We had to fight to get my grandfather good care. Those of us who don’t have children need a new approach
Few of us are immune from the anxiety that can quickly set in when we contemplate our own ageing. Who will be there for us when us can no longer physically take care of ourselves? Who will be around to remind us of who we were in our moments of lucidity when our minds have started slipping away?
For those of us who don’t have children, these questions take on a particular significance. I had mixed feelings after watching Still Alice, an Oscar-winning depiction of early-onset dementia. It made for grim viewing. But it was easy to imagine the ways it could have been even grimmer: what if the protagonist, Alice, had no children, a partner long departed or divorced, or friends who had drifted away?
Related: Why should older people rely on their families for care? | Catherine Bennett
Related: Mice benefit from research into cannabis. Why not us? | Simon Jenkins
We’ll visit prehistoric African landscapes, ancient Egyptian cities, Victorian streets featuring the sound of cat’s meat men hawking their wares, the unique economic situation of World War II, and the business boom of post-war America.
The unifying thread woven through all of these curious scenes is, as you guessed, cats – and the food they eat.
Their natural dietary needs haven’t changed, either. Nevertheless, humans always have to do things the hard way. Ideas about feline nutrition have transformed quite a bit over the years.
We’ll begin our journey over 12,000 years ago. These are the days of felis silvestris lybica or the African wildcat. This small cat living in Africa, the Near East, and around the Arabian peninsula, is the ancestor of the domesticated cat. This hardy hunter lives primarily off of small rodents, supplementing their diet with small mammals, bugs, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. As obligate carnivores, their diet is comprised of meat – although they’re known to occasionally eat jackalberries.
While dogs were domesticated much earlier (think as much as well over 20,000 years earlier) by hunter-gatherers, the domestication and keeping of cats is always the sign of advanced civilization. Yep, you read that right. You may use this fact in your next argument with a dog person.
Wildcats wandering by a settlement would have noticed the abundance of rodents feasting on the grain stores, twitched their whiskers, and dove in. Thanks to their fantastic value as rodent management tools, these cats quickly earned their place in society. People not advanced enough to harvest and store surplus grain were of little interest to wildcats. Similarly, without grain stores in need of protection, these hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have recognized their practical value.
As is the case with so many things, the story of feline domestication is closely linked to food and diet. Humans need grains and cats need meat. Our different and mutually beneficial dietary needs were the basis for the entire relationship between cats and people.
Continuing onward through the ages of cat-worshipping ancient Egypt and the reverent Romans, cats continued to live on a similar diet – they hunted snakes, rats, mice, and other pests. People may have given them treats to encourage the cats to stick around, but for the most part, these early cats fended for themselves.
This continued for thousands of years. Throughout most of history, cats have been full-time employees in an agrarian society. Although they were valuable companion animals as well, cats were hunters and pest controllers.
The Medieval era was a very turbulent time for cats. Among Muslims, cats were beloved pets. But in Christian Europe, they were seen as devilish creatures – still, of course, profoundly linked to their proclivity to hunt rodents. Medieval printing pioneer William Caxton is credited with this statement that in a sense likens the cat to the devil while addressing its predatory nature:
“The devyl playeth ofte with the synnar, lyke as the catte doth with the mous.”
By the 1700’s, however, European cats were no longer persecuted and again rose to high esteem for their ability to get rid of hated brown rats, which hit Europe in the 18th century.
Through the middle of the 19th century, cats were viewed as independent animals capable of essentially feeding themselves. However, it was around this time that you’ll see evidence that there was a new idea going around.
In 1837, French writer Mauny de Mornay declared that:
“It is… thought wrongly that the cat, ill-fed, hunts better and takes more mice; this too is a grave error. The cat who is not given food is feeble and sickly; as soon as he has bitten into a mouse, he lies down to rest and sleep; while well fed, he is wide awake and satisfies his natural taste in chasing all that belongs to the rat family.”
But what would that well-fed cat eat? Probably a lot of horse meat – cheap meat often sold for pets by street vendors. At the time, “complete and balanced” commercial food didn’t exist even for dogs. The first food made just for dogs hit the market in 1860. James Spratt introduced Patent Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes that year. They were a hit in England and their popularity quickly caught on in America, kicking off the spread of the pet food industry.
It was in the same year that Scottish doctor Gordon Stables stated that:
“…cat ought to be fed at least twice a day. Let her have a dish to herself, put down to her, and removed when the meal is finished. Experience is the best teacher as regards the quantity of a cat’s food, and in quality let it be varied. Oatmeal porridge and milk, or white bread steeped in warm milk, to which a little sugar has been added, are both excellent breakfasts for puss; and for dinner she must have an allowance of flesh. Boiled lights are better for her than horse-meat, and occasionally let her have fish.”
So we see what the cultured Victorian cat might eat: oatmeal and bread with milk and sugar for breakfast, followed by organs, horse meat, and fish for dinner. And perhaps some Spratt’s Patent Cat Food. Note, though, that at this time commercial pet food was still viewed as a luxury item. It didn’t become really common until around the 20’s and 30’s.
It was around that time when the first canned cat food hit the market. Most canned cat foods were fish-based and more popular in coastal areas that produced plenty of seafood byproducts.
