This Book May Save Your Life – by Dr. Karan Rajan
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The title is a bold sell, but the book does include a lot of information about what can go wrong in your body, and how those things can be avoided.
What it’s not: a reiteration of Dr. Michael Greger’s “How Not To Die“. It’s not dense medical information, and it doesn’t cite papers at a rate of ten per page.
What it is: an easy-reading tour guide of the human body and its many quirks and foibles, and how we can leverage those to our benefit. On which note…
Hopefully, your insides will never see the light of day, but this author is a general surgeon and as such, is an experienced and well-qualified tour guide. Here, we learn about everything from the long and interesting journey through our gut, to the unique anatomical features and liabilities of the brain. From the bizarre oddities of the genitals, to things most people don’t know about the process of death.
The style of the book is very casual, with lots of short sections (almost mini chapters-within-chapters, really) making for very light reading—and certainly enjoyable reading too, unless you are inclined to squeamishness.
Bottom line: in honesty, the book is more informative than it is instructional, though it does contain the promised health tips too. With that in mind, it’s a very enjoyable and educational read, and we do recommend it.
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PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.
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PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here
Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there’s only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.
So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?
- A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained
- The body keeps the score… And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don’t really add up, or an aversion to being touched.
- Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties
- Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.
- We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.
- We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it’s there. We’re angry at the world and at ourselves.
- We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we’re already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.
- “Hell is other people” has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.
- We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.
- In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that’s great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.
“Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?”
A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you’ve accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.
It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family… and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn’t either.
Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.
If you’d like some help with that, here are some resources:
ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)
CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)
Some final words about healing…
- You are in fact amazing,
- You can do it, and
- You deserve it.
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The Brain-Skin Doctor
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Of Brains And Breakouts
Today’s spotlight is on Dr. Claudia Aguirre. She’s a molecular neuroscientist, and today she’s going to be educating us about skin.
What? Why?
When we say “neuroscience”, we generally think of the brain. And indeed, that’s a very important part of it.
We might think about eyes, which are basically an extension of the brain.
We don’t usually think about skin, which (just like our eyes) is constantly feeding us a lot of information about our surroundings, via a little under three million nerve endings. Guess where the other ends of those nerves lead!
There’s a constant two-way communication going on between our brain and our skin.
What does she want us to know?
Psychodermatology
The brain and the skin talk to each other, and maladies of one can impact the other:
- Directly, e.g. stress prompting skin breakouts (actually this is a several-step process physiologically, but for the sake of brevity we’ll call this direct)
- Indirectly, e.g. nervous disorders that result in people scratching or picking at their skin, which prompts a whole vicious cycle of one thing making the other worse
Read more: Psychodermatology: The Brain-Skin Connection
To address both kinds of problems, clearly something beyond moisturizer is needed!
Mindfulness (meditation and beyond)
Mindfulness is a well-evidenced healthful practice for many reasons, and Dr. Aguirra argues the case for it being good for our skin too.
As she points out,
❝Cultural stress and anxiety can trigger or aggravate many skin conditions—from acne to eczema to herpes, psoriasis, and rosacea.
Conversely, a disfiguring skin condition can trigger stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
Chronic, generalized anxiety can create chronic inflammation and exacerbate inflammatory skin conditions, such as those I mentioned previously.
Chronic stress can result in chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, poor sleep, and a whole cascade of effects resulting in a constant breakdown of tissues and organs, including the skin.❞
So, she recommends mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), for the above reasons, along with others!
Read more: Mind Matters
How to do it: No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
And as for “and beyond?”
Do you remember in the beginning of the pandemic, when people were briefly much more consciously trying to avoid touching their faces so much? That, too, is mindfulness. It may have been a stressed and anxious mindfulness for many*, but mindfulness nonetheless.
*which is why “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily, one time after another 😉
So: do try to keep aware of what you are doing to your skin, and so far as is reasonably practicable, only do the things that are good for it!
The skin as an endocrine organ
Nerves are not the only messengers in the body; hormones do a lot of our body’s internal communication too. And not just the ones everyone remembers are hormones (e.g. estrogen, testosterone, although yes, they do both have a big impact on skin too), but also many more, including some made in the skin itself!
Dr. Aguirra gives us a rundown of common conditions, the hormones behind them, and what we can do if we don’t want them:
Read more: Rethinking The Skin As An Endocrine Organ
Take-away advice:
For healthy skin, we need to do more than just hydrate, get good sleep, have good nutrition, and get a little sun (but not too much).
- We should also practice mindfulness-based stress reduction, and seek help for more serious mental health issues.
- We should also remember the part our hormones play in our skin, and not just the obvious ones.
Did you know that vitamin D is also a hormone, by the way? It’s not the only hormone at play in your skin by a long way, but it is an important one:
Society for Endocrinology | Vitamin D
Want to know more?
You might like this interview with Dr. Aguirre:
The Brain in Our Skin: An Interview with Dr. Claudia Aguirre
Take care!
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The Distracted Mind – by Dr. Adam Gazzaley and Dr. Larry Rosen
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Yes, yes, we know, unplug once in a while. But what else do this highly-qualified pair of neuroscientists have to offer?
