Health tracking anxiety, 10,000 steps and banana bread

Welcome to the MHD newsletter

A 3-minute weekly read where you will be encouraged to get reflective with a journal prompt, have relevant reading suggestions with a new book each month and hear about nutrition in the news and what we have going on over at team MHD.

Weekly check in:

Happy Friday. I hope you are feeling good heading into the weekend. My priority this weekend is my Nervous System. I have been travelling all over the place keeping super busy and now I can tell that my body is asking for some rest, both mentally and physically. I am so ready to slow down and switch off, and I plan to refill my cup. I hope you have a weekend that refills your cup too.

Journal prompt for this week:  

What values do you consider most important in life? How do your actions align with those values?

I think it is important to be aware of your personal values in order to live a purposeful life. It is also a relevant discussion in Eating Disorder recovery as for many people the habitual behaviours driven by their eating disorder take them away from their values.

Podcast recommendation:

The 10,000 steps myth, by the Maintenance phase podcast.

If you don’t know about the Maintenance phase podcast I would encourage you to get to know! It is a podcast by Aubrey Gordon (activist and writer) and Michael Hobbes (journalist) that debunks wellness and health fads. It is also entertaining and funny.

This episode was a well researched breakdown of the common idea that ‘We should all be doing 10,000 steps per day’. 

The key takeaways for me were:

• How popular fads can get absorbed into public health policy despite a lack of evidence. (This is something I worry about with the media coverage of Ultra Processed foods- more to come on this topic in a few weeks)

• How by tracking our exercise we enjoy it less and may actually be less motivated to do it.

I have worked with a number of people who have struggled with compulsive exercise and a key step in recovery from this is to stop tracking, stop counting steps, get rid of the apple watch/ fitbit. Health tracking is of course, not ~always bad~ but obsessively it can contribute to a disordered relationship with exercise.

June Book of the month:

The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler

I hope you have been enjoying the start of this book, I have some thoughts already and will post a summary review and some book club prompts at the end of the month.

Nutrition in the news:

Guardian: Why health trackers can push you off the road to wellness

Keeping on the theme of fitness trackers I thought this was an interesting article, and honestly I haven’t seen many ‘against’ arguments in the popular media so this was refreshing.

Eva Wiseman makes a case for how health technology fuels ‘cyberchondria’ where people worry obsessively and unnecessarily about their health. She discusses the latest trend of continuous glucose monitors in people without diabetes. This is something I feel concerned about, and have written a full blog on the topic which you can read here.

The key takeaway being that more data is not always better.

Banana bread

Banana bread is a staple at home, it got me through university. I travelled to Colombia last year and had a sudden craving for banana bread that drove me to hike for hours to a small village in order to buy ingredients, and I managed to successfully make banana bread without a measuring scale, cooked in a fire-heated oven. I guess the moral of the story is, there isn’t much I won’t do for banana bread.

I frequently make this vegan banana bread recipe. But more recently I have been experimenting with using up my sourdough discards (the discarded fermented flour from when you feed your sourdough starter) to make banana bread and it worked really well. I posted the recipe for it this week on my Instagram page.

That’s all from us this week, back again same time next week.

Look after yourself <3

Sophie and the team at Mental Health Dietitians.