Well, dry cat food didn’t exist at all until World War II shook up the world economy and forced major changes in production. For one, pet food was classified as a non-essential good. Secondly, metal rationing took a toll on the can production industry, forcing pet food manufacturers to do something different. Production shifted towards an emphasis on dry food and kibble for cats and dogs.
After the war, dry food established itself as an essential part of pet care. Commercial pet food, in general, was an essential. Human food manufacturers saw the popularity of pet food as a great opportunity to make use of byproducts. Pet food manufacturers utilized clever marketing to convince consumers that table scraps, raw food, and prey were not enough to keep their pets healthy
Today, dry food is the number one most popular type of cat food in the United States.
We’ve gone from the carnivorous diet of felis silvestris lybica, through the rodent-fueled early days of feline domestication and the thousands of years of meat-eating pest control that followed, onward into times of milk, sugar, and horsemeat, and finally concluding with today’s period: one marked by the prevalence of a grain-based diet for cats.
Grain has always been a critical part of the cat’s relationship with people. Humans use grain as a primary food source, harvesting and storing it for future use. Rodents threaten the stores of that grain, attracting cats, who need the flesh of those rodents to survive. Cats keep the pests in check and, so doing, have earned their place in human society.
Dry cat food has been a staple for only about the last seventy years. That’s just about .5% of the history of domesticated cats. Does it really make sense to believe that this new diet – necessitated by wartime restrictions and popularized by the opportunity to make money off of human food byproducts – is truly appropriate for our cats?
The flaws of dry cat food are numerous and manifest in some of the most common health issues affecting cats today: poor dental health, diabetes, and feline urinary tract disease.
Check out Everything You Need to Know About Dry Cat Food and learn more about why you should probably throw out your cat’s dry food today.
Through Wildernesscat, you can learn even more about your cat’s nutritional and lifestyle needs. Armed with that information, you may begin to make choices to effect positive change in your cat’s world. Visit our site to change your cat’s life through dietary changes, nutritional supplements, and other natural care products – all available through Wildernesscat.
The marriage between Tini Owens and her multimillionaire mushroom farmer husband, Hugh, doesn’t sound like one that most of us would relish. She tried to divorce him last year, but was told by a judge that she couldn’t, because they hadn’t lived apart for five years. Now she has asked the court of appeal to overturn that ruling.
Hugh had, according to evidence supplied by Tini, constantly berated her about a year-long affair she’d had, rowed with her in an airport shop, criticised her to the housekeeper, avoided speaking to her during a meal in a pub – and asked her to pick up bits of cardboard from the garden.
But the accusation of “unreasonable behaviour” was thrown out because the judge decided the grounds were too flimsy. This is a very odd conclusion – the judge essentially told poor Mrs Owens she must stay married to a husband she no longer wants, until enough time has elapsed for his agreement to no longer be required. Yet I don’t entirely blame the judge; he was just upholding laws requiring a couple to have lived apart for at least five years if one party opposes the marriage’s dissolution.
The letters I received as an agony aunt showed me the vast range of behaviours in a marriage that some people are prepared to put up with – and not put up with. One reader and her husband hadn’t spoken to each other for five years – and used their son as an intermediary. But neither wanted to divorce. Another woman put up with her husband having countless affairs. Miserable as such marriages might seem to us, for those couples they were good enough.
On the other hand, one man wrote to say he wanted to leave his wife and children just because he’d spotted her kissing another man while drunk at an office party. No matter how she grovelled and apologised, he couldn’t accept it.
I would guess the problem in the Owens’ marriage is not so much that one behaved entirely unreasonably to the other; it is that they have different expectations of marriage. A man of Hugh’s age, 78, a man who’s done national service, a man who may have seen his own father behave in the same cavalier way to his mother as he behaved to Tini, just doesn’t see the problem. Marriage for him is for life, even if his wife did have an affair.
She, on the other hand, is looking for warmth and compatibility. She described to the court feeling “unloved”. And as she can’t get the warmth she needs from Hugh, at 65 she understandably wants to move on.
‘We’ve all witnessed married friends arguing and bickering so much that we wonder how they can stand each other.’ Photograph: Alamy
Tolstoy said: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But he was wrong. Happy – or happyish – families can be very different. They range from being comfortable and loving to those in which both partners feel that the upside of being married only just outweighs the downside. Unless behaviour is intolerable by any person’s standards, how can a judge rule on it?
If one partner spends the night gambling away the family savings and yet the other can tolerate this behaviour, then the relationship could be regarded as OK. Not happy, but bearable. We’ve all witnessed married friends behaving in a way that we would find unacceptable. They argue and bicker so much that we wonder how they can stand each other. But we don’t know what each partner gets out of this. Who knows, perhaps it’s a weird kind of foreplay? After they’ve had a good public snipe, they may go back home for glorious sex. To outsiders it’s a mystery how the relationship works, but somehow it does.
And we’ve all seen relationships break up when one or other of the partners “reforms” their bad behaviour. A woman complains bitterly about her alcoholic husband but finds living with him sober too much to bear.
Sometimes dysfunctional relationships totter on because partners’ behaviour resembles what they each experienced as a child. Although the protagonists may not exactly enjoy it, at least it reminds them of the security of being at home.
As for Tini feeling “unloved, isolated and alone”, is this grounds for divorce? Who hasn’t had a row in an airport shop? A silent meal? I’ve sat through hundreds. In Tini’s position, another woman might tell Hugh to pick up his own cardboard and laugh at his grumpiness.
