Category Archives: Health & wellbeing

Melting pot: 17 delicious, warming stews – from a Moroccan fish dish to Persian lamb

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Popular all over the world, stew is always a comfort, whether it comes as a Lancashire hotpot, French daube or a summery mix of courgette, mint and butter beans

Stew doesn’t have a poor reputation so much as bad branding. The name itself has an aura of disappointment about it, especially the way my children repeated it back to me, after they asked what we were having and I told them. “Stew!” they would say, with heavy emphasis on the “Ew!” It probably doesn’t help that “stew” shares an etymological source with the word typhus.

It is perhaps for that reason that we are often drawn to more exotic names for what is essentially the same idea: tagine, ragout, daube. But a basic, unfussy, slow-cooked stew can rival any of these, as Felicity Cloake’s perfect beef stew demonstrates. As with most beef stew recipes, this one begins with browning the meat on all sides, in batches, and then removing it before adding anything else.

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Kate Humble on walking – and how to improve it: ‘The rhythm is really good for your brain’

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The TV presenter thinks our newfound love of walking will persist after lockdown. She talks about hiking around Britain’s coast, the joy of newborn lambs and the true meaning of liberation

It is a rare day that Kate Humble doesn’t get up and get outside, walking out from her farm in the Monmouthshire countryside. “I want to be outside for the first hour or two of the day: no phone, no distractions. I’m sure we all wake up with a million things going on in our heads, all these disjointed thoughts, worries and anxieties. For me, that part of the day, when all I have to think about is one foot going in front of the other and not falling over, creates a headspace that allows all my thoughts to settle in a way that feels much more manageable.”

Humble is a walker – she wrote a 2018 book on the subject, and is presenting a new TV series on it – but the last year has turned many of us into walkers, too. Whether for exercise, to break the monotony or to snatch the chance to walk and talk with a friend, for those of us lucky enough to be physically able and safe to venture beyond the front door, a stroll has become a highlight of the day. “We’re scrabbling to find positives of this situation, and I think one is that it has turned our focus back on to what’s on our doorsteps, whether it’s the wildlife in our gardens, or the beauty of our urban parks,” says Humble. As an ambassador for Living Streets, the charity that campaigns for a better walking environment in towns and cities, Humble hopes the pandemic may speed up the shift away from car-dominated urban spaces. With fewer cars on the road, “I think people have realised that walking is often quicker, healthier, just generally a nicer way of getting around.”

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I have no motivation to work. How can I change my attitude? | Leading questions

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You don’t get joy from work – not many people do, says Eleanor Gordon-Smith – but you won’t get more of it sitting at the computer promising yourself you’ll work soon.

I have always had a problem with work, I don’t have much internal motivation to do any and a lot of anxiety about it. Now I am supposed to be working from home I feel even more disengaged. I get up at 11am, then procrastinate around the internet for a few hours.

I do appreciate having a salary and it would logically make sense to try and keep my job. My colleagues are all running themselves ragged working and home schooling and all that stuff. I hate the idea of all that rushing about. How can I change my attitude, and persuade myself do a few hours work every day?

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Mindfulness, laughter and robot dogs may relieve lockdown loneliness – study

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University of Cambridge researchers identify potentially effective interventions to help people

Robotic dogs, laughter therapy and mindfulness could help people cope with loneliness and social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers at the University of Cambridge have found.

The team at the university’s School of Medicine, led by Dr Christopher Williams, reviewed 58 existing studies on loneliness and identified interventions that could be adapted for people living in lockdown or under pandemic-related social distancing measures.

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When you can’t quit a crush

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Falling head over heels in love is one thing, but if it becomes all-consuming you may be in ‘limerance’

A few years ago I was at my university’s library, frantically refreshing a dating app. Under my crush’s photo there was a location setting that told me how far she was from me. “One mile away!” I felt a surge of adrenaline and my mind started racing.

