Stop the Careening Age Bus

 

Here’s some fun information to chew on – instead of that Halloween candy or Wendy’s  S’Awesome Bacon Classic Double.

According to fitness experts Steve and Becky Holman at Old School New Body, our body starts aging faster than normal when we hit 40.  Now, for most of you reading this, that isn’t exactly revelatory since we creak and groan our way out of our bedrooms each morning and likely have for some time.

What is a bit revelatory is that, without proper nutrients and exercise, our bodies – men and women alike – will age about 6 months EXTRA for every year that passes.

So if you’re 40 and LazyBoy, Law and Order reruns, and Carl’s Jr are your best friends, that means when you hit 44, you’ll likely look and feel 48 (or older if Carl’s is a frequent stop).

Then by the time you hit 60, you might look and feel 70, look and feel 85 at 70, so on and so on.

I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of folks that have done a lot to confirm these findings.

I’m pleased to say, however, that I know a few that seemed to have reversed that.  My wife, Linda, 72, would be one of those.   I like to think I would be one also – but to claim that would unleash my narcissistic, arrogant tendencies which are already overworked.

Wait a minute.  Screw worrying about the narcissism and arrogance – I AM ONE!

I’d better be. I’ve been studying this stuff, preaching/teaching it anywhere/ any way I can and trying to live it for the last 15+ years.

But back to my wife. She has been a wonderful nutrition gatekeeper for years.  It all started a couple of decades ago when she joined Weightwatchers and began to understand more about nutrition values and calorie counts.  She dropped 30 pounds, moved on from Weight Watcher but kept the nutritional awareness.

Our refrigerator and pantry began to transform and has steadily gotten better as we have both become students of good nutrition and learned more about how to avoid all the bad options available to us – which, by the way, overwhelm the good options available within our industrial, corporate-driven food system.

She was a gonzo Jazzerciser for years and now continues to keep pace with youngers in each Zumba class she attends, which is 4-6 days a week.  And our diet has gradually migrated to where we are 90% plant-based.

Food Rules

We consider ourselves “flexitarians”, a term borrowed from Michael Pollan, renowned author, journalist and food activist and author of a wonderful guidebook on eating right, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”.

Meat is a rare event, chicken and fish are occasional.  Dairy for me – gone.

And that same gatekeeper has discovered plant-based meals that are even tastier than the traditional meat- and chicken-based meals that were standard fare for us for years.  Amazing what can be done with different combinations of vegetables and healthy spices.

I’ve taken the advice I learned years ago from Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and highly transformational book “Younger Next Year”.  (See “Harry’s Rule” in the Appendix of that book.)  In addition to having “stopped eating crap”, most weeks I hit my target of 45 minutes of aerobic exercise six days with three of those days adding an additional 30+ minutes of aggressive strength training.

By the way, the math on that is 3.5% of my 168 hour week.  I think any of us can find 3.5% in our week to look better and live longer.  That is if it’s important. But Western lifestyle stats would say it’s a lot tougher than I realize and maybe not that important relative to – well, who knows what.  Maybe we can hang the blame on Netflix or Hulu.

I’m grateful today that 30 years ago, I stopped letting anything crowd out exercise on my calendar. You don’t want to be around me if I can’t exercise due to injury or illness.  It’s best to lock me in a closet when that happens.  I’m sour enough on a good day.

I guess if we get honest and just boil it down, the outside reflects what we do to the inside. I’ve come to appreciate that our bodies are essentially 24 x 7 immune systems of cells that, for us Westerners on the Standard American Diet (SAD) and living our sedentary lifestyle, are often working overtime to keep us healthy despite our naïve efforts to make it difficult for them.

Those cells actually crave frequent positive stress and thrive in it.  Not the adrenaline or cortisol or norepinephrine morning-commute, late-for-a-meeting type of stress but the type of stress that raises the oxygen levels in the bloodstream.  Dr. Lodge, in the aforementioned book Y-N-Y will provide you with an understandable description of the biology of all that,

Let’s just call it exercise to keep it dirt simple.

After a while, without proper diet and adequate exercise, cells just sort of give it up and check out early and the internal and external deterioration accelerates.

But, let’s not forget the inevitable.

Steve and Becky appear to be 50-year old hard-bodies who aggressively market their stupefying good looks and rippled torsos to sell their own version of a “new” exercise program.  Probably one that will have you looking good in less time and less effort- that seems to be a common theme for exercise programs these days.

They appeal because they sell the idea of delaying the inevitable.  Which is:  you and I are going to wrinkle up, droop and die.

I’m all for delaying the inevitable and looking as good as I can along the way.  And I’ve learned that diet and exercise are pivotal to both.  And that shortcuts and diets don’t work.

But at some point, one has to look beyond the physical and accept eyebags, turkey necks, high foreheads and hair in the wrong places as part of the divine plan, perhaps meant to remind us that the inevitable is drawing closer.

So, for my wife and me, it’s pretty simple.  Accept the inevitable but do what we can to delay it, look and feel as good as we can along the way, and accept the sags, droops, and wrinkles as ultimately unavoidable.

Of course, there is the option to have multiple encounters with a scalpel – a thought that has crossed my mind some mornings as the bags under my eyes stare back at me in the mirror.  But now I’m taking pride in them because they don’t become that prominent without having been around a while.  And being around a while means you’ve got something to offer to someone, somewhere, sometime.

Truthfully, this formula for looking as good as you can and feeling better than most for your age is so incredibly simple – eat right and exercise.  But I’ll be the first to confess it’s incredibly difficult because of the habit changes that it entails.  Plus neither activity scores