I don’t know what the appeal court will decide about the Owens’ marriage, but as judge James Munby pointed out this week: “It is not a ground for divorce if you find yourself in a wretchedly unhappy marriage – people may say it should be.”
I don’t – because it’s often too difficult to say whether the petitioner is being made unhappy by the other person, or whether she or he is the sort who finds insult and cruelty in every breath their partner takes.
I started off by saying the Owens’s marriage isn’t one that most people would relish. But on reflection, who am I to say? I’ve met too many people who can happily shrug off behaviour I find wretched, to judge.
Certain foods have the ability to relieve stress, so reach for them next time when you’re feeling under pressure. Include such foods into your diet makes a natural and safe way to overcome stress, anxiety, and depression.
Top 10 Foods You Should Eat When You’re Stressed
1.Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potato has a good amount of magnesium, an important mineral with anti-stress properties. Sweet potato is also high in vitamin C, vitamin B6, vitamin D, potassium, iron and other essential minerals to support a healthy immune system and against the diseases.
2.Nuts (Almonds, Walnuts)
Nuts such as almonds and walnuts are high in vitamin E and zinc, both of which are important for strengthening your immune system. B-vitamins in them helps you manage anxiety and stress. Have a small handful of these healthy nuts every day to improve your mood and also keep your brain function well.
3.Spinach and Kale
Leafy greens such as spinach are high in vital nutrients and minerals that have anti-stress properties. Kale is also a good option to add into your diet to regulate your mood, improve your brain function and boost your energy levels.
4.Seeds
Some seeds have anti-stress properties, such as pumpkin seeds, cashews, and sunflower seeds, they are all important for a healthy nervous system and have many other health promoting abilities. Eat them directly or sprinkle some on your salads to boost of nutrition.
5.Milk
A glass of warm milk before your bedtime will give you a restful sleep, as you will get enough protein, vitamin D, calcium and B-vitamins to relieve the fatigue.
6.Blueberries
Blueberries are rich in varieties of antioxidant that are beneficial for easing stress and anxiety. This tasty fruit is also loaded with minerals and vitamins that are considered extremely good for overall health.
7.Chamomile
Chamomile tea is a good remedy for relieving muscle spasms and relaxing nerves, this is thanks to the glycine in chamomile, an amino acid that helps reduce stress levels effectively.
8.Salmon
Fish rich in omega-3 such as salmon, tuna, and sardines can moderate the adrenaline levels in your body to make you calm down.
9.Dark Chocolate
Researchers found that dark chocolate helps lower stress hormones levels, and chocolate also releases mood-improving serotonin. So next time when you’re feeling down, eat your dark chocolate, just keep in mind that one-ounce servings are enough.
10.Avocado
Avocado is rich in phytochemicals such as carotenoids and phenolics, which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties to reduce the risks of illnesses and the damages from free radicals in your body. This superfood also reduces oxidative stress and keep the blood pressure low. Overcome your anxiety and stress by taking these anti-stress foods and making some lifestyle changes instead of taking medications. Also avoid the foods that may cause stress, such as fried foods, unrefined sugars, alcohol and high glycemic carbs.
Sources: seekingfit.com/ bhg.com/ draxe.com
Related Reading: 6 Natural Remedies That Help Ease and Relieve Your Stress Safely
A sudden drop in temperature in Melbourne on Monday evening from peaks of 35C brought with it severe thunderstorms and triggered a mass asthma event that left hospitals struggling to treat 8,500 patients.
There is a small group of researchers around the world working to understand the phenomena known as “thunderstorm asthma”, which although rare, can have devastating consequences. Climate change, they say, may be where part of the blame lies.
On Sunday 20 people remained in hospitals across Victoria, struggling with respiratory and related conditions, while four remained in critical condition. At least five people are known to have died after their asthma was triggered during the thunderstorm, the health department confirmed over the weekend.
A major, state-wide investigation into the response of emergency services to the event has been ordered.
Paramedics did the best they could to respond to an unprecedented 1,900 emergency calls in five hours on the evening of 21 November but were unable to reach everyone in a reasonable time. Ambulances made constant trips to emergency departments already overwhelmed as hundreds of patients streamed in under their own steam.
The acting general secretary of Ambulance Employees Australia, Danny Hill, said it would have been a traumatising night for paramedics.
“For anyone who worked that night, from staff on the ground to senior management, they regarded it as the busiest night they ever worked in their whole careers,” he said.
“Very few crews got fed. They worked 14 hours straight. Everyone worked together, worked hard, and stepped up. There was about 30 people who were so severely ill that they had to be taken straight into intensive care. So you’re talking an event equivalent to a bushfire where people are severely burned, or a terrorist attack where people are critically injured.
“That’s the level of chaos our crews dealt with on Monday night.”
Asthma patients can be some of the most difficult for paramedics to respond to. They deteriorate very quickly, and severe cases require more than the immediate treatment a paramedic can provide, including continuous days of intravenous drugs and ventilation. Many, Hill said, went into cardiac arrest.
Kathy Bowlen from St Vincent’s hospital said the emergency department there had considered opening a temporary emergency department in the foyer of the hospital to cope with the demand.
