Corporate Cooking May Be “Cooking Your Goose”

 

I’m a long-time fan of Michael Pollan, author, journalist, food activist and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His books “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food” played a major role in raising my awareness of the unhealthy nature of our food industry.

His clever, simple and straightforward book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”, is one of the best $15 investments one can make toward developing a healthy lifestyle through dietary habits.  Eighty-three simple rules for eating better.

All of them simple – but simply overlooked in our corporate-dominated food-supply environment.

Here are a couple of rules from the book:

Rule # 20:  Don’t Ingest Foods Made in Places Where Everyone Is Required to Wear a Surgical Cap.

Rule # 21:  If It Came from a Plant, Eat It; If It Was Made in a Plant, Don’t.

Pollan has not strayed from his quest to get the truth out about the dark side of our food industry.  Click on this  Pollan Youtube video to get a sampling of some of the behind-the-scenes deception that goes on in big corporate food.

How ’bout the comment toward the end of the video: “Evidence shows that poor women who cook have healthier diets than wealthy women who don’t”.

Ouch!

Convenience at the expense of health

We look to and expect corporations to do more and more things for us in the name of convenience and saving time.  And generally, they continue to do a good job.  One can hardly argue against Alexa, self-propelled lawnmowers, GPS, Google, fast food – oops.  We have to stop there.

Fast food tilts the wrong way on the risk-reward scale of convenience.  Definite time-saver; definite health risk.

I’m sure you get tired of hearing it:

  • Two-thirds of the American population is overweight; one-third of American men are obese.
  • Type 2 diabetes, which is largely attributable to dietary habits and was virtually unheard of 40 years ago, has now reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. and is now showing up in children.  According to our own American Medical Association, half of our American population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic and 70% don’t know it. 
  •  The five major killer diseases in our country remain unchanged: heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and dementia – all highly attributable to what we put in our mouths.

You’d think maybe we’d start paying attention at some point before individual health crises hit.  But it doesn’t appear that we really care – or know enough to really care.

Our taste buds have been hijacked by the food industry.

Pollan refers to the research that the industry does to determine and then feed our “craveabilty”.  We know it centers around clever manipulation of sugar, salt and fat. Once we are hooked on that deadly combination, so cleverly baked (pun, yes) into processed foods, it’s hard to break away.

I’ll attest to it.  My diet is now 95% plant and whole-grain based.  At a recent family gathering, I succumbed to eating a cheeseburger and a brat.  With the brat, it was like I had died and gone to heaven!!  My taste buds were reveling in my sin!

That evening, and into the next day, I felt like crap!  My taste bud cells had loved it – the rest of my cells apparently felt assaulted.

Corporate cooking vs home cooking

Pollan confirms big food manufacturer’s focus on profitability at the expense of our health.  The same holds true for most restaurant food, especially the fast-food type, themselves the purveyors of much of this manufactured, processed food.  Research has shown that restaurant food generally is as much as 26% higher in calories than food cooked at home.  And the food is often calorie-dense and high-glycemic because that’s what people crave, contributing to blood sugar spikes.

Nonetheless, as I pointed out in a previous blog,  we love the convenience (and taste bud gratification) of eating out.  2015 was the first year that Americans spent more eating-out than they did cooking at home.

Actions have consequences.  We’re getting bigger, but not any taller.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, I guess it’s not rocket science to tie most of this together. We’re getting fatter, less healthy and dying way too early while corporate and restaurant cooking increase their share of our diet.

Pollan says it beautifully in “Food Rules”, p.9: “What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick.”

Enough rant, already – solution, please!

Again, Pollan makes it simple with the phrase for which he is best known:

“Eat food, not too much.  Mostly plants”. 

So, the solution, thus described, is really quite simple.  Easy?  Not so much.

Following the discovery in 2016 that I have some cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the form of fairly significant arterial calcification, I’ve eliminated meat and dairy (OK – 99% of it – the brat exposed me), eat very little chicken (may be worse for me than meat) and drastically reduced my intake of anything made with white flour (fiberless and non-nutritional).  A sugared drink hasn’t passed my lips in years (including fruit juice, energy drinks).  And I’ve worked harder at staying hydrated.