I was a promoter for a gay nightclub in London’s Soho, which was where I met Lucy. I’d drop my flyers on purpose and she’d help me pick them up. We had been on a few dates and were making plans to meet again. Then we came across each other on a dating app – “Fancy seeing you here!” – and matched as a joke. Even though dating apps were probably unreliable in their geolocation abilities, suddenly I could gauge her distance from me.

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Destined for an arranged marriage, I chose to follow my heart

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As a teenager, true love seemed like an impossible dream, but I was determined to marry for love and not obligation

This year, my husband Richard and I will have been married for 10 years. It may not sound all that long, but it feels quietly significant to me, this decade of us, not least because there was a time that I could not fathom a world in which we could ever be together at all.

I grew up expecting to marry someone my parents chose for me: a suitable young man who would share my Pakistani family background, my cultural heritage and faith. I can’t remember how old I was when I understood this – only that I did, without it needing to be explained. It was what my cousins did and the daughters of our family friends did. It was the way things were.

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Close-ups, cats and clutter: what the online yoga teacher saw

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Teaching via Instagram and Zoom is both more and less intimate than a real-life class

Fifteen people lie down in rectangles on my screen. I am telling them to relax their jaws and soften the muscles around their eyes. I am also having a silent, hand gesture-based conversation with a five-year-old girl in one of the rectangles. This morning the girl’s mother sent me an email that read: “I’m going to attempt as much of the class as she will allow me to do – sometimes she is fine with it, and sometimes not.” In the next box, a cat strolls into view and settles down on its owner’s back as they rest in the child’s pose. Elsewhere, a dog is causing chaos at the back of someone’s mat. This is what I’ve learned from teaching Zoom yoga; mostly, small children and pets rule a household.

I’ve observed couples having conversations in class, giving me a delicious feeling of embarrassment and curiosity

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The real thing: my battle to beat a 27-year Diet Coke addiction

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I have been obsessed with the sugar-free soda since I was four, spending £500 a year on up to seven cans a day. This is what happened when I tried to quit

The greatest love story of my life has been with a carbonated beverage.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t addicted to Diet Coke. Some memories: I am sitting at the kitchen table at my grandmother’s house in northern Cyprus, screaming because my mother won’t refill my yellow-and-green patterned glass. I am four or five years old. My grandmother looks on, disturbed, as I wail disconsolately. My mother does not give in.

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‘I feel so good I may never drink again!’ Readers on their success – or failure – during dry January

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Readers explain whether they looked, felt and slept better – or if they turned back to alcohol to cheer up a miserable month

I don’t drink every day, but I do drink every weekend and I usually drink a fair amount. I did dry January (and February) two years ago when my wife was eight months pregnant with our son, but I’m finding it much easier this year because I don’t have the opportunity to go out and socialise. The thing I miss most about drinking is visiting the pub with some friends – without that it’s certainly easier. Duncan Ward, operational resilience manager, West Sussex

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Lockdown cabin fever? 56 tried, tested and terrific ways to beat the boredom

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Shaun Ryder keeps chickens, while Mel Giedroyc organises chutney tastings. These small, affordable suggestions won’t end lockdown misery – but they might help

If you live with someone else, draw each other. My boyfriend, a professional artist, has a gross advantage – so I hold the most atrocious pose possible to challenge him. Then I challenge the foundations of our relationship by trying to depict him in a fashion that won’t result in him dumping me. Our relationship survived the last time, although we almost died laughing. Laura Snapes, Guardian deputy music editor

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I enjoyed researching the bloody history of childbirth – then I had a baby | Anna North

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My new novel is about a midwife’s daughter in the old American west. The peril pregnant women underwent, then and now, became all too vivid once I became a parent

Childbirth in the 19th century was a dangerous affair. Women routinely came down with puerperal fever, an infection of the uterus that could lead to sepsis and death. Others suffered a postpartum haemorrhage: heavy bleeding that, if not stopped, could also claim their lives. Some experienced eclampsia, a condition in which skyrocketing blood pressure could cause fatal seizures. In 1900, six to nine women died for every 1,000 births, more than 30 times the rate today.