While not the first case of thunderstorm asthma in Melbourne, it was the most deadly and the severe. What researchers don’t know is why sometimes a combination of high pollen counts and thunderstorms lead to a mass asthma event, while other times, those two factors combined have little impact on people’s respiratory health at all. What other factors might be playing a part?
What is known is that grass pollen is usually too big to get into the lungs to cause asthma, and instead causes a reaction in the superficial respiratory systems of those with pollen sensitivity: a hay fever reaction such as a runny nose, sore throat and itchy eyes are more common.
But when a thunderstorm occurs, pollen which had settled during the day can be swept back into the air and the moisture in those winds combined with wind power causes the pollen to rupture into smaller pieces, between 0.5mm and 2.5mm in diameter. Those small fragments are then able to penetrate the superficial respiratory system and get into the lungs, triggering asthma and other serious respiratory responses.
Gennaro D’Amato is a professor of respiratory medicine in Italy and chairman of the World Allergy Organisation’s climate change, biodiversity and allergy committee. He is the world expert on thunderstorm asthma and one of the most published authors on the phenomena in the scientific literature.
He has been monitoring thunderstorm asthma events throughout the world and says they have also been seen in London in the UK, Naples in Italy, and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales.
A sudden and extreme asthma outbreak that occurred in London in June 1994 coincided with a heavy thunderstorm, D’Amato said. In the space of just 30 hours, 640 patients with asthma or other airway diseases attended London hospitals, nearly 10 times the usual number. For 283 patients, the storm triggered their first known attack of asthma. And for every patient that did seek help, many more suffered at home.
“Fortunately, even though it can induce severe asthma, outbreaks associated with thunderstorms are neither frequent nor responsible for a high number of disease exacerbations,” D’Amato told Guardian Australia.
“However, the mechanisms involved in the release of allergens from pollens during thunderstorm should be known so that patients can receive information about the risk of an asthma attack, including in those usually only affected by seasonal allergic rhinitis [hay fever].”
The frequency of thunderstorms had recently increased in some geographical areas, he said, particularly in temperate and subtropical climates. Research has shown that thunderstorms and their destructive winds are expected to become moresevere as the climate changes.
D’Amato has found a number of characteristics common to all of the asthma epidemics. Theiroccurrence is closely linked to thunderstorms, are limited to late spring and summer when there are high levels of airborne pollen grains, have an onset close to the arrival of the thunderstorm and to major rises in the concentration of pollen grains, and people with hay fever and asthma and who stay indoors with windows closed during the thunderstorm are unaffected.
Those not undergoing asthma treatment are at major risk, his research has also found. In the Melbourne epidemic on Monday, between 20 and 40% of those affected had never had asthma before, and so would not have been undergoing treatment.
Associate Prof Paul Beggs, an environmental health scientist with Macquarie University in Sydney, is best known for his research on climate change and its impact on allergens such as pollen.
Some research had found that the potency of pollen grains had been increasing, he said. Anthropological climate change through the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere could be responsible for this growing pollen potency, he said.
Between 20 and 40% of those affected had never had asthma before, and so would not have been undergoing treatment
“Plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis,” he said. “It’s like if you change your diet, there are changes in your body. So plants use carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and if you change the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then their growth conditions are changing.”
“A few smart scientists thought to put these highly allergenic plants into a glass house where we can control all the conditions, from the temperature to light, water and levels of carbon dioxide.”
What they found, he said, was increasing the amount of carbon dioxide led to a whole range of changes in the plants, including more pollen and more potent pollen.
“All of these thing are happening in the background: climate change, increasing pollen potency, and they all mean a thunderstorm asthma episode is more likely than it was 20 years ago.”
Beggs is a researcher with the AusPollen Partnership, a multi-centre cross-disciplinary team of investigators including eminent allergy physicians and scientists looking at pollen aerobiology and climatology. Their work is essential given Australia is the fourth worst country for allergic hay fever and asthma.
The principal investigator on that team, Associate Prof Janet Davies, said another factor researchers believed may trigger asthma is a sudden temperature change, which occurred in Melbourne on Monday as the temperature fell rapidly from 35C into the low 20s. But much more research and data was needed to understand the phenomena, she said.
“The AusPollen Partnership is encouraging people to tell us about their symptoms and triggers, and free app downloads allow people to do this daily if they want to,” she said.
“That will help us understand regional patterns and, by integrating that data with geo-spacial data, will help us understand who is at greater risk and the threshold for triggering a higher risk.”
The difficulty for researchers is that pollen monitoring, though extensive in Melbourne, did not go back far enough to help them develop a clear picture of all the factors triggering thunderstorm asthma. This would allow them to issue alerts when they could see a perfect storm of risk factors about to collide.
But Associate Professor Ed Newbigin from the school of biosciences at the University of Melbourne said thunderstorm asthma was going to be “a hard thing to get a handle on” because of the lack of data.
“The big question is why sometimes high pollen counts combined with thunderstorms sometimes trigger these asthma events and sometimes don’t,” he said.
“We need to understand what other factors work together if we want to reduce thunderstorm asthma. Because in Melbourne, high pollen counts and thunderstorms often coincide. But most of the time when they do, nothing happens.”
Did you know that 50-90% of people who receive some form of treatment, according to drug and alcohol rehab statistics, go on to relapse?