Rather than being a book for the sake of being a book, with lots of fluff and the usual advice about single-tasking, the authors start with a reframe:
Neurologically speaking, the hit of dopamine we get when looking for information is the exact same as the hit of dopamine that we, a couple of hundred thousand years ago, got when looking for nuts and berries.
- When we don’t find them, we become stressed, and search more.
- When we do find them, we are encouraged and search more nearby, and to the other side of nearby, and near around, to find more.
But in the case of information (be it useful information or celebrity gossip or anything in between), the Internet means that’s always available now.
So, we jitter around like squirrels, hopping from one to the next to the next.
A strength of this book is where it goes from there. Specifically, what evidence-based practices will actually keep our squirrel-brain focused… and which are wishful thinking for anyone who lives in this century.
Bringing original research from their own labs, as well as studies taken from elsewhere, the authors present a science-based toolkit of genuinely useful resources for actual focus.
Bottom line: if you think you could really optimize your life if you could just get on track and stay on track, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out The Distracted Mind, and get yours to focus!
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Build Muscle (Healthily!)
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What Do You Have To Gain?
We have previously promised a three-part series about changing one’s weight:
- Losing weight (specifically, losing fat)
- Gaining weight (specifically, gaining muscle)
- Gaining weight (specifically, gaining fat)
And yes, that last one is also something that some people want/need to do (healthily!), and want/need help with that.
There will be, however, no need for a “losing muscle” article, because (even though sometimes a person might have some reason to want to do this), it’s really just a case of “those things we said for gaining muscle? Don’t do those and the muscle will atrophy naturally”.
Here’s the first part: How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
While some people will want to lose fat, please do be aware that the association between weight loss and good health is not nearly so strong as the weight loss industry would have you believe:
And, while BMI is not a useful measure of health in general, it’s worth noting that over the age of 65, a BMI of 27 (which is in the high end of “overweight”, without being obese) is associated with the lowest all-cause mortality:
BMI and all-cause mortality in older adults: a meta-analysis
Body weight, muscle mass, and protein:
That BMI of 27, or whatever weight you might wish to be, ignores body composition. You’re probably aware that volume-for-volume, muscle weighs more than fat.
You’re also probably aware that if we’re not careful, we tend to lose muscle as we get older. This is known as age-related sarcopenia:
Protein, & Fighting Sarcopenia
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, our featured expert in the above article, recommends getting at least 1.6g of protein per kg of body weight per day (Americans, divide your weight in pounds by 2.2 to get your weight in kg).
So for example, if you weigh 165lb, that’s 75kg, that’s 1.6×75=120g of protein per day.
There is an upper limit to how much protein per day is healthy, and that limit is probably around 2g of protein per kg of body weight per day:
Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?
You may be wondering: should we go for animal or plant protein? In which case, the short version is:
- If you only care about muscle growth, any complete sources of protein are fine
- If you care about your general health too, then avoiding red meat is best, but other common protein sources are all fine
- Unprocessed is (unsurprisingly) better than processed in either case
Longer version: Plant vs Animal Protein: Head to Head
What exercises are best for muscle-building?
Of course, different muscles require different exercises, but for all of them, resistance training is what builds muscle the most, and it’s pretty much impossible to build a lot of muscle otherwise.
Check out: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
Prepare to fail!
No, really, prepare to fail. Because while resistance training in general is good for maintaining strong muscles and bones, you will only gain muscle if your current muscle is not enough to do the exercise:
- If you do a heavy resistance exercise without undue difficulty, your muscles will say to each other “Good job, team! That was hard, but luckily we were strong enough; no changes necessary”.
- If you do a heavy resistance exercise to the point where you can no longer do it (called: training to failure), then your muscles will say to each other “Oof, what a task! What we’ve got here is clearly not enough, so we’ll have to add more muscle for next time”.
Safety note: training to failure comes with safety risks. If using free weights or weight machines, please do so under well-trained supervision. If doing it with bodyweight (e.g. press-ups until you can press no more) or resistance bands, please check with your doctor first to ensure this is safe for you.
You can also increase the effectiveness of your resistance training by doing it in a way that “confuses” your muscles, making it harder for them to adapt in the moment, and thus forcing them to adapt more in the long term (e.g. get bigger and stronger):
HIIT, But Make It HIRT: High Intensity Resistance Training
Make time for recovery
While many kinds of exercise can be done daily, exercise to build muscle(s) means at the very least resting that muscle (or muscle group) the next day.
For this reason, a lot of bodybuilders have for example a week’s schedule that might look like:
- Monday: Upper body training
- Wednesday: Lower body training
- Friday: Core strength training
…and rest on other days. This gives most muscles a full week of recovery, and every muscle at least 48 hours of recovery.
Note: bodybuilders, like children (who are also doing a lot of body-building, in their own way) need more sleep in order to allow for this recovery and growth to occur. Serious bodybuilders often aim for 12 hours sleep per day. This might be impractical, undesirable, or even impossible for some people, but it’s a factor to be borne in mind and not forgotten.