I learned these facts when I started researching my latest novel, Outlawed, an alternate history following a midwife’s daughter on the run across the American west in 1894. I needed a working understanding of obstetrics and gynaecology of the era to give it verisimilitude. So I read about the history of the C-section, which, at least in Europe, was generally a fatal procedure until about the 1880s, though there are reports of women surviving it as early as the second century CE. I learned about the discovery of egg cells, which was the subject of heated debate in the 1670s between the Dutch doctor Reinier de Graaf (who demonstrated their existence by dissecting rabbits shortly after mating) and his rival Jan Swammerdam (who liked to travel with a human uterus and other “items of genital anatomy”). I studied the composition of early baby formula, which, in 16th and 17th-century Europe, often consisted of bread soaked in milk, fed to infants from a “pap boat” that was unfortunately hard to clean and prone to accumulating bacteria.

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Analgesic culture: can reframing pain make it go away?

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The way we think about pain could change how much we actually suffer

We’ve all got a story about pain. Maybe it’s that time you broke your arm skating, or the time you finished the game on a twisted ankle, or the 10 hours of labour without an epidural. Maybe your story of pain is a story of violence, the injury and trauma of an assault. Maybe it’s a story of terror. Or it’s heartbreak, the seemingly endless depths of grief and despair after a loss. Whatever it is, (almost) all of us have experienced what we call pain and we’re not in a hurry to experience it again.

But have you ever tried to define that pain? When you’re telling the story, how do you explain the pain? Do you try to quantify the injury – how many broken bones, the size of the bruise, the amount of blood? Or do you describe the cause – the type of cancerous cells, the crowning baby, the sharp knife? But what if there was no obvious cause? And how do you communicate the intensity? Is it a searing or scalding burn, a throbbing or dull pressure, a pounding or stabbing headache? Is it worse than a bee sting, but not as bad as a dog bite?

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Head, shoulders, knees and toes: the best stretches to see off aches and pains

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Soft mattresses and pillows are great for lounging, but after a full day’s work your back and shoulders will start to complain. These gentle exercises should help

Working on a laptop in bed all day can be ruinous for your shoulders, back and overall wellbeing. “Your back won’t be supported very well,” says Fiona Houston, a physiotherapist and the founder of Physio Inverness. “It will be slumped. Plus, if your legs are stretched out in front of you, you’ll be putting strain through your nervous system.” She explains that this runs from your brain to your spinal cord, all the way to your toes. “By sitting in bed with your legs out in front of you, and your head tilting downwards, at a laptop screen, you’re stretching that system continuously. It’s actually one of the things we would ask our clients about, to see if people are likely to have issues with their nerves.”

Houston advises a mixture of stretches for your back. “Sit on a chair and rotate your shoulders forwards and backwards,” she says. “Yoga poses such as the child’s pose (where you sit on your heels and push your shoulders to the ground, head facing the floor) or the cobra pose (where you lie on your front, hands and legs flat on the floor, and arch your head and shoulders off the ground) will help your joints move. These stretches are quick and easy to do, and easy to access online.”

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The joy of steps: 20 ways to give purpose to your daily walk

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Has the novelty of a prescribed stroll long since worn off? From tracking animals to uncovering hidden history, here’s how to discover a new world in your neighbourhood

The weather is rubbish, there is nowhere to go and, bereft of the joys of spring, the daily lockdown walk can feel pointless. But, of course, it is not: the mental and physical health perks of exercise are immune to seasonal changes. We need to gallivant around outside in daylight so that our circadian rhythms can regulate sleep and alertness. (Yes, even when the sky is resolutely leaden, it is still technically daylight.) Walking warms you up, too; when you get back indoors, it will feel positively tropical.

But if meeting these basic needs isn’t enough to enthuse you, there are myriad ways to add purpose to your stride and draw your attention to the underappreciated joys of winter walking.