Sounds discouraging? I agree.
Relapse after all is a stage far too many people in recovery slip through – the high statistics are not surprising at all. But you don’t have to become another statistic. In fact, there are proven, reliable, and straight forward strategies you can use to ensure you don’t fall off the wagon.
Although it’s true that you have a lot of work cut out in front of you, this doesn’t mean that you can’t successfully beat out the relapse statistics.
If you’re worried you might fall victim to relapse, you just have to do a few key things to set yourself on the road to successful recovery.
Start with an inpatient treatment at an inpatient rehab facility
First things first, if you think you might end up relapsing – it’s time you checked yourself into an inpatient treatment at an inpatient rehab facility. Inpatient treatment is without a doubt the best option for those struggling with relapse – it has successfully kept people from relapsing so there’s no reason why it can’t do the same for you.
With that said, however, maybe inpatient rehab won’t work for you – it’s not for everyone.
Although it may not “cure” your addiction, it’s still something you need because what it will do is set you back on the straight and narrow. In other words, it’ll create the right foundation for you by showing you the tools you need to successfully beat your addiction – you’ll need these tools for the rest of your journey.
Address your issues with complacency
What if I told you that your thoughts of relapse are directly correlated to your issues with complacency? Would you believe it or brush it off?
Your reaction to the question above will provide you with a clear indicator of where you stand on the path to recovery. This is the case because if you’re battling with relapse – you’re suffering from issues with complacency. In other words, you’re not taking the pursuit of personal growth seriously.
Those who aren’t actively engaging in the process of personal growth are suffering from complacency issues, meaning they’re more likely to relapse. If you’re not taking positive action to better yourself each and every day, you are by default slipping closer to relapse – there’s no middle territory for you to call home. Either you’re moving towards personal growth or you’re slipping towards relapse.
Pick complacency or pick personal growth – make a decision
There’s only two roads before you – one is full of personal growth and the other road is characterized with complacency and will end with relapse. You can only take one road.
Which one are you going to pick?
You must make the decision now and commit to it.
If you cannot look yourself in the eye and state with conviction that you’re going to follow the road of personal growth – you must actively work to address your complacency issues.
How to overcome complacency and the possibility for relapse
There’s one tried and trued method to overcoming complacency and the possibility for relapse – it involves you taking advice from everyone around you, from your sponsor to your therapist to your counselor to your mentor. You must seek out these individuals and ask them what part(s) of your life you should be aiming to improve.
In other words, the road to overcoming complacency lies in your ability to embrace humility and ask those around you for help. More importantly, once you’ve asked for help – you must follow through and act on the advice you receive.
Avoid becoming just another complacent addict who floats through the realms of sobriety – you’re not going to magically heal yourself nor is overcoming addiction going to be a passive experience for you.
You must actively seek help, form new habits, and take action if you are to beat complacency and overcome the possibility for relapse. It’s going to take hard work and humility. Lots of it.
If you can’t find the courage within to seek advice from those around you, it’s likely that you’re headed towards relapse. The only thing you need to do to stay sober is to show humility by asking for advice and then actually follow it. That’s all it takes to overcoming the possibility for relapse.
The trick, however, isn’t in knowing this information – the trick is in acting on this information. You have to put this tip into action if you are to successfully get clean and stay clean.
Resisting the temptations once and for all
Once you’ve began seeking and implementing the advice of others, you’ll notice that the path of recovery gets easier to bear than ever before. You’ll notice yourself changing for the better and for the first time you notice yourself liking the person you see in the mirror.
As good as this stage feels, it doesn’t mean that your job is done. For beating complacency and the possibly for relapse is an everyday battle.
Each day you will be faced with temptations from all different facets of life. These temptations will aim to suck you back into your addiction and you must actively and consciously resist the temptation to do so. With every temptation you resist, you grow that much stronger and the easier the process becomes.
To help you resist temptation, you should continue seeking advice and help in the form of support groups such as AA and NA meetings.
In addition to these support groups, you should also make it a conscious habit to eliminate the various triggers and temptations around you. Make smarter decisions and you’ll notice majority of the temptations escaping your world.
Although you can eliminate majority of the triggers for relapse with smarter decisions – you won’t be able to eliminate the triggers and temptations altogether. No matter what you do or where you go, some form of temptation will always be around you. Therefore, you need to learn how to face the triggers and temptations head on if you are to resist the threat of relapse.
How do you do that?
You do that by embracing personal growth and making it a central component of your life.
Look at all the different areas of your life, from professional to health to financial to emotional and figure out how you can go about improving these areas. Pick one to start – you can get help identifying the one area you need to be improving by seeking the advice of your sponsor, therapist, or mentor.
Ask these individuals what area of your life requires the greatest need for improvement. Then, do what they say and follow their suggestions. By constantly strengthening and improving the foundation of your life, you’ll notice yourself becoming better and better with each passing day.
The better you become, the less likely you are to slip back into your old ways.
In other words, once you trade complacency for personal growth, you will have successfully shifted the odds of staying clean in your favor and will have successfully avoided the allure of relapse.
Real-life accounts of sex and relationships, with writer Alix Fox. This week Alix heads to Manchester to meet a man who has defined as asexual since he was a young teenager. But while university was where many people embraced their sexuality, for Jords it resulted in a series of challenging confrontations with a highly sexed culture.
