them if you’re concerned.
What to do about it
In the mid-to-late stages of the disease, the options are medication and surgery, respectively, but your doctor will advise about those in that eventuality.
In the early stages of the disease, the first-line recommend treatment is exercise, of which, especially walking:
Lower Extremity Peripheral Artery Disease: Diagnosis and Treatment
Given that this more often happens when someone hasn’t been walking so much, it can be a walk-rest-walk approach at first (a treadmill on a low setting can be very useful for this):
See also: Exercise Comparison Head-to-Head: Treadmill vs Road
Take care!
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Balanced Energy Cake Bars
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Unlike a lot of commercially available products, these bars won’t spike your blood sugars in the same way. There’s technically plenty of sugar in them, mostly from the chopped dates, but they’re also full of fiber, protein, and healthy fats. This means they can give you an energy boost (along with lots of gut-healthy, heart-healthy, and brain-healthy ingredients) without any crash later. They’re also delicious, and make for a great afternoon snack!
You will need
- 1 cup oats
- 15 Medjool dates, pitted and soaked in hot water for 15 minutes
- 3 carrots, grated
- 4oz almond butter
- 2 tbsp tahini
- 2 tbsp flaxseeds, milled
- 1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
- Optional: your choice of dried fruit and/or chopped nuts (mix it up; diversity is good!)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Steam the grated carrots for 3–4 minutes; pat dry and allow to cool
2) Drain and pat dry the dates, roughly chop them and add them to a bowl with the carrots. Because we chopped the dates rather than blended them (as many recipes do), they keep their fiber, which is important.
3) Add the oats, seeds, almond butter, and tahini. Also add in any additional dried fruit and/or chopped nuts you selected for the optional part. Mix well; the mixture should be quite firm. If it isn’t, add more oats.
4) Press the mixture into a 10″ square baking tin lined with baking paper. Refrigerate for a few hours, before cutting into bar shapes (or squares if you prefer). These can now be eaten immediately or stored for up to a week.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
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Procrastination, and how to pay off the to-do list debt
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Procrastination, and how pay off the to-do list debt
Sometimes we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the mountain of things we are supposed to be doing. If you look at your to-do list and it shows 60 overdue items, it’s little wonder if you want to bury your head in the sand!
“What difference does it make if I do one of these things now; I will still have 59 which feels as bad as having 60”
So, treat it like you might a financial debt, and make a repayment plan. Now, instead of 60 overdue items today, you have 1/day for the next 60 days, or 2/day for the next 30 days, or 3/day for the next 20 days, etc. Obviously, you may need to work out whether some are greater temporal priorities and if so, bump those to the top of the list. But don’t sweat the minutiae; your list doesn’t have to be perfectly ordered, just broadly have more urgent things to the top and less urgent things to the bottom.
Note: this repayment plan means having set repayment dates.
Up front, sit down and assign each item a specific calendar date on which you will do that thing.
This is not a deadline! It is your schedule. You’ll not try to do it sooner, and you won’t postpone it for later. You will just do that item on that date.
A productivity app like ToDoist can help with this, but paper is fine too.
What’s important here, psychologically, is that each day you’re looking not at 60 things and doing the top item; you’re just looking at today’s item (only!) and doing it.
Debt Reduction/Cancellation
Much like you might manage a financial debt, you can also look to see if any of your debts could be reduced or cancelled.
We wrote previously about the “Getting Things Done” system. It’s a very good system if you want to do that; if not, no worries, but you might at least want to borrow this one idea….
Sort your items into:
Do / Defer / Delegate / Ditch
- Do: if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it now.
- Defer: defer the item to a specific calendar date (per the repayment plan idea we just talked about)
- Delegate: could this item be done by someone else? Get it off your plate if you reasonably can.
- Ditch: sometimes, it’s ok to realize “you know what, this isn’t that important to me anymore” and scratch it from the list.
As a last resort, consider declaring bankruptcy
Towards the end of the dot-com boom, there was a fellow who unintentionally got his 5 minutes of viral fame for “declaring email bankruptcy”.
Basically, he publicly declared that his email backlog had got so far out of hand that he would now not reply to emails from before the declaration.
He pledged to keep on top of new emails only from that point onwards; a fresh start.
We can’t comment on whether he then did, but if you need a fresh start, that can be one way to get it!
In closing…
Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness, it’s usually a matter of overwhelm. Hopefully the above approach will help reframe things, and make things more manageable.
Sometimes procrastination is a matter of perfectionism, and not starting on tasks because we worry we won’t do them well enough, and so we get stuck in a pseudo-preparation rut. If that’s the case, our previous main feature on perfectionism may help:
Don’t Forget…
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