“The GLP-1 Lifestyle: Transform Your Metabolism & Achieve Lasting Weight Loss With Or Without Semaglutide”

Anesthesiologist Joshua Hackett grew up in Chico, attended Chico State, and now practices in Humboldt County. He has a “passion project: increasing metabolic health for the general population.”

Hackett’s project is carefully presented in “The GLP-1 Lifestyle: Transform Your Metabolism & Achieve Lasting Weight Loss With Or Without Semaglutide” ($14.99 in paperback, independently published, see facebook.com/groups/glp1lifestyle; also for Amazon Kindle). His book is for educational purposes and is “not a substitute for professional medical advice.” 

“Semaglutide,” he writes, “is a medication initially designed to treat type 2 diabetes”; it’s also proving effective in “harnessing the power of our own biology, targeting the hormonal imbalances and physiological mechanisms that contribute to weight gain. At least that’s what the commercials want you to believe. Of course, part is true, part is false, and part is unknown.” (A lengthy bibliography points to medical journal articles as well as non-academic sources.)

Semaglutides are GLP-1 “receptor agonists” (binding to a cell receptor producing a similar effect as the body’s natural function) which are in such medications as Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus. “GLP-1 influences digestion by slowing down the rate at which food leaves the stomach,” stimulates “insulin release from the pancreas,” and sends “a message to the brain that we’ve had enough to eat.”

There’s great detail about how GLP-1 works but Hackett alerts readers to side effects (some severe)--and the rebound, when weight comes right back. Instead, “the goal is to utilize semaglutide as a catalyst for change, a springboard to a healthier lifestyle that can be sustained even after the medication is discontinued.”

The second half of the book details a holistic approach to weight control, focusing on exercise and meal plans that aid one’s gut health; the gut “produces GLP-1” and “is the epicenter of the entire immune system.” Hackett also encourages sunlight exposure (for vitamin D production) and “grounding,” putting bare feet on the earth, which aids in stress reduction. And, if needed, supplements.

Hackett refrains from exaggerated claims, even for measures he advocates. His focus at the end is on healthy habits and not wonder drugs, however wonderful they may be. 

“When The Cows Lie Down: The Reason People Quit You—Their ‘Leader’”

Retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Dave Nordel grew up in Orland. While the Air Force “made me a medic” the cows in Orland made him wise. 

“As I grew older,” he writes in his winsome guide to leading, “and became a contributor to the daily activities it takes to run a farm or an orchard … this required a few roles to ensure I did it right. One role is a trainer and leader, one is a cheerleader, and one is a mentor.”

“Back then,” he adds, “the coffee was a must before you started the milking. … The best of all was you got your cup, went to the first cow to be milked, and squirted your cream right from the cow into the cup. It was heaven….”

Years later, on a fishing boat with friends, he noticed cows near the dock all hunkered down. That meant bad weather was on the way. So now he asks those in charge: “What are the cows doing, do you still check, do you notice the changes, or have you quit paying attention to the subtle (or not-so-subtle) signs of a pending storm, illness, or problem with our followers or processes?”

“When The Cows Lie Down: The Reason People Quit You—Their ‘Leader’” ($19.99 in paperback from Max Fab Consulting; also for Amazon Kindle) illustrates leadership principles from farm experiences; Nordel’s time as a medic in Iraq (where “we had some terrible incidents of suicide and near-death, self-inflicted injuries … And what did we quit noticing or doing?”); and as a consultant (maxfabconsulting.com) showing leaders how to maintain “Maximum Fabulous” attitudes—bringing one’s best to a war zone or an office team in danger of “lying down” or quiet quitting.

Along the way readers meet those who have been transformative in Nordel’s life, like Paul, his First Sergeant (“Shirt” for short), who later developed “severe cancer. He was scared—not scared of dying but scared of quitting. He didn’t want to quit his people, quit his family, and not answer the call.” Attitude, he told Nordel, “is everything.”

The book exemplifies vulnerable, compassionate, and effective leadership.

“Life In Transition: Essays And Diversions”

“I was born in Chico,” author Karen Gilden writes me, though she spent most of her public school career in Willows. Her dad worked for the U.S. Forest Service there and “Mom was the secretary at the grammar school in Willows for years.”

She went to Chico State for a year, but really wanted to travel. In 1970 she and her husband, Ray, moved to Eugene, Oregon and in 1977 spent six months journeying through Europe and the USSR. They lived in Turkey and southern France. She became a freelance writer, blogging (“Random Vectors” on Substack) and writing books.