Share your story: if you have a question about what you’ve heard, or want to share a tale about your own encounters, email us in confidence at closeencounters@theguardian.com.
A Rethink Audio / Guardian production. Close Encounters’ theme, Bells, by Secret Circuit, is available now on Emotional Response.
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
It’s hard to believe that the British Medical Association really intends to stage four five-day junior doctors’ strikes before the end of the year, one of them in just a couple of weeks’ time. BMA members, after all, are the people who warn that the NHS is already under intolerable pressure. How can they therefore believe that such huge, continuing disruption can simply be absorbed by their colleagues, bringing no harm to patients? It doesn’t make sense.
Nor does the BMA’s own position quite make sense. The strikes earlier in the year resulted in a renegotiation and new contract for junior doctors, which the BMA committee declared satisfactory. Yes, it was rejected by members. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the new contract did largely address the particular problems with weekend remuneration that junior doctors had initially identified.
Supporters of action will argue that the dispute is about much more than junior doctors’ contracts. But there has to be a worry, surely, that if the specific detail acting as a catalyst for industrial action isn’t perceived by the public as impeccably clear and strong then the wider message is also undermined.
Many people are concerned about the future of the NHS. And many people were dumbfounded that Theresa May opted to keep Jeremy Hunt as health secretary. But, to me, it’s beginning to look as if the junior doctor’s dispute isn’t really solid enough to carry the weight of such hefty concerns.
I have sympathy with the argument that the move to a seven-day NHS, without a proportionate increase in funding, is a dangerous one. It can certainly be interpreted as a way for politicians to actually cut funding while claiming to be increasing it, as they regularly do.
People have every right to be suspicious. In the 1980s and 1990s, public services were starved of funding by governments which then cited the mess that they were in as prima facie evidence that they were hopeless and had to be privatised. Not everyone has forgotten such cynical strategies, or persuaded themselves that they could never be employed again. They most certainly could.
‘Unless what they want is something that can be written into their contracts – rather than, say, the resignation of Jeremy Hunt – then they have few grounds for complaint when others question whether this latest stance is sensible, admirable or honest.’ Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images
Yet there is also some sense in the thought that expensive buildings and expensive equipment are greatly under-utilised for two days in every seven.
There’s a sensible idea in there, for increased NHS capacity – a greater number of available beds at night, a greater number of appointments for patients. The question is really about whether the government is willing to pay for the kind of rise in payroll costs that increased use of facilities would entail. That’s an incredibly important debate to have – but it seems at the moment that the tight focus on the BMA and junior doctors is serving to dilute that focus rather than concentrate it.
There’s a sense in which junior doctors are the stalking horse of more senior medical professionals, who naturally enough would like to be generously compensated if they start being asked to turn out for weekend shifts themselves. Junior doctors, of course, are the ones who are already working at weekends anyway – which is the reason why they’re on the frontline of the resistance to seven-day working. Wise and venerable consultants, offering sympathy for those hot-headed kids, do actually have a horse in the race themselves.
Yet there’s a real chance that junior doctors would bear the brunt of public revulsion if such big strikes took place and things went wrong. I don’t much like the idea of passionate young people full of vim and political commitment waking up one morning to headlines asserting that they were instead dogmatic provocateurs who killed innocent patients with their militancy. Who doubts such headlines are possible? Or that the personal pain and disillusionment such headlines could visit on individual junior doctors is not significant?
I understand that it’s awkward, bringing up the idea that what the mainstream media might do is worth bearing in mind. I know the established media is seen as “part of the problem”. But I also know that the BMA’s latest threat is not onelikely to fare well within that climate, which for better or worse is a climate it cannot blithely ignore.
Maybe the threat alone will get the junior doctors what they want. But unless they can make it clear to the public that what they really want is something that can be written into their contracts – rather than, say, the resignation of Jeremy Hunt – they can’t complain when reasonable people question whether this latest stance is sensible, admirable or honest.
We can all agree to that losing weight is not easy. In fact, most people never attain their weight goal, and some who do, end up regaining the weight.
Folks usually blame metabolism, but most of the time that’s not the problem. The truth is dieters make diet or exercise mistakes that hinder them from reaching their ideal weight. Today we’ll look into 20 common weight loss mistakes and how you can avoid them.
1. Underestimating calorie intake – studies show that most dieters (even experts) underestimate the number of calories in a meal. Counting calories will help you avoid this.
2. Overeating on holidays – according to research, most people are not able to lose the weight gained during holidays. Avoid overindulging during holidays to prevent unwanted weight gain.
3. Late night snacking – studies show that late night snackers gain more weight than folks who don’t eat at night. Set a rule not to eat past a certain time. And keep all unhealthy snacks out of the house.
4. Hormonal imbalances – in recent years researchers have discovered that our hormones have an impact on weight loss. Use these methods to keep your hormones balanced.
5. Extreme calorie deficits – maintaining extreme calories deficit long term can mess up your metabolism and hormones. Maintain a deficit of not more than 25 percent of your total calorie intake.
6. Cheat days – while cheat days are a great way to maintain your sanity while dieting, most people abuse them. The calories from cheat days can quickly add up and cause weight gain. I’d suggest you forget about cheat days.
