Men's Health Australia June 2022

“I KNOW YOU CAN BE OVERWHELMED, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?” A little known fact: in Editor’s School one is taught that all great Ed’s Letters must start with a quote from a classic ’90s movie and end with a reference to a historical figure. What could be more quintessentially ’90s, then, than 10 Things I Hate About You? And what could be more memorable than the immortal, if maddingly whimsical head-scratcher posed by Gabrielle Union’s character Chastity. Chastity might not have got a satisfactory answer (in Europe?!) to her emotional conundrum, but I, for one, wholeheartedly believe that, yes, you can be ‘whelmed’. After 18 months of intermittent lockdowns, with three vaccine doses coursing gloriously through my veins and the promise of a…

THE BIG QUESTION Q Is it safe to do my regular workout when I’m fasting for 24-hour periods? – EM Sounds like you’ve signed up for Eat Stop Eat, a popular form of intermittent fasting (IF) in which you fast for 24 hours once or twice a week. Or, you may just be coming off the holy month of Ramadan – a period of 30 days during which no foods or liquids are ingested between sunrise and sunset – and you’re wondering if you can manage it better next time around. For anyone intent on abstaining from food – be that for spiritual reflection, health and fitness, or simply a desire to challenge yourself – fitness trainer Faisal Abdalla, who began fasting for Ramadan aged 11, has some advice. A sought-after authority on fuelling…

Q My ex and I broke up because she cheated on me but we’re talking about getting back together. Is this a good idea or does ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’ apply here? – RH Jess: I don’t see any truth in the ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’ argument. Very unfair. Nik: It wouldn’t apply to everyone, but I’d approach getting back together with caution. You’ll need to have the painful talk about why she cheated and know that if you do get back together there’s a chance it’ll happen again. Jess: Discuss the motivations around her cheating. Really unpack what happened. Park your ego and approach it honestly. Was she unhappy? Did she feel things had grown stale and wanted to spice things up? Was it a case of her…

YOUR MONTHLY DOWNLOAD OF THE LATEST LIFE ENHANCING RESEARCH MUCH HAS BEEN made of the rise in sales of erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs during the pandemic. Last summer, Superdrug announced that it had logged a 30 per cent year-on-year increase in orders, while online searches about the condition rose to their highest levels in 12 months. A positive spin would be that stay-home guidelines resulted in more moments of personal closeness, and that macho stigmas related to medication are fading. Yet ED, which affects around one in five men, is often symptomatic of stress and depression – both of which have spiked as coronavirus upset the rhythms of ordinary life. And, with 60 pills of Viagra costing close to $100, the reality is that – unless prescribed by a doctor – a…

ONE DAY IN 2001, film-maker Edgar Wright switched on his TV and saw a vision of Armageddon: a giant bonfire of cows smoking against the English sky. Having avoided the news for a fortnight, the emergence of foot-and-mouth disease had completely passed him by. The horrific footage made him realise that “the world could be ending” without you noticing – an insight that he translated into his 2004 zombie flick, Shaun Of The Dead. It’s an insight that has resonance today as the global population swells and demand for animal protein sources grows. Dairy farming is hurrying us towards climate apocalypse. The cattle industry alone is as large a polluter as the entire construction sector. With soya bean cultivation another major source of greenhouse gas emissions, the time has come for…

YOU MIGHT WANT to think twice before finishing a text with a frown face or angry icon. As harmless as it might seem to you, chances are your recipient will regard you as a downer. “But, ” you say, “I was being ironic. I meant it as a joke. What’s wrong with people?” (Insert head-exploding emoji here.) Doesn’t matter. A new study by the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology has found that using negative emojis in text messages produces a negative perception of the sender, regardless of intent. (Insert head-scratching emoji here.) In the study, researchers tracked the eye movements of 38 undergraduate students shown sentences that were negative, positive or neutral. Each sentence was accompanied by a negative, positive or neutral emoji, or no emoji at all. Participants were then asked…