March 07, 2020 at 04:00PM by CWC I dread the changing of the clocks at the end of winter because, let’s be honest, it’s the bad one. As terrible as it is, “spring forward” has to exist in order for us to have “fall back,” wherein you can have an extra hour of sleep. There can be no good without evil. On March 8 we have to face the evil and turn our clocks forward an hour. But on the bright side this means we get an extra hour of daytime. Since my face is going to be bathed in more sunlight than it has during the winter, I was curious if there were any tweaks I should make to my daytime skin-care routine. So I called in the experts. First up: sunscreen. It is skin-care canon that everyone should wear sunscreen every single day. Ninety percent of aging comes from unprotected UV exposure, dermatologist Mona Gohara, MD, told Well+Good in a recent episode of Dear Derm. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLlrv7VBPPU] There are two types of sunscreen: chemical and physical. Dr. Gohara says that if you see words like avobenzone and octinoxate on the label, it’s a chemical sunscreen. She also notes that chemical sunscreens have that “piña colada” classic sunscreen smell. If you see zinc oxide or titanium dioxide on the label, it’s a dead giveaway that it’s a physical sunscreen. Chemical sunscreens work by being absorbed into the skin, while physical sunscreens form a physical barrier on the skin. There
Tag: Well+Good
How I’m preparing my skin-care routine for an extra hour of daytime
March 07, 2020 at 04:00PM by CWC I dread the changing of the clocks at the end of winter because, let’s be honest, it’s the bad one. As terrible as it is, “spring forward” has to exist in order for us to have “fall back,” wherein you can have an extra hour of sleep. There can be no good without evil. On March 8 we have to face the evil and turn our clocks forward an hour. But on the bright side this means we get an extra hour of daytime. Since my face is going to be bathed in more sunlight than it has during the winter, I was curious if there were any tweaks I should make to my daytime skin-care routine. So I called in the experts. First up: sunscreen. It is skin-care canon that everyone should wear sunscreen every single day. Ninety percent of aging comes from unprotected UV exposure, dermatologist Mona Gohara, MD, told Well+Good in a recent episode of Dear Derm. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLlrv7VBPPU] There are two types of sunscreen: chemical and physical. Dr. Gohara says that if you see words like avobenzone and octinoxate on the label, it’s a chemical sunscreen. She also notes that chemical sunscreens have that “piña colada” classic sunscreen smell. If you see zinc oxide or titanium dioxide on the label, it’s a dead giveaway that it’s a physical sunscreen. Chemical sunscreens work by being absorbed into the skin, while physical sunscreens form a physical barrier on the skin. There
8 vegan jerky recipes you can make using your air fryer
March 07, 2020 at 02:00PM by CWC In the past few years, traditional beef jerky has gotten a major glow-up, revamped from the ultra processed sticks ubiquitous at gas stations and remade to be sourced from grass-fed meat and lower in sodium. The jerky space has also expanded to include new, vegan varieties. A run-down of the few options on the market: mushroom jerky, watermelon jerky, and soy-based jerky. Still, the vegan options definitely aren’t as easy to find as their animal-based counterparts. No worries, you can make your own! If you are the proud owner of an air fryer, it’s easier than you may think to DIY. Rounded up here are eight vegan jerky recipes using the beloved kitchen appliance. Scroll down for eight vegan jerky recipes, all made using the air fryer Photo: Monson Made This 1. Smoky soy curls Part of what makes traditional jerky a good snack is all the protein, and using soy to make a vegan version ensures you don’t miss out on that front. This recipe calls for liquid smoke, hoisin sauce, cayenne, garlic powder, and onion powder, which makes it taste like it was cooked over an open fire and seasoned with your pantry’s all-stars. Photo: Healthy Slow Cooking 2. Southern-style soy curls If a smoky taste isn’t your thing, try this Southern-inspired take instead, which uses nutritional yeast, Cajun seasoning, and poultry seasoning (don’t let the name fool you—it’s still vegan). Cornmeal is used to give a breaded texture; this take
Slept wrong? Try a professional stretchers 4 best moves for working out the knots