7. Overeating on the weekends – if you’re like most people, your weekend starts on Friday afternoon. That’s when you start eating junk and boozing. Make a habit of eating healthy on the weekend and you’ll lose weight consistently.
8. Consuming too much vegetable oil – this is especially true for folks who eat in restaurants (even healthy restaurants). Vegetable oils might make the food tastier but they’re very high in calories. Note that excess intake vegetable oil can lead to lots health problems.
9. Relying on herbs for weight loss – you may not want to hear this but herbs won’t magically melt away the excess flab. You have to eat unprocessed foods, maintain a calorie deficit and exercise.
10. Excess sugar consumption – not only is sugar harmful to your health but it’s also packed with lots of calories. Reduce the intake of table sugar and avoid foods with added sugar.
11. Binge eating – binge eating is a big challenge for most dieters. Seek professional help if you have this disorder because it can make it impossible for you to lose weight.
12. Jumping from one diet to another – The average dieter has tried more than 4 diets. Most people don’t realize that what works for someone else might not work for them. Stick to eating habits you’re comfortable with and work on improving your weaknesses.
13. Lack of quality sleep – research has associated lack of sleep with weight gain. Make sure you get 8-9 hours of quality deep sleep every night.
14. Excess alcohol consumption – not only is alcohol high in calories but it also hinders fat oxidation. If you have to drink, go for spirits like gin and vodka since they’re low in calories.
15. Calories from beverages – calories from sodas, energy drinks and juices quickly add up and cause weight gain. If you have to drink beverages make sure you account for them in your total daily calorie intake.
16. Overestimating calories burned during workout – exercise doesn’t burn as many calories as most people think. Most workout machines give wrong readings. I’d recommend not to consider calories burnt during workout when tracking your calories.
17. Mindless eating – eating mindlessly leads to overeating and bingeing. Always focus on your meals, eat slowly and put food in plates, even if it’s nuts or snacks.
18. Not having a meal plan – a meal plan is one of the most important weight loss tools. It’ll guide you on what to eat and prevent you from opting for junk food.
19. Eating processed foods and junk – Processed foods and junk foods are high in calories and usually lead to bingeing. Stay away from them.
20. Not doing strength training – Strength training helps increase lean muscle mass, boost metabolism and enhance fat loss. Both men and women need it.
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The guy working the greatest psychological wellness institution in the United States is not a doctor. He did not significant in psychiatry, nor did he spend his formative years studying bipolar disorder or operating with schizophrenics.
That guy is me, a history significant turned attorney who went on to turn out to be the sheriff right here. As sheriff, I run the Cook County Jail, the largest jail on a single website in the nation with around ten,000 inmates on any offered day – and roughly thirty% of them struggling from a serious mental illness.
With dramatic and continued cuts to mental overall health funding on the federal and neighborhood degree, county jails and state prisons are where the bulk of our mental wellness care is being administered right now. According to the Treatment method Advocacy Center, the greatest psychological well being institutions in 44 of our 50 states are jails or prisons. And 10 times as numerous mentally unwell people reside in jails and prisons than in state mental health hospitals, in which they should.
The conclusion is heartbreaking but no longer undeniable: we have criminalized mental illness in America, and you are having to pay for it.
It is shameful. Deplorable. Immoral. Merely put, the mentally ill belong in treatment method – not in jail. It would be less expensive that way, too.
Inmates harvest crops in the Cook Nation Jail vegetable backyard. Photograph: Ramon Gonzalez / Unique to the Guardian
Even though some of the mentally sick population in our jail has been charged with violent crimes, the bulk has been charged with non-violent, lesser offenses such as retail theft, trespassing and drug possession. These inmates finish up staying simply because they can’t afford to post bail – or because they have nowhere to go. Eventually, a lot of of them are sentenced to probation. Typically, their situations are dropped. Then they’re launched into the local community, and the vicious and predictable cycle repeats.
There are workarounds to break the cycle:
we have experimented with to re-route new inmates to remedy ahead of they arrive
we’ve launched discharge programs to area inmates in therapy when they leave
we remain obtainable to former inmates going through psychological overall health crises or going off their medicine
more than four,000 individuals who started out an application in Cook County Jail for Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act are now carrying an insurance card
and even though they’re in the jail, numerous inmates note that it really is in which they get their ideal – or only – treatment, which is simply unhappy.
But the priority requirements to be funding psychological well being care, not throwing mentally unwell patients-in-waiting behind bars. It really is not only the moral factor to do – it truly is the most value-effective answer.
From 2009 to 2012, states cut mental wellness funding by $ 1.6bn (virtually ten%), according to the Nationwide Alliance on Mental Illness. The current math right here in Chicago now adds up like this:
cook county jail taxpayer expenses
But this is about more than cash. The reply to treating psychological sickness is not incarceration – it truly is case management. Dedicated situation managers could ensure that the mentally ill remain medicated, could support them via crisis, and ought to give them the very best achievable likelihood at a sustained and productive existence in the community. This is the humane point to do, and it truly is far much less high-priced than housing them in jails and prisons.
Much more needs to be carried out. In the American criminal justice technique, the jail is the final automobile on a extended train. At every phase before a particular person ends up in jail, there is discretion – discretion to arrest, to charge, to set bond. When none of the entities with that discretion bother to take psychological illness into account, what ensues is this almost irreparable mess of a program.
Righting these wrongs calls for the help of numerous automobiles on that train – including individuals operating in the criminal justice program, in the mental wellness field, and state and federal legislators to assistance this vulnerable population.
With just a modest measure of essential thought and a manageable economic investment, we can close the revolving door in between American streets and jails. The time is prolonged previous due for the mentally sick to get the treatment method they so deserve – so that sheriffs like me can get back to worrying about the true criminals.
Thomas J Dart is the Cook County Sheriff in Illinois, and a former prosecutor and state legislator.
• Interactive report, part two: The struggle to find housing for America’s mentally sick patients
Now that he has become a father, Prince William’s hair has started to recede faster than a Eurozone economy. Sorry, Your Royal Highness, it seems that you’re getting old.
Here, then, are some more telltale signs that time is taking its toll on us men…
1. Going to bed early is not a punishment, but a blessed relief.
2. You are, very occasionally, more interested by babies than babes.
3. Someone famous dies and your immediate reaction is to subtract your age from theirs and realise, with a start, that the difference is terrifyingly small. Or, even worse, that you’re older.
4. You discover that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of hair on your head and the number of shampoos, conditioners, grooming gels, creams, bottles of Just For Men, restorative foams and anti-baldness pills you possess. Soon, you will have a bathroom cabinet that puts Boots to shame and a scalp like Kojak’s even balder brother.
5. You get the reference to Kojak.
Kojak: “who loves ya, baby?” (ALAMY)
6. All those furious female TV presenters who are always protesting that they’re too old to get decent jobs any more, well, they don’t seem that old to you.
7. You’re clearing out the garage – because that’s the kind of thing you do these days – and you find a pile of old vinyl LPs. You haven’t played any of them in 20 years, maybe more, but every sleeve brings back a memory.
Vinyl LP covers: a reminder of happier times (ALAMY)
8. You see a pretty young thing swishing down the street on a sunny day and your heart still lights up as it always did. But the blood doesn’t pound as hard as a young man’s does. And then you realise that you’re probably older than the pretty young thing’s father. Or, in some parts of the country, her grandad.
9. It’s not just that you’re older – much, much older… – than the footballers on Match of the Day. It’s that the managers have started to seem young, as do the pundits and certainly the referees. Not that you see many of them, because you’ve dropped off less than halfway through the programme. Speaking of which …
10. Afternoon nap – the two finest words in the lexicon.
11. You start to take a perverse pride in wearing old clothes. They’re agreeably familiar, and the tattier they get, the more comfortable they become. It’s a tremendous relief to give up shopping almost entirely. You start thinking they’ll probably see you out if you look after them carefully. And what could provide more satisfaction than being able to get into the jeans you bought when you were 35?
12. Squat on your haunches. Now stand. Just a few twinges, aren’t there? Kneel down for more than 30 seconds. Try to get up. See what I mean?
13. While watching Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden in The Trip to Italy, you hoot with laughter at Coogan’s spot-on impersonation of Neil Kinnock while your unsmiling teenage son asks: “Who’s Neil Kinnock?”
14. Pensions cease to be a subject of no interest whatever and become an overriding obsession. See also the iniquities of annuity rates, the rapacity of fund managers, the dubious ability of financial advisers. And as for George Osborne’s pension reforms in the Budget, oh, be still my beating heart: what excitement!
15. Gardening – there’s another thing that never used to be of any interest whatever. But suddenly you find yourself brooding over slug repellents, leafing through seed, bulb and David Austin rose catalogues and, yes, being genuinely grateful for a really good pair of gardening gloves at Christmas.
16. It’s not that you spend Saturday evenings in, watching all those Euro-cop shows on BBC Four, laying off the Scandinavian murder mysteries and Belgian conspiracy thrillers just long enough to relish the intrigues of Danish coalition politics; it’s that you actually think you’re rather trendy as you’re doing it.
17. You used to be reasonably hip, but now you have literally no idea at all what the number one single could possibly be. If you happen to hear it, your first reaction is to spot all the songs and artists you remember from the old days from which it (like virtually all contemporary hits) has been ripped off.
18. How can one be both shortsighted and longsighted at the same time? Reach middle-age, that’s how. Suddenly TV dinners become a nightmare as you discover that you can either see the telly, or the food on your plate. But not both, and suddenly…
19. You can hold your own in a discussion about varifocals. “Oh, do they work for you? Really? I couldn’t the hang of them at all, myself. They just made me feel woozy and walking downstairs was a nightmare of vertigo. What? You have different prescription lenses in either eye? Amazing, etc…”
One Direction (I think…) (GETTY IMAGES)
20. The baby that you once held so nervously in your arms goes to school, and you add ‘nativity plays’ to the list of unexpected pleasures. Then you go to cello recitals and cheer at football games; and fight to get your children into the school you wanted; and you suffer through GCSEs and A-Levels, through fights with friends and first romances, through furious rows and slamming doors, through endless evenings spent ferrying them to parties and back. Then suddenly they’re halfway round the world, backpacking anywhere from Bolivia to Bangkok. And they’re graduating, getting jobs and somehow costing even more than they ever did before. And you simply can’t imagine how the time could have gone by so fast.
Oh, and one final thing…
21. You know you left another sign of getting old somewhere safe, just in case you needed it, but you simply can’t remember where…