Easy for me?  Not really, but probably easier than for most.  Why?  Three reasons:

  1. A minor health scare when the heart scan report came back.  The heart scan informed me that a price is being paid for six decades of inattention to a healthy diet and that rocked my world enough to want to understand why and what can be done about it.
  2. A mindset reinforced by knowledge.  My research into documented proof of heart disease reversal helped me develop a mindset dedicated to habit changes that will enable me to, at a minimum, stop the calcification and possibly even reverse it.
  3. I sleep with a fantastic “gatekeeper”.  My wife controls what leaves the grocery store and goes into our fridge and pantry.  She’s been ahead of me for years on the importance of keeping our food stock devoid of what we know is unhealthy and full of what we’ve learned is healthy.

But, don’t do what I did – please!  Don’t wait for some health scare before you educate yourself and adopt better eating and other health habits.  Begin now to exercise “self-efficacy” and take control of your health and become knowledgeable how your body works and what it takes to make it work optimally.  And, if possible, get on the same page with your spouse or partner on what is good for you.  If that won’t work, take charge and become your own gatekeeper.

Your life depends on it.

You can find deeper content on all this in my free e-book entitled “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier and With More Purpose”.  Access it here www.makeagingwork.com

Also, scroll down and leave us a comment or your thoughts on this topic.  We love your feedback.

 

Are You a Fugitive From Yourself?

 

“Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves — we can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people, and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within — by middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”  John Gardner

Accomplished fugitives from ourselves?

Ouch! I kinda wish I hadn’t run across that quote again.

I bumped into it on my third trip through a favorite book, “Life Launch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life” by Pamela McLean and Frederic Hudson.  That quote is highlighted, underlined, asterisked and the page paper-clipped.  In my lexicon of weird reading habits, that means five-star important – stop, listen, reflect.

Reflection tends to reveal truth. Truth can hurt but truth is reality.

Reality is, I’m still a fugitive.

Feeling better about my fugitive status

Currently, I’m a fugitive with mostly misdemeanors – no new felonies.  A quarter-century ago, at that 50-year middle-life point, I was guilty of felonies, a handful of them, all inter-related.  I’m not going all-naked, but here are a few of the more serious felonies:

  • Suppression of my essential self
  • Succumbing to culturally-defined external roles (aka building someone else’s dream)
  • Thinking only in an ideological/theological bubble, hearing mostly echoes
  • Comparison

It wasn’t enough that I ran into the Gardner quote.  Then Martha Beck stepped up 18 months ago with her book version of a groin kick called “Finding Your North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” to remind me that, although I may have expunged some of the felonies, some remain, along with far too many misdemeanors. Much work is still to be done to uncover and release my “essential self.”

I have a paragraph from Beck’s book that I’ve memorized and try to proclaim every day:

“Freed from rigid social expectations, focused firmly on guidance from your essential self, you will stop conforming to any of the pre-designated patterns offered by your cultural environment.  Instead, you will turn your life into a work of art: an absolutely original expression of your unique gifts and preferences.”

Hmmmm. “-unique gifts and preferences.”  “-the fearful and wonderful life within.” “- life into a work of art.”   Ever think about these things?

Maybe (hopefully) you aren’t an off-the-chart, introverted, reclusive, grand –poopah of information gathering like me and have broken out and found those unique gifts and that wonderful inner life.  But I’ll stick my neck out and say you probably haven’t.

It’s a tough journey, this self-discovery trip.

Those unique gifts and wonderful inner life get pretty plastered over by the mid-forties/ the early fifties.  By that point, we’re saying I couldn’t possibly:

  • leave this job to write those books I know are inside me
  • start my own business
  • dig wells in Africa
  • give up my healthcare insurance
  • sacrifice my 401K match
  • betray my hard-won image

So, we crank along suppressing our own dreams in favor of building someone else’s, succumbing to the grip of comparison, maintaining a “look good, smell good” image at all costs, seeking life-sapping comfort instead of life-affirming risk, all the while denying that time is slipping away ever more rapidly.

In the court of life potential, these are all felonies.

Then at mid-life, we create our own internal prisons.  And the prison guards/interrogators in there are cruel, incessant, with questions like:

  • Really? This is all you’ve got to show for your life?
  • Why do you think you are here?
  • How do you feel about just taking up space and using up oxygen?
  • What part of “you can’t take it with you” do you not understand?
  • You’re concerned about what gossipy Joe and Emma next door might think if you break out? What’s up with that?
  • When are you going to let the “real you” come alive?
  • How much longer are you going to refuse to admit that you are uniquely gifted and off purpose?
  • Would a remedial class on having an impact and leaving a legacy help?

