Beat The Heat, With Fat

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

In A Rush?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• The summer heat can be a challenge for everyone, but extra challenges arise for anyone who’s not the medical default: a slim and/or athletic cis white man aged 25–35 with no disabilities.

  • Today’s main feature looks at how to keep cool while fat, and/or having sweat-trapping folds (underboob counts!), as well as the different hydration rules that can apply (because the usual advice was based on an average person in an average climate increasingly long ago).

• Good quality sleep is one of the top few things for good health, yet it’s often the one we most easily neglect.

  • Today’s sponsor Cozy Earth is offering temperature-regulating bamboo sheets guaranteed to keep you cool on even the warmest summer nights (literally, they have a 100-night risk-free trial to guarantee it)

• Today’s featured recipe is a shchi with possibly the most nutrients we’ve had in one dish so far, and guess what, all those nutrients are tasty. Try it once, love it forever.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

4 Tips To Stand Without Using Hands

The “sit-stand” test, getting up off the floor without using one’s hands, is well-recognized as a good indicator of healthy aging, and predictor of longevity. If you can’t easily do it already, these tips may help you, and if you can, they may help you keep any wobbling at bay:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Saturday’s Life Hacks

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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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between chia seeds and flax seeds—we picked the chia seeds (click here to read about why), as did 56% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

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Recipes Worth Sharing

Super-Nutritious Shchi

Today’s dish isn’t the prettiest, but it’s a wonderful comfort food and incredibly tasty (it’s famous for being something one can eat many days on end without getting sick of it), and that’s before mentioning that it has an amazing nutritional profile, with vitamins A, B, C, D, as well as lots of calcium, magnesium, and iron (amongst other minerals), and a healthy blend of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, plus an array of anti-inflammatory phytochemicals!

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

Treat Your Own Knee – by Robert McKenzie

He’s a physiotherapist not a doctor, but with 40 years of practice to his name and 33 letters after his name (CNZM OBE FCSP (Hon) FNZSP (Hon) Dip MDT Dip MT), he seems to know his stuff.

The book covers recognizing the difference between arthritis, degeneration, or normal wear and tear, before narrowing down what your actual problem is and what can be done about it.

While there are many possible causes of knee pain (and by causes, we mean the first-level cause, such as “bad posture” or “old sports injury” or “inflammatory diet” or “repetitive strain” etc, not second-level causes that are also symptoms, like inflammation), McKenzie’s approach involves customizing his system to your body’s specific problems and needs. That’s what most of the book is about.

The style is direct and to-the-point; there’s no sensationalization here nor a feel of being sold anything. There’s lots of science scattered throughout, but all with the intent of enabling the reader to understand what’s going on with the problems, processes, and solutions, and why/how the things that work, work. Where there are exercises offered they are clearly-described and well-illustrated.

Bottom line: this is not a fancy book but it is an effective one. If you have knee pain, this is a very worthwhile one to read.

Click here to check out Treat Your Own Knee, and treat your own knee!

PS: if you have musculoskeletal problems elsewhere in your body, you might want to check out the rest of his body parts series (back, hip, neck, wrist, ankle, etc) for the one that’s tailored to your specific problem.

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a wonderfully restorative weekend,

The 10almonds Team