March 07, 2020 at 12:00PM by CWC Opening your eyes first-thing to realize you have a kink in your neck or back kinda gives a whole new meaning to “waking up on the wrong side of the bed.” You don’t have to go ahead and consider the day a wash, though. According to Keren Day, DC, a chiropractor and professional stretcher at Racked NYC, what you do next will make or break the time between now and your next sleep. “A common mistake people make when they wake up with aches and pains from sleeping in the wrong position is overcompensating with intense stretching,” says Dr. Day. It may seem like a contradiction, but taking the edge off your sleep borne pain is all about smart, simple stretching. “While it might be satisfying in the moment, avoid pushing into the area that hurts to the point of pain when moving or stretching as it can cause even more irritation,” says Dr. Day. Before you even think about doing a neck roll or a backstretch, though, Dr. Day recommends hopping in the shower. “This places systemic heat into the entire body and helps increase circulation through your body helping warm up the area that has become stiff,” she says. Once you’ve toweled off, going for an easy-peasy walk to relax your muscles and allow blood to flow throughout the entire body. Then (and only then!) are you ready to stretch. Dr. Day says that you should feel (almost) brand-new after you
Is it just me, or can your deodorant completely stop working? A dermatologist explains
March 07, 2020 at 02:00AM by CWC Raise your hand (or, erm, maybe don’t) if you’ve ever gotten a ripe whiff of your armpits in the middle of the day and wondered, “what the hell is going on under there?” Well, it may be that your deodorant has stopped working. Yep. According to dermatologists, it is fully possible for your favorite old-faithful D.O. to betray you. In order to understand why, it’s important to understand why your armpits smell in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, it’s actually not solely because of your sweat. Instead, it’s because of how your sweat interacts with the bacteria living on the surface of your skin, which can release an odor. Pure deodorants work to mask this odor with fragrance and alcohol, which acidifies the sweat and makes it a less hospitable place for bacteria to live. Antiperspirants—a category that some, but not all, deodorants fall into—use an active ingredient (usually aluminum) to plug up the sweat glands. This stops sweat from making it up to the surface in the first place so that bacteria can’t feed on it. When either type of product is working properly, the result is going to be a reduction in body odor. If that’s stopped happening, though, it may not technically be the deodorant’s fault—it could be due to some underlying cause in your body. “Perceived differences in smell may have to do with how much the person is actually sweating,” says board-certified dermatologist and founder of LM Medical
I’m a professional chef, and this anti-inflammatory salad recipe is good enough to eat every day
March 07, 2020 at 01:00AM by CWC [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNBjXk0c65I] If you’re feeling fatigued with the standard cold desk lunch, all you need is a handful of hearty veggies to make a nourishing warm salad recipe. In an episode of Well+Good’s video series Cook With Us, Sam Kass—cookbook author and former White House chef to the Obamas—is challenged to create an anti-inflammatory meal that’s vegetarian, uses turmeric, and can be put together in under 30 minutes. The result is an anti-inflammatory warm salad recipe that’s good enough to eat every day. To create this warm salad recipe, Kass roasts broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots, parsley, and shallots. “Roasting is one of the best ways to prepare vegetables. It brings out so much flavor, and it’s super simple. You just throw them on a sheet tray and throw them in the oven,” he says. The vegetables are filled with vitamins and minerals, but this warm salad recipe is anti-inflammatory because of the dressing. In addition to turmeric, the dressing includes a dose of fresh ginger. “Ginger also has wonderful anti-inflammatory properties,” he says. What you’re left with is a quick, flavorful meal that provides all the benefits. And don’t worry—there’s more than enough for leftovers. Anti-inflammatory warm salad recipe Ingredients Salad: broccoli cauliflower Brussels sprouts carrots parsley shallots Dressing: olive oil Dijon mustard lemon juice garlic ginger turmeric 1. Toss the vegetables in your oil of choice, and add salt and pepper to taste. 2. Roast at 350°F for 10 to 20 minutes.
