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Roughly a third of people follow a prescription exactly as it is written, and keeping to a diet or an activity plan goes worse than that. Which means a modest change you keep beats an excellent one you abandon by the end of the month. Choose on that basis, and treat a plan that lasted three days as information about the plan rather than a verdict on you.
God wants ease for you, not hardship (Quran 2:185). Ease is not a lowering of the standard, it is what makes a thing possible to keep.
البقرة
شَهۡرُ رَمَضَانَ ٱلَّذِيٓ أُنزِلَ فِيهِ ٱلۡقُرۡءَانُ هُدࣰ ى لِّلنَّاسِ وَبَيِّنَٰتࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡهُدَىٰ وَٱلۡفُرۡقَانِۚ فَمَن شَهِدَ مِنكُمُ ٱلشَّهۡرَ فَلۡيَصُمۡهُۖ وَمَن كَانَ مَرِيضًا أَوۡ عَلَىٰ سَفَرࣲ فَعِدَّةࣱ مِّنۡ أَيَّامٍ أُخَرَۗ يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ بِكُمُ ٱلۡيُسۡرَ وَلَا يُرِيدُ بِكُمُ ٱلۡعُسۡرَ وَلِتُكۡمِلُواْ ٱلۡعِدَّةَ وَلِتُكَبِّرُواْ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ مَا هَدَىٰكُمۡ وَلَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
It was in the month of Ramadan that the Quran was revealed as guidance for mankind, clear messages giving guidance and distinguishing between right and wrong. So any one of you who is present that month should fast, and anyone who is ill or on a journey should make up for the lost days by fasting on other days later. God wants ease for you, not hardship. He wants you to complete the prescribed period and to glorify Him for having guided you, so that you may be thankful
Qur’an 2:185read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Structured programmes that people stay in look reasonably kind to mental health. A meta-analysis of adult behavioural weight management interventions found they did not worsen mental health and were associated with small improvements in depressive symptoms, which cuts against the assumption that structured effort around eating must be miserable. The improvements were small, so read it as reassurance rather than a reason to expect a lift.
Jones RA, Lawlor ER, Birch JM, Patel MI, Werneck AO, Hoare E, Griffin SJ, van Sluijs EMF, Sharp SJ, Ahern AL. (2021). The impact of adult behavioural weight management interventions on mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
What you get in a real life is the strength of a thing multiplied by how much of it you actually do.
The vitamin D in a general multivitamin is a maintenance amount, nowhere near what is used to correct a real deficiency. If your level is genuinely low, that is a prescribing conversation with blood tests behind it, not a shelf in the chemist.
Before settling on a purely psychological account of months of anxiety or broken sleep, it is worth having the ordinary bloods done. Low iron, low vitamin D or low magnesium can produce symptoms that look exactly like a mental health problem.
Even where a herb has good evidence behind it, that evidence belongs to the plant and not to the bottle in your hand. Testing keeps turning up products that do not contain what the label says.