The dying have a message

Australian hospice nurse, Bronnie Ware, for many years has spent time with patients who are in the last few weeks of their lives and who have gone home to die.  In her article “Regrets of the Dying, she shares the five most common regrets that they expressed in their final days:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Regret #1 was by far the most common.

For many, the call to break out and be true to oneself while progressing into the second half/third stage of life intensifies and, at the same time, becomes increasingly difficult.

Most of this inertia is rooted in – wait for it – F-E-A-R.

 

False Expectations Appearing Real.

Want a few of those false expectations?  How many of these have NOT run through your mind?

  • I’d like to have my own business, but 90% of new businesses fail.
  • I have a voice, but who would be interested in what I have to say?
  • There’s already too much competition for what I want to write/sell/teach/build/consult.
  • I’d be foolish to put my retirement nest egg at risk.
  • I’m not sure I have the energy to break away and do what I really want to do.
  • My age is too much of a disadvantage in this youth-oriented society.
  • I might lose all my friends.
  • I’d be putting my family at risk.
  • I have no idea how to find this “purpose” thing.

In my free ebook “Achieve Your Full Life Potential”,  I relate a story about my own hard-headedness in this area.

The condensed version is that 30+ years ago, in my mid-40’s, I participated in a “spiritual gifts” analysis with a Bible-study group I was part of – a series of questions that purported to isolate what one was best “wired-up” spiritually to be doing with his or her life.

Mine came back as “pastor.”

My response.  Repulsion and sarcastic laughter.  C’mon! I’m a successful sales guy in telecom knocking down a comfortable six-figures.  No way – but thanks for playing!

Humility can be a b*^ch!

Years later, I ran into a thing called “Strengthsfinder”, developed by the Gallup organization and explained and administered through a book entitled “Now Discover Your Strengths”.  I took the test.  The analysis of my strengths was equally repulsive and, in my state of mind at the time, as off-mark as the pastor tag.

But, surprisingly similar.

Not accepting the results, I took the Strengthsfinder test again a year later – same results.  Still pastory.

Same derisive, sarcastic rejection on my part.

It’s an embarrassing confession, but I took the test a third time, this time following the publication of their new book, “Strengthsfinder 2.0”, assuming that they had gotten smarter with their testing.  It was a time when I was battling a debilitating sense of being off-purpose.

Same results. Still sounding an awful lot like “pastor.”

 

OK, God.  Got my attention.

The organized-religion community is fortunate and grateful that I didn’t pursue the pastorate.  And so am I.  But I am grateful that my tree was finally shaken enough to begin to acknowledge and move in the direction of my strengths/calling/purpose – pick the word that works best for you.  It was all three for me.

My extended Strengthsfinder trip revealed, each time, these five dominant talents:

  • Learner – I’m energized by the steady, deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. Hence the insanity of having read over 600 books over the last 12 years with less than a half-dozen novels in the mix.
  • Input – I find lots of things interesting, collect factoids and don’t throw any of them away, physically or mentally. (Please never come to my home office!  And now you can understand why I seem to be in perpetual confusion, flitting around like a fart on a hot skillet.)
  • Intellection – I like to think, stretch my brain muscles in different directions. I’m my own best companion and I’m constantly discontent comparing what I am doing with all the stuff rattling through my head.  (All you ADD/ADHD’s out there can relate, huh?)
  • Connectedness – things happen for a reason and I’m part of something much bigger than lil ‘ol me. MUCH bigger.
  • Includer/Harmony (seem to tie for a spot in the top five) – I steer away from confrontation and toward harmony and I rest on the conviction that fundamentally we are all the same.

So, what does one do with all this?  Well, for starters, few will be this unbalanced and long in their search, thankfully.  But for me, it turned on the lights and helped me acknowledge the “essential self” Martha Beck writes about.  I’m meant to write, teach, coach, encourage, speak, share my accumulation and perhaps, in a small way and on a rare occasion, inspire some to move to the truth of that “fearful and wonderful world within”.

It’s a journey started slowly in my mid-sixties, intensifying in my mid-seventies.  And I recognize it as one with no finish line.  My choice is to be excited about it or to be frustrated by it.  The culture-induced path of least resistance is to simply say “it’s too late to be growing” and settle back into comfort, convenience, comparison and complacency and wait for the end, which I now know would come sooner were I to succumb.