After Ray passed away early in 2018, Gilden began compiling some of her and Ray’s favorite travel pieces. “Life In Transition: Essays And Diversions” ($12 in paperback; also for Amazon Kindle) is a celebration of cultures and the natural world, and a poignant account of caregiving and loss.

“The poet John Berryman once said, ‘We must travel in the direction of our fear.’ He was speaking, I think, about the fear that nibbles away at our self assurance, the fear that cramps our gut, inhibits creativity and risk-taking, and denies us the right to shine in front of strangers. And somehow I find that, unaware and without forethought, I have followed Berryman’s advice. … There is nothing better I think, than putting yourself in a difficult position and coming out of it whole, and travel is an engaging way to do that. It may even be addictive.”

In 1996 they moved to a small town in Turkey. “Nothing mechanical ever seems to be junked here, it gets rebuilt and repainted and repaired and resold and recycled and redeemed.”

Now, without Ray’s voice, Gilden must find her own way. “There is no pattern to grief,” she observes, “and that lack of pattern makes it confusing and difficult. Just when you think things are looking up, down you go.” Her heart “makes room for boundless love and seemingly endless grief.” It is a painful transition, as one year, one era, gives way to the next. But it is also a hopeful time because, she writes, “there’s still so much to see.”

“Advent: The Season Of Hope”

“Part of why we observe Advent,” writes Episcopal priest Tish Harrison Warren, “is to make Christmas weird again, to allow the shock of the incarnation to take us aback once more.” Advent (from a Latin word that means “coming”) begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, “which through each passing week will slowly unfurl the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit.”

Advent closes with a focus on the coming of the Christ Child celebrated on Christmas Day. Yet, as Warren points out in “Advent: The Season Of Hope” ($20.99 in hardcover from InterVarsity Press; also for Amazon Kindle), Christians believe “not just in one coming of Christ but in three: the coming of Christ in the incarnation, the coming of Christ in what Scripture terms ‘the last days,’ and the coming of Christ in our present moment, through the Holy Spirit’s work and through Word and sacrament….”

Her book is a warm and accessible entry into Advent’s four weeks of waiting, hoping, anticipating. In five short chapters (Yearning, Longing, Crying Out, Stirring, Approaching) she melds church history with her personal story of coming to terms with Advent. By that she means what she first thought was a month-long preparation for Christmas was actually about much more. “I was surprised to discover … that Advent is uncomfortably and unavoidably apocalyptic, more concerned with a vast cosmic battle than dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.”

It's not about bad second-coming theology, which produces fear, but the yearning for the return of Christ “in glory,” where “Death will be undone. Tears will be wiped away,” where “all of our longings meet their end in Christ coming again, bringing healing, peace, joy, and an unimaginable wholeness in his wake.”

The coming of the Holy Spirt at Pentecost created the church, however imperfect, and, as she quotes theologian Michael Horton, who grew up in Paradise, it is now “the age that Jesus inaugurated … disrupting the powers and principalities that keep us from recognizing him.”

And so, she writes, “We need him to come to us, to rescue and restore us, even today, in our everyday lives.”

“Cenzontle: Poems”

Marysville author-poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo recently spoke to Butte College students, reading from his memoir “Children Of The Land.” An immigration advocate and part of the college’s Diversity Speaker Series, Hernandez Castillo was born in Tepechitlan Zacatecas, Mexico, studied at Sacramento State, and “was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan.”

His award-winning book, “Cenzontle: Poems” ($17 in paperback from BOA Editions Ltd.; also for Amazon Kindle) is a kind of ever-changing song: “The song becoming the bird becoming the song.” “Cenzontle,” we are told, “means mockingbird in Spanish and comes from the Nahuatl word centzuntli, which refers to one who holds 400 voices or songs.” The voices are many in these poems, the meanings elusive. 

The young poet grasps for meaning as well. In the title poem, the mockingbird echoes something beyond words even as the poet is trying to find just those words. “Can you wash me without my body/ coming apart in your hands?/ Call it wound--/ call it beginning--/ The bird’s beak twisted/ into a small circle of awe.// You called it cutting apart,/ I called it song.” 

Behind many of the poems is Hernandez Castillo’s own story and the story of undocumented family members, deportations, a severe life in the home country and uncertainty in the States. 

And a father who beat him with a white belt he called Daisy. “And after it’s over, we know we have both become men./ Him for the beating,/ and me for taking his beating.” Yet somehow it’s an act of love: “I love you Daisy.// My father’s hands will love a man/ at the first sign of weakness./ I am weak/ therefore, I gather that he loves me.” It is a complicated relationship.

They all are: “We made love then argued,/ or, argued then made love.// It didn’t matter either way,/ everything had the aftertaste of gasoline….” Then: “I only wanted to look far enough back/ to see where I split in half.// How dumb we were/ endlessly searching/ for a definite shape/ our longing would take.// I leaned into you,/ all of you,/ as if in chorus.” 

The song lives.

“Letting All The Light In: Gracefully Surviving Illness, Injury, And Grief”

Dax Meredith (daxmeredith.com), the pen name of a Chico area author, college instructor and counselor, wrote of her escape from the Camp Fire in "The Sound Of The Snow Geese." But she is also dealing with a years-long debilitating illness. 

“Both the illness and the fire almost killed me,” she writes in “Letting All The Light In: Gracefully Surviving Illness, Injury, And Grief” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). “Twice now I have been much closer to death than I like to consider. But I am a better person because of it. … I am more patient, more grateful, more present in the moment each day because of those events.”

This is not a story of “arrival” but an ongoing journey as Meredith navigates the health care system and returns with cautionary tales. 

The book’s three parts include the harrowing memoir of her mysterious illness where, she writes, “The left side of my face was numb for almost a year. … My spine was numb. I remember constant and continual migraine headaches. The pain was excruciating. I remember endless vomiting, blurred vision or partial and temporary blindness, and on several occasions, hallucinations.” She adds: “As a general rule of thumb, hallucinations are just not a good sign.”

The second part features short interviews with two dozen sufferers, of all ages, each presenting the biggest challenge (including grief at the loss of a son and wife, amputation, addiction, miscarriages, multiple cancers, depression), resources used, the person’s belief system (some are Christian, some “spiritual,” some have no professed religious commitment), what others need to know, the roughest parts, and what wisdom has emerged. The accounts are devastating, gut-wrenching, in part because this is you or someone you know.

The final section is practical advice; Meredith covers everything to be aware of, from how to talk with one’s children to fighting the judgment from others and oneself. “I don’t believe all the bad things that occur are a punishment from God. But there are lessons in the bad things that happen to us.”

With graceful kindness, Meredith may well change how you understand your very life.

“Even Broken-Winged Divas Can Fly”

Forty-something Chicoan Jennifer Kuhns (www.jenniferkuhns.net) has published more than a dozen books. “I write children’s books,” she tells readers in her latest memoir, “most of which have a disabled protagonist with a strong and positive character and attitude. Well, maybe a little bit of a snarky attitude … What can I say? I put a little bit of me into all of my characters.”

Her own story is told in “Little Diva On Wheels: Growing Up Differently-Abled” and now “Even Broken-Winged Divas Can Fly” ($16.95 in paperback from Shalako Press) which focuses on her high school and college days. Born ten weeks early, diagnosed with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, Kuhns notes that while “my fine motor manual dexterity is basically non-existent,” she has “the ability to memorize like a freaking elephant.”

This “broken-winged diva” has a penchant for literary symbolism, “a strange sense of humor,” a competitive instinct, and self-advocacy.

Her cerebral palsy affects speech. “I can say the word. The problem is ‘saying’ and ‘enunciating’ a word are two absolutely, completely, different animals.” Most of her family members, friends, and those who have interacted with a disabled person understand what she calls her “CP-babblelistics.” She is “greeted, not ignored. I was spoken to, not at. I was not made to feel like I had leprosy. And I was verbally understood.”

Perhaps other adults lack the patience or are afraid, but there is no rancor in Kuhns’ description. Instead, she reveals a well-rounded life, including raising a sheep and an awkward relationship with her mother: Mom is the boss at home, but she is also hired as an aide by the Department of Rehabilitation and so Jennifer is her boss at school.

“I’ve not always been happy about my condition, my situation in life. I’ve been mad, and I’ve been sad, and I’ve hated the body I’m in.” And yet, “I know how to harp like nobody’s business to get what I need, want, or think I should have … not that it always works.” 

A color section at the end showing some of her tattoos (one for each book published), receiving her MA, and newspaper clippings, demonstrates that something very much worked.