If publishers were being truthful about their “New Year, New You” books, they’d all have the same title: “Eight Great Habits That Won’t Last a Week.” But that’s OK. Many of us really do look forward to beginning the New Year with a bit of a tuneup. Or at least trying to. Here are a couple of great places to start.
Eat Your Ice Cream
by Ezekiel J. Emanuel
As much as I admire the guy who was an architect of the Affordable Care Act, I’d be a little scared to talk to him at a party, what with his penchant for thoughts like “every second we live can never be recovered.” Still, the six wellness practices at the heart of EAT YOUR ICE CREAM (Norton, 256 pp., $28.99) are simple, straightforward and deeply rooted in science, and he writes amusingly about all of them.
Here are the SparkNotes: Avoid self-destructive habits, like smoking and not getting vaccinated (a chapter he titles “Don’t Be A Schmuck” ); cultivate family and friends (social isolation has been linked to proteins in the blood that increase inflammation and weaken the immune system); stay mentally sharp; consume healthy food and drink; exercise well and regularly; and get the rest you need. It’s info we all know, but after reading Emanuel — we know.
Along the way we get startling bits of health information that are easy to put into practice. For example: People who get the shingles vaccine have a lower risk of developing dementia — something that I, a person who last week lost her keys and eventually found them nesting in one of her shoes, found both useful and immediately actionable.
Cooking Your Way to Calm
by Julie Ohana
In COOKING YOUR WAY TO CALM (Sheldon Press, 192 pp., paperback, $18.99), Ohana, who practices what she calls “culinary art therapy,” makes a strong case for the kitchen’s ability to quell our nerves — assuming that you are not averse to cooking to begin with. (If your idea of a perfect night involves Uber Eats, better to skip this book.) It’s not just that the repetitive acts of chopping, mixing and pouring are soothing in and of themselves; it’s that the skills involved in cooking can translate to our lives outside the kitchen.
So, for instance, because smell and taste can unlock early childhood memories (the so-called Proust effect), cooking “gives us a different perspective on who we are and how we got here,” Ohana explains. Cooking can help you learn to be more flexible — if you substitute walnuts for pecans, the Nut Police won’t come bursting through the door — and it can give you confidence. Perhaps the best thing about cooking is that on most days there’s not much at stake: You screw up, and the next day you’ll do better.
Reading Ohana’s book reminded me of what the British chef Nigella Lawson, who famously suffers from anxiety, has said about cooking during fraught times. “It cannot always calm, but it does so much else that is so very necessary: It imposes order; gives us purpose; unleashes creativity; sustains us bodily and emotionally.”
Money Proud
by Nick Wolny
I would never think that learning to take care of oneself financially would be any different whether you were queer or straight. Wolney, a finance columnist for Out magazine, would disagree. In MONEY PROUD (Morrow, 320 pp., $24), he argues that the psychology behind savings and spending can be very different in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, where, he points out, people “have a long history of enduring economic discrimination.”
Wolny gives us all the basics on paying off debt, getting impulse spending under control, socking away money for the future, investing and so forth, and he does it with a verve you don’t usually find in personal finance books. (I like the pull-outs throughout the book labeled “Tea” — short, snappy definitions of things like debt-to-income ratio, disposable income, modified savings rates. OK, it’s not TMZ, but it got me to pay attention.)
He’s also not a purist about all things financial. When he threw out his back on a squat machine (“so butch!,” he writes), he was in excruciating pain for months and almost unable to work. That experience made him realize that “health is wealth” — and that a trainer and the occasional massage were, for him, necessities.
So does it matter that this book is geared toward the queer community? Nah. This is just a fun, well-written primer on a subject that’s usually a snooze.
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