Five things: Eggs, Cancer, Productivity and More.

The first time someone’s faced with a scary diagnosis like cancer, they’re instantly thrown into a world of helplessness: How and Why? Soon, they make their way to the question: Now what? How to solve this?

Thankfully, treatments have evolved. This disease isn’t always a death sentence. Medicine is available, but only after the disease has shown up. And it won’t do much apart from trying to fight it.

Once someone’s hit with the news, there’s also no dearth of advice flowing in from everywhere. And when there’s SO much advice—they’re likely to stick to one source—a doctor or medical professional.

Though helpful during times of crisis, this advice doesn’t always keep in mind the prevention of recurrence. Once the initial battle is fought, apart from (very) few restrictions, the patient is happily sent home to return to a life of normalcy.

In the celebration of seeing “No Evidence of Disease” on paper, they’re likely to want to forget this ever happened and put it behind them.

But a key detail that’s lost in the chaos: How does one equip and retrain their body to keep fighting cancer while medicines are supporting them and, importantly, when the medicines stop supporting them?

Despite having spent a good amount of time in research two years ago for a loved one, I had missed a bunch of details: learning about cachexia, the alkaline vs acidic state, and how cancer patients shouldn’t be encouraged to “keep eating” just because they’re losing weight!

If you’re intrigued by why patients in chemo wards are served gulaab jaamuns along with their food and why you heard a doctor tell a patient they can occasionally enjoy a glass of whisky during treatment, this article might help you form your framework on how to look at the disease and deal with it.

If you’re helping someone navigate this world and trying to understand this disease on a cellular level—what fights it and what feeds it—this article by Luke Coutinho will definitely help you.

Link to article: Cancer Diet: Eating Right When You Have Cancer – Luke Coutinho

Article in video form:

3) What could someone with a cancer diagnosis (and their loved ones) read?

The last thing you expect from a book about cancer is for every third sentence to make you laugh out loud. But that’s what happens when a writer walks into a chemo ward. A lot that’s gone unnoticed or undocumented by others is going to show up here.

From realising that the cancer department at most hospitals is “a cross between the Kumbh Mela and a local train”, wondering if the Oral Contra given to you during a PET scan will “make your radioactive pee glow in the dark”, doing a happy dance when a doctor tells you there’s not enough fat on your body to cut and use for a breast reconstruction surgery, to figuring how to get a table at the busiest sushi restaurant before surgery to choosing the right neighbours for the treatment—Shormistha Mukherjee talks about the hard stuff, the heartwarming stuff and everything in between in her book.

Self-help books and accounts of the emotional turmoil cancer causes have their own merits. But this one’s different and rare. It feels like the kind of long chat where you close down a restaurant with your funniest friend, who’s wearing their surgery scars with a sense of lightness.

Link to the book: Cancer, You Picked The Wrong Girl

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4) Is productivity a rigged game?

At the risk of sounding like a dudebro, I must confess: I had a phase where I tried to “optimize” life. I read books about productivity and strived to become the kind of person who checked off large task lists with ease.

I was worried I’d started sounding like a man who took himself too seriously while doing this and hid the books’ covers in public because I’ve only ever heard men talk about this stuff.

Despite making notes from podcasts and books written by Cal Newport—the ultimate productivity guru—this lifestyle simply wasn’t working for me. I’d stick to the tips for two days and slip back into the routine of indecisiveness after.

Then came the tweets and LinkedIn posts about how Ankur Warikoo’s morning routine didn’t take into account the domestic responsibilities women have and how culturally, they’re expected to do a lot more. But this did not apply to me. I do not manage a home and have it ridiculously easy—a perk of being an only child in a family that loves to pamper.

So what was going wrong? One simple thing: Newport’s body did not function like mine.

I discovered this while reading Aruna Chawla’s fascinating take on modern productivity. Chawla (a 2x founder in female healthcare, trained nutrition coach, biohacker, and health behaviour researcher and TBT contributor) explains it clearly:

“Modern productivity systems haven’t been designed for or around women. They’re modelled on a male 24-hour hormonal cycle (the circadian rhythm), which doesn’t account for the unique fluctuations of the female hormonal cycle (the infradian rhythm).”

I didn’t even know an infradian rhythm existed! (This is the biological rhythm that operates over a period longer than 24 hours—in women, it’s typically the monthly cycle that influences energy, mood, cognitive function and metabolism.)

Her piece explains why traditional productivity advice feels lacking for women (beyond the cultural and domestic expectations) and how menstrual unproductivity is a systemic problem. It goes on to give you actionable tips on how to biohack productivity using the menstrual cycle—not ignoring it.

Read the article here:

Stop Defending the Castle: Why Modern Productivity is Failing Women

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5) OCD can take so many forms.

There’s a podcast episode in which a popular Indian comedian talks about how he had to complete certain rituals 8 times or 8^n times—8, 64, 512 times. He did this because he was convinced something bad would happen to his family if he didn’t.

In a standup set, another comedian talked about something similar: she had to stay locked in her bedroom as a child, chanting a few words, because she was convinced this would help save the Earth from a calamity. This also had to be done a specific number of times.

A close friend once told me about a harmless ritual she had to follow, without which she’d feel antsy all the time. It all sounded like anxiety to me—which we all lowkey have, don’t we? In their cases, it seemed like more. The cases ranged from slightly exhausting to debilitating.

Then, I stumbled upon an article from NPR LifeKit that opened up the world of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—OCD—to me. A mental health condition that causes repetitive thoughts and unwanted behaviours.

It explained how the root cause is anxiety, but there’s a lot more to this mental health condition.

We’ve reached the level of public understanding that we shouldn’t throw around the term OCD casually. We also know that because someone likes to be organised and washes their hands repetitively simply does not mean they have it.

But what next? What is OCD then? Can it show up in ways that do not have physical manifestations? Can it be entirely internalised? How does one know when to get help?

After reading the article, I realised how the discourse around OCD is dangerously limited.

This NPR LifeKit piece might help you understand the condition better and potentially help someone who may be dealing with it.

Read it here: This is what it’s really like to have OCD, according to 4 people living with it.