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Why it’s time to stop pursuing happiness

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Positive thinking and visualising success can be counterproductive – happily, other strategies for fulfilment are available

Like many teenagers, I was once plagued with angst and dissatisfaction – feelings that my parents often met with bemusement rather than sympathy. They were already in their 50s, and, having grown up in postwar Britain, they struggled to understand the sources of my discontentment at the turn of the 21st century.

“The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy,” my mother once said. I was baffled. Surely happiness was the purpose of living, and we should strive to achieve it at every opportunity? I simply wasn’t prepared to accept my melancholy as something that was beyond my control.

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Does vitamin D combat Covid?

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It’s cheap, widely available and might help us fend off the virus. So should we all be dosing up on the sunshine nutrient?

In March, as coronavirus deaths in the UK began to mount, two hospitals in northeast England began taking vitamin D readings from patients and prescribing them with extremely high doses of the nutrient. Studies had suggested that having sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is created in the skin’s lower layers through the absorption of sunlight, plays a central role in immune and metabolic function and reduces the risk of certain community-acquired respiratory illnesses. But the conclusions were disputed, and no official guidance existed. When the endocrinology and respiratory units at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS foundation trust made an informal recommendation to its clinicians to prescribe vitamin D, the decision was considered unusual. “Our view was that this treatment is so safe and the crisis is so enormous that we don’t have time to debate,” said Dr Richard Quinton, a consultant endocrinologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.

Soon clinicians and endocrinologists around the world began arguing about whether sufficient levels of vitamin D might positively impact coronavirus-related mortality rates. Some considered the nutrient an effective treatment hiding in plain sight; others thought of it as a waste of time. In March, the government’s scientific advisers examined existing evidence and decided there wasn’t enough to act upon. But in April, dozens of doctors wrote to the British Medical Journal describing the correction of vitamin D deficiencies as “a safe, simple step” that “convincingly holds out a potential, significant, feasible Covid-19 mitigation remedy”.

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I teach a course on happiness at Yale: this is how to make the most of your resolutions

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Forget tough love. Adopting a positive mindset and being kind to yourself is a more effective way to make a change

To say that 2020 wasn’t the best year is an understatement. For many of us, it felt like a giant global dumpster fire. Not surprisingly, the stresses of living through a pandemic have had a terrible impact on our collective mental health, with rates of depression and anxiety skyrocketing. Many of us feel we can’t say goodbye to last year fast enough.

And that means we’re entering 2021 with high expectations. With the promise of a vaccine and the potential for a return to normality, the start of this year has given us something we’ve been missing for a long time: hope. Starting over after the year we’ve just had feels more exciting than usual. It’s a brand new chapter in our lives, in which lots of positive changes are possible.

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Headspace Guide to Meditation: can Netflix deliver enlightenment in 20 minutes?

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The streaming service and the mindfulness app have joined forces to inject some calm into our tech diet. Elle Hunt tries to switch off, while switching on

Those who subscribe to the notion of “new year, new me” will be familiar with the advice to empty your fridge and kitchen cupboards of junk food before 1 January, so as to set yourself up for healthy-eating success. (Or else a New Year’s Day McDonald’s delivery, when you wake up very much the old you, and not in the mood for overnight oats.)

After all that bingeing on Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset last year, Netflix now provides a similarly aspirational refresh, with a new series of guided meditations. Produced with the popular Headspace app, the eight 20-minute episodes are billed as a beginner’s guide to meditation, helping you to start the year “by being kind to your mind”.

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Silence your inner critic: a guide to self-compassion in the toughest times

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Is your internal monologue friendly, calm and encouraging – or critical and bullying? Here is how to change it for the better

Tobyn Bell still remembers the precise moment when his self-compassion practice paid off.

He had just arrived home from work and was turning over in his mind the mistakes he had made that day, what he could or should have done – the kind of self-critical thoughts he had struggled with for years. Then, unexpectedly, another voice piped up in response, calm and steadying, addressing Bell by a fond nickname from his childhood.

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