See also:
Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise (According To Actual Science)
Anything else that can (safely and healthily) be done to promote muscle growth?
There are a lot of supplements on the market; some are healthy and helpful, other not so much. Here are some we’ve written about:
- What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout
- Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People
- Ginseng: Exercising With Less Soreness!
- Taurine’s Benefits For Heart Health And More
- Topping Up Testosterone? What To Consider
Take care!
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How Your Sleep Position Changes Dementia Risk
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This is not just about sleep duration or even about sleep quality… It really is about which way your body is positioned.
Goodnight, glymphatic system
The association between sleeping position and dementia risk is about glymphatic drainage, which is largely powered by gravity (and thus dependent on which way around your head and neck are oriented), and very important for clearing toxins out of the brain—including beta-amyloid proteins.
This becomes particularly important when the glymphatic system becomes less efficient in midlife, often 15–20 years before cognitive decline symptoms appear.
The video’s thumbnail headline, “SCIENTISTS REVEAL: THE WAY YOUR SLEEP CAN CAUSE DEMENTIA” is overstated and inaccurate, but our adjusted headline “how your sleep position changes dementia risk” is actually representative of the paper on which this video was based; we’ll quote from the paper itself here:
❝This paper concludes that 1. glymphatic clearance plays a major role in Alzheimer’s pathology; 2. the vast majority of waste clearance occurs during sleep; 3. dementias are associated with sleep disruption, alongside an age-related decline in AQP4 polarization; and 4. lifestyle choices such as sleep position, alcohol intake, exercise, omega-3 consumption, intermittent fasting and chronic stress all modulate* glymphatic clearance. Lifestyle choices could therefore alter Alzheimer’s disease risk through improved glymphatic clearance, and could be used as a preventative lifestyle intervention for both healthy brain ageing and Alzheimer’s disease.❞
…and specifically, they found:
❝Glymphatic transport is most efficient in the right lateral sleeping position, with more CSF clearance occurring compared to supine and prone. The average person changes sleeping position 11 times per night, but there was no difference in the number of position changes between neurodegenerative and control groups, making the percentage of time spent in supine position the risk factor, not the number of position changes❞
Read the paper in full here: The Sleeping Brain: Harnessing the Power of the Glymphatic System through Lifestyle Choices
*saying “modulate” here is not as useful as it could be, because they modulate it differently: side-sleeping improves clearance; back sleeping decreases it; front-sleeping isn’t great either. Alcohol intake reduces clearance, exercise (especially cardiovascular exercise) improves it; omega-3 consumption improves it up a degree and does depend on omega-3/6 ratios, intermittent fasting improves it, and chronic stress worsens it.
And for a more pop-science presentation, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
Take care!
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Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It
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Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It
We’ve talked before about how waist circumference is a much more useful indicator of metabolic health than BMI.
So, let’s say you’ve a bit more around the middle than you’d like, but it stubbornly stays there. What’s going on underneath what you can see, why is it going on, and how can you get it to change?
What is visceral fat?
First, let’s talk about subcutaneous fat. That’s the fat directly under your skin. Women usually have more than men, and that’s perfectly healthy (up to a point); it’s supposed to be that way. We (women) will tend to accumulate this mostly in places such as our breasts, hips, and butt, and work outwards from there. Men will tend to put it on more to the belly and face.
Side-note: if you’re undergoing (untreated) menopause, the changes in your hormone levels will tend to result in more subcutaneous fat to the belly and face too. That’s normal, and/but normal is not always good, and treatment options are great (with hormone replacement therapy, HRT, topping the list).
Visceral fat (also called visceral adipose tissue), on the other hand, is the fat of the viscera—the internal organs of the abdomen.
So, this is fat that goes under your abdominal muscles—you can’t squeeze this (directly).
So what can we do?
Famously “you can’t do spot reduction” (lose fat from a particular part of your body by focusing exercises on that area), but that’s about subcutaneous fat. There are things you can do that will reduce your visceral fat in particular.
Some of these advices you may think “that’s just good advice for losing fat in general” and it is, yes. But these are things that have the biggest impact on visceral fat.
Cut alcohol use
This is the biggie. By numerous mechanisms, some of which we’ve talked about before, alcohol causes weight gain in general yes, but especially for visceral fat.
Get better sleep
You might think that hitting the gym is most important, but this one ranks higher. Yes, you can trim visceral fat without leaving your bed (and even without getting athletic in bed, for that matter). Not convinced?
- Here’s a study of 101 people looking at sleep quality and abdominal adiposity
- Oh, and here’s a meta-analysis with 56,000 people (finding the same thing), in case that one study didn’t convince you.
So, the verdict is clear: you snooze, you lose (visceral fat)!
Tweak your diet
You don’t have to do a complete overhaul (unless you want to), but a few changes can make a big difference, especially:
- Getting more fiber (this is the biggie when it comes to diet)
- Eating less sugar (not really a surprise, but relevant to mention)
- Eat whole foods (skip the highly processed stuff)
If you’d like to learn more and enjoy videos, here’s an informative one to get you going!
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