So, as I write, I’m a confessing “bad-ass, obnoxious, sarcastic, audacious-ager” intent on sliding home at 100 or later like Pete Rose slid into second!  My ”fearful and wonderful life within” means I have a voice and the messy story that has been my life is my message, warts and all.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a pearl in that mess that will spark a mid-lifer to seek, or acknowledge, their essential self and take it to the marketplace and leave a footprint.

Hey, I get it if not much of this resonates!  Thanks for enduring the trip.  But if you took this diatribe this far, I’m thinking something is stirring.  I hope you won’t stuff it back in.

 

Avoiding Retirement Chaos

 

 

Wouldn’t it be terrible to find out that retirement can really suck?

After all, you’ve shouldered through a grinding 30-40 year journey filled with marginally-motivating jobs and totally marginal bosses to get to this point.

You’ve sacrificed most of your “today’s” for the “tomorrow” that your financial advisor’s constantly changing charts, graphs and strategies say is out there for you.

In the 3-5 years leading up to the coveted date, your excitement has built, with plans for recreation, hobbies, travel, R&R.  You will be amongst the 91% who expect to be happy and the 80% who expect to be able to achieve their dreams.

You see your retirement as part or all of a remedy for unhappiness.

The numbers are there; the financial risks are isolated and covered and contingency plans are in place. The only thing left is to slide into the new lifestyle and reap the rewards of the sacrifice.  You’ve paid a big price for this third-stage-nirvana.

You’re entitled.

The date arrives.  Jubilation! Liberation!

Average duration:  One year

 

These numbers are courtesy of research done by the AgeWave organization headed by Dr. Ken Dychtwald, gerontologist, psychologist and one of the world’s foremost authorities on aging-related issues.  Dr. Dychtwald’s extensive research of 55,000 Baby Boomer retirees exposed many of the hidden realities of retirement.

AgeWave’s research revealed that there are five stages of retirement.

(I unpack this in my January 6 blog entitled the “The ‘$400 Trillion Time Bomb’ and ‘An Unnatural Act’”. )

Liberation is Stage 3.  The sucky part of retirement emerges and intensifies in stages 4 and 5 – Re-orientation and Reconciliation.

In a nutshell, AgeWave’s research revealed that the retirement honeymoon lasts 1-5 years and wears off with the discovery that retirement is more challenging and less satisfying than anticipated.  Other research has revealed that 75% of pre-retirees expect life to be better after retirement while only 40% of actual retirees report that to be the case.

Clearly, people discover that they hadn’t planned well for their retirement.  Often times, couples are not on the same page.  Boredom sets in.  Relationships diminish.  Health issues begin to accelerate.

In his free booklet “The Darkside of Retirement”   Financial Planner and Retirement Coach Robert Laura reveals some disturbing but important facts about the realities of retirement.

He writes:

“There is a hidden epidemic taking place in the shadows of retirement. It’s a chilling reality that will impact baby boomers and their families more deeply than any economic recession or market crash. It’s the dark side of retirement, where addiction, depression, and even suicide are quickly becoming so prominent that new and soon-to-be retirees must become more aware of the impact these powerful influences can have during retirement and develop a plan to avoid them.”

Here are just a few sobering facts:

  • It is expected that, by 2020, the number of retirees with alcohol and other drug problems will leap 150% to 4.4 million – up from only 1.7 million in 2001.
  • The National Institutes of Health reports that, of the 35 million Americans age 65 or older, nearly 2 million suffer from full-blown depression. Another 5 million suffer from less severe forms of the illness. Women are at a greater risk for depression because of biological factors such as hormonal changes and the stress that comes with maintaining relationships or caring for loved ones or children who are ill.
  • Depression is the single most significant risk factor for suicide among the elderly. Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a dramatic spike in suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50% to 30 per 100,000; and women in their early 60s, whose rate rose by nearly 60%.
  • A recent New York Times article noted that the overall, national rate of divorce in the United States is trending down. Except for one group: the 50-plusers, who have seen their rate of divorce surge 50% in the past 20 years. In fact, one in four couples divorce after age 50.

So, what else does your financial advisor know that he/she hasn’t told you?

Whoa – hold up!  Let’s not hang this on your CFP/CIMA/CPWA/AIF/CMFC/CRPC/AAMS (NOTE: you might want to consider a change if your financial advisor has all of these initials after their name!)

