New Year, New Health Habits?

Happy Friday👋 

❝Health is not simply the absence of sickness❞ ~ Hannah Green

In today’s email we cover the week’s health news, VO2 Max, and gentle nutrition.

Learning a foreign language has a lot of cognitive benefits, but often the trickiest thing is getting conversation practice. Today’s sponsor Babbel is offering 10almonds readers a 67% discount on its language learning package that includes lessons, games, podcasts, and even an AI conversation partner. Check it out!

Recommended Reading

Watch and Learn

53 Studies Later: The Best Way To Improve VO2 Max

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

This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between dates and prunes—both very respectable options, but we picked the prunes (click here to read about why), as did 45% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

Meal planning makes life easier—and you deserve that! Knowing what’s for dinner every night can feel like a small victory in a chaotic week. With Plan to Eat, you can streamline your meal planning, feel prepared, and it only takes a few minutes!

One-Minute Book Review

Gentle Nutrition: A Non-Diet Approach to Healthy Eating – by Rachel Hartley, RD, LD

The subtitle here claims “a non-diet approach”, but doesn’t everything, nowadays? Even books titled “The such-and-such Diet” tend to also assure us “it’s not actually a diet; it’s just a way of eating”, as if a diet is not—by definition—a way of eating. Usually what they want to communicate is that it’s not a restrictive diet, usually meaning not restrictive in quantity, or not restrictive in food type (rarely both).

This book is about intuitive eating, which is about as non-restrictive as any dietary approach can be, since it doesn’t restrict food type at at all, and it doesn’t restrict quantity in advance—rather, we learn to pay closer attention to our full signals.

No wait, we don’t. This time, it’s not about “full”, it’s about “satisfied”. This comes in two forms:

1. A principle somewhat akin to the “eat until 80% full” idea

2. A principle of ensuring the good is culinarily satisfying

This latter is important, if we want to have a good relationship with eating, and it also helps reduce portion sizes, when we truly take the time to mindfully savor a tasty morsel, rather than wolf down a plate of mediocre food.

The style is one that balance being encouraging with delivering science to back up that encouragement. This not only means encouragement to take up this dietary approach, but also, encouragement to let go of things like calorie-counting and BMI.

The recipes arranged per meal type, and indeed include things not found in many healthy eating books, such as gyoza dumplings, gnocchi, wontons, and shortbread. The recipes are mostly not, by default, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, or such. So if you have your own food restriction(s), the number of usable recipes will be diminished, barring any substitutions you can make yourself.

Bottom line: this is more about about how to go about intuitive eating, than it is a book with a lot of nutritional information (though there is some of that too). If you’d like to get going with intuitive eating, then this book can help.

Click here to check out Gentle Nutrition, and nourish gently!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

May today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,

The 10almonds Team