Will shaving really make your hair grow back thicker? Derms weigh in
March 07, 2020 by CWC There are plenty of old wives’ tales in the beauty world: that your skin needs to feel squeaky-clean (not true), your pores can actually shrink (also false), and—one of the biggest—that your hair grows back thicker after shaving. Well, good news: Dermatologists are busting that myth for us, once and for all. “It is definitely not true that after you shave, your hair grows back thicker,” says Shirley Chi, MD, a board-certified dermatologist based in Los Angeles. If this were the case, she jokes that everyone would be shaving their heads so that we could all have thicker hair. (Imagine!) Mona Gohara, MD, a Connecticut-based, board-certified dermatologist, echoes this: “Hair grows as thick as Mother Nature made it! Razors don’t change that.” “Hair grows as thick as Mother Nature made it! Razors don’t change that.” —Mona Gohara, MD If you’re finding it hard to digest the fact that your hair grows in at the same thickness, note that there’s a valid reason why this misconception exists in the first place. “The reason why your hair feels like it’s thicker after you shave is because of the blunt-cut ends of the hair that are growing out,” Dr. Gohara says. “It can feel stubbly and therefore thicker. But it’s not actually thicker or growing back any faster.” But if you give it some time, that won’t actually be the case. “If we let it grow longer again, it would taper just as it normally does,” says Miami-based
Yoga has literally thousands of poses, but a stretching expert says this one unwinds every muscle
March 06, 2020 at 11:00PM by CWC No one has an exact count of the number of asanas out there (it could be thousands or millions), but trainer and massage therapist Joe Yoon, author of the newly-released book Better Stretching, says that one pose outperforms the others when it comes to better mobility and flexibility: cat-cow stretch. “When I was a trainer, I thought ‘oh this is just a yoga move for the extension and flexion of the spine,” says Yoon. Once he started studying up on stretching, he learned that the movement works way (and I mean, way) more than just your vertebrae. “When I started to actually look at the movement, I noticed that you’re moving your shoulder blades into protraction and retraction, too,” says Yoon. “So it’s almost like you’re reaching for something and then when you’re dropping your chest down and pulling your shoulders down and back.” And that’s just what cat-cow does for your upper body. Cat-cow asks you to pull your chest forward (cow) then puff up your back (like an angry cat), but this move doesnt’ happen in isolation, it pulls the rest of the kinetic chain—your middle and lower body—along with it. For example, “It’s great for [alleviating] pelvic tilt. So your hips tuck under and then they arch. That’s another thing that people just don’t have awareness of,” says Yoon. But reader, this is just scratching the surface. Below, Yoon and yoga teacher Beth Cooke share the tiny cat-cow tweaks that can
Why do we keep taking nutrition advice from Silicon Valley?
March 06, 2020 at 10:00PM by CWC Twitter founder Jack Dorsey drinks salt juice every morning and eats just once a day. Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey loads his coffee with butter, engages in 60-hour intermittent fasts, and continuously monitors his blood glucose levels (despite an absence of diabetes). Silicon Valley psychologist Cameron Sepah, PhD, encourages his venture capitalist clients to engage in “dopamine fasts.” Some tech entrepreneurs eschew a full night of shut-eye for 20-minute naps scattered throughout the day. Many adhere to a ketogenic diet, regularly microdose psilocybin (aka ‘shrooms), and/or utilize at least one wearable health-tracking device daily. Ten years ago, most of this might have seemed extreme. And some of it still is today—you would be very, very (very) hard-pressed to find any health expert who would recommend going multiple days without food or sleep. But many of the rest of these once-fringe habits have leaked out from Silicon Valley into the mainstream to, in some cases, be widely adopted with fervor. (Hello, Bulletproof coffee.) It seems not to matter to the general public that few of the above-named people are formally trained in medicine, science, or nutrition—whatever it is they’re doing, we seem to think we should be doing it, too. This health-guru status Silicon Valley folks have acquired in modern times is attributable to many factors, some as old as human nature and others specific to this innovative industry. Keep reading to unpack the reasons you may look to a programmer for diet advice over
Your secret weapon for back strength is a stability ball—here’s exactly how to wield it
March 06, 2020 at 09:00PM by CWC A stability ball is typically used for core exercises at the gym or as a supposedly better-for-your-posture chair at the office. And while it really is helpful to define your abdominal muscles, it’s also a secret weapon for strengthening your back. Take that, lat pull-down machine. “Most people only see the ‘six pack’ as their abs, but stability balls can work all sides of the core—and that includes the back,” says Gerren Liles, Equinox master trainer and Hyperwear athlete. “Exercises that challenge your back by incorporating back and glute contractions make the ball a valuable tool in strengthening your posterior chain.” “Most people only see the ‘six pack’ as their abs, but stability balls can work all sides of the core—and that includes the back.” —Gerren Liles, Equinox master trainer Unlike some back-strengthening exercises—especially those done on gym equipment—using a stability ball keeps things easy. There’s no complicated instructions to figure out, and you can build up your muscles right in the comfort of your own home. To try out three of Liles’ favorites, follow the instructions below. The best stability ball back exercises, according to a trainer Reverse extension Lie on your stomach over the ball, placing your stomach and hips at the top of the ball with your hands and feet on the floor. Stabilizing with your hands, contract your lower back and glutes to slowly lift your feet off of the floor, keeping your legs together. No other part of you should move.