It’s not their job to guarantee you a happy, fruitful retirement.  They are just there for the numbers, the “hard side” of retirement.  And they’ve likely done a pretty good job for you in that regard.

Roger Whitney is a highly credentialed and successful financial planner with 25+ years of financial services industry experience.  In his refreshingly candid book “Rock Retirement” he provides some perspective on why you should only expect “hard number” assistance from your financial planner:

“The professions of financial planning and retirement planning came from the investment and insurance industries.  Until the recent advent of the financial-planning-degree programs at the university level, financial planners came from the sales forces in these industries.  Pause for a second: sales force.  They created the industry; they set the standards.

The truth is, although almost all advisors are well-intentioned and capable, they don’t have the skill set or training to think beyond investment solutions.”

In other words, most financial planners (i.e. salespeople) are not trained to go to the soft side of retirement and discuss the critical emotional, social, mental, psychological issues that emerge in any retirement. Theirs is a world of numbers, not counseling couches.

We’re on our own to prepare for the potential pitfalls of retirement.

We know that, unfortunately, 2 of 3 retirees enter their retirement with NO semblance of a non-financial plan.

Like an iceberg, most of what goes on in retirement is below the surface and outside of the conversations and planning that goes on with most financial advisors.

Serious non-financial considerations such as the mental, social, physical, and spiritual adjustments accompany every retirement. Just as a good, sturdy stool will have four strong legs, a fulfilling retirement will need attention to these four pillars to succeed. And most retirees go into retirement with little or no consideration of those “soft side” elements.

The “soft side” elements – mental, social, physical, spiritual – will raise their heads in any retirement.  But, if anticipated and planned for, they can help lead to a longer, fulfilling and healthier retirement and don’t need to be dark side elements.

But it’s important to get out in front of them.

That’s where a retirement coach can play a vital role.

Robert Laura, mentioned earlier, has been a retirement coach to pre- and new-retirees for years and has combined this experience and his financial planning background with the skills and experience of two psychology Ph.D.’s to develop a new Certified Professional Retirement Coach (CPRC) program.   I have completed the program and received that designation to add Retirement Coaching to my coaching services.  It’s a logical complement to the Career Coaching that I do.

We’ve developed a comprehensive program designed to help pre- and early- retirees avoid these dark side elements by focusing on the four non-financial pillars of retirement – mental, social, physical and spiritual – through a fun and enlightening eight-step process that culminates in a plan focused on achieving a “best-life-possible” retirement.

Curious?  Want to know more about the components and how it works?  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com or call my office at 720-344-7784 and we’ll set up a no-cost consultation to see if it makes sense for you.

OK, Old-timer. Do Your Part to Combat Ageism.

 

 

I suspect you caught what I just did with that headline.  I appealed for help in combating ageism by committing it.

So easy to let words that are ageist slip off our tongues – like “old-timer.” We’ll use it to describe ourselves.  We’ll casually, playfully tag friends with that monicker not realizing we are contributing to ageism.

It’s just one of a gazillion ways that we use words and phrases that prop up ageism.  It’s almost as if using ageist words and phrases is an expected part of the “rite of passage” as we pass that 50-year threshold.  Little do we realize how damaging it is, not only to the effort to eliminate ageism but also to our own self-esteem and, ultimately, to our aging process.

Words count. 

Holly Lawrence, freelance writer, in an article “How Would We Live If We Forgot We Were Over 50” written for Next Avenue, quotes a 61-year old bank vice president who admits: “One thing I say that I should not say is ‘Oh yeah, a senior moment’ or ‘Forgive me, I’m an old man, so I forget these things.’ I say things like that and I know that some people may find it, you know, humorous. On the other hand, it does depreciate my value as a professional.”

Ashton Applewhite, acclaimed writer and activist, has stepped boldly into the breach in the battle against ageism.  Her excellent book  “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” takes it on and the prejudice and the damage it does.  She refers to ageism as the last “-ism” that isn’t being addressed in our culture.   Some have termed it the  “last acceptable prejudice.”

