I’m five foot three inches tall and I weigh roughly 10 stone. If you prefer metric that’s exactly 160cm and 64.5kg. According to the Body Mass Index, these two figures alone are enough to quantify if I’m underweight or obese. There’s no need to know my waist size, age, gender, cultural heritage, how often I work …
One of my earliest memories is of pain. My teenage years were filled with hospital appointments, calendars circled with dates for surgery. At 13, over the course of one night, my spine twisted like a plumbing trap to more than 80 degrees. At one point, a piece of hardware from the titanium rods supporting my …
“The worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.” So wrote Joaquin Phoenix, on a notepad, playing the part of the mentally troubled comedian Arthur Fleck, whose mistreatment by society finally tips him over the edge into his alter ego in Todd Phillips’s film Joker. If …
Despite knowing this January would be the bleakest on (unofficial) record, I embarked upon an alcohol-free month. For my physical and mental health, and having overindulged at Christmas, I wanted to have a month devoid of the hard stuff, a feat I’d never achieved before. Which is all well and good, but when the monotony …
Despite being dedicated acolytes of Dry January, many of us need both a rhyme and a reason to keep going when it comes to being on the wagon – especially after a festive season during which many drinks were consumed. For today, let it be this: avoiding alcohol is unequivocally a good thing when it …
If your skin has ever reacted to drinking wine, you’re not alone. While many of us experience facial flushing when nursing a glass of chablis, there are numerous other ways drinking wine can negatively impact your overall skin health. Naturopathic doctor and beauty expert Dr Isabel Sharkar, co-founder of the Indigo Integrative Health Clinic in …
Spotify’s year-end Wrapped lists are always something to behold; a unique and deeply fascinating form of social anthropology. But in 2020, a year defined by unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety, it was all the more intriguing to get a peek into the audio offerings that helped get people through it all. Some takeaways, according …
If you balk at the idea of wearing socks in bed (or indeed, at the thought of someone else doing so), a viral TikTok might just have you delving into that sock drawer by nightfall. A video extolling the benefits of sleeping in your socks shared by @Doctorjesss – real name, Doctor Jess Andrade – …
Whether it’s the worldwide health pandemic or the constant threat of global warming, we’ve been under a bit of stress lately. It isn’t just this year, either. Statistics from 2018 – a time when the world was, arguably, a much easier place – showed that a huge 74 per cent of us felt so stressed …
I remember walking down Oxford Street on Friday 8 July 2016, joining masses of other Black people to cry, “No justice, no peace.” Only a few days after protesting again, with that same plea for humanity, I can’t help but reflect on how our vulnerability has once again been put on display, for others to …