Applewhite is not the only one that views this “-ism” as a problem.  The World Health Organization (WHO) agrees.  From their website, WHO offers up a couple of perspectives:

  • Research suggests that ageism may now be even more pervasive than sexism and racism. This has serious consequences both for older people and society at large. For example, ageism limits the questions that are asked and the way problems are conceptualized and is hence a major barrier to developing good policies.
  • Ageism has harmful effects on the health of older adults. Research by Levy et al shows that older adults with negative attitudes about aging may live 7.5 years less than those with positive attitudes.
  • Socially ingrained ageism can become self-fulfilling by promoting in older people stereotypes of social isolation, physical and cognitive decline, lack of physical activity and economic burden.

My takeaway from these and other sources is that there are two major culprits in the proliferation and embedding of ageism: (1) ourselves and (2) people and organizations of influence who stand to gain by the continuation and deepening of the “-ism”.

The exploitation of the aging is a topic for another article but we need to look no further than the proliferation of advertising for “fix it” drugs and the latest senior-living iteration to realize that we are a big, naive and highly-exploitable market.  But I digress

Each of us a big part of the problem.

Until I spent some time in Ashton Applewhite’s book, I hadn’t really considered how my own use of certain words or phrases are ageist and could subtly contribute to ageism.   Maybe you hadn’t considered it either.

Think about how often you’ve used or heard these:

  • I just had a senior moment.
  • This aging thing is for the birds/is no picnic/sucks!
  • What do you expect at your age? (If this comes from your doctor, change doctors!)
  • You certainly don’t look your age.
  • You’re not retired yet?
  • When are you going to retire?
  • How’s it going, gramps?
  • Whaasup, old timer?
  • “Young lady” when addressing an older woman
  • Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.
  • Can you believe she’s 60 years old?
  • He is 80 going on 60.
  • You shouldn’t be doing that.
  • You could pass for much younger.
  • Good to see you are still up and around.
  • You’re still working?
  • You have a smartphone?

Then we have jokes and birthday cards that contribute, thinking they are innocent and all in good fun.   Here’s the card my daughter gave me for my 75th birthday (I got over it!)

You just think you are being funny!

Ever heard jokes like these?

“At four, success is not needing diapers. At 12, success is having friends. At 17, success is having a driver’s license. At 20, success is having sex. At 35, success is having money. At 50, success is having money. At 60, success is having sex. At 70, success is having a driver’s license. At 75, success is having friends. At 85, success is not needing diapers.”

 “Grandma is so wrinkled she needs a bookmark to find her mouth.”

“My old Uncle Ed still whistles at girls but can’t remember why.”

Whether directed at myself or someone else, when I use this type of phraseology or jokes, I am practicing ageism, plain and simple.  And I continue to engender its use in others.

William Sadler, in his excellent book ‘The Third Age: Six Principles for Personal Growth and Rejuvenation After Forty”, underscores the importance of tending to our own thoughts about aging:

“Our unwitting acceptance of negative stereotypes about age and growing older threatens the development of a rich, vital, creatively unfolding identity. This is why we should free ourselves from myths of aging well before it becomes irrevocably embedded in our neurons.”

“The stereotype of aging embedded in our neurons shapes our attitude and contributes to our decline and eventual placement in a nursing home where we spend a period of prolonged dying.”

Who would have thought that our own use of words could accelerate our trip to an “elder warehouse?”

Let’s start a revolution!

We can start our own individual campaign against ageism by being more attentive to the words we use which in turn help us turn the attitudes of our own aging more to the positive and away from the prevailing negative.

From Seniorliving.org, we find some thoughts on ways to wage your own battle against this entrenched discriminatory attitude:

  1.    Give it back to them. If someone says “I’m glad you’re still up and around”, cordially respond, “I’m glad you’re still up and around too”. If a younger people ask you “Let us know if you need anything,” offer the same as well and say, “Let us know if you need anything too.”

 

  1.    Flaunt your age when someone says you’re young. Be cheerful and say, “I earned my wrinkles,” or “I’m proud of my age,” or “You know I’m old and I like it.”

 

  1.    What do you mean? If you encounter some complement –slash-awkward ageist comment, you can always ask them with a straight face and genuine puzzlement, “What do you mean?”  This way, you wouldn’t be burdened to explain why the comment is ageist and offensive. It works all the time.

We have enough challenges in our fight against ageism without contributing to it with our own language and attitudes.   Let’s start an anti-ageism revolution and clean up our own act.  There are still societies where the elderly are venerated but it ain’t gonna happen in our culture.  But we don’t need to deepen the offense.

How are you battling ageism?  Have you experienced it?  Scroll down and leave us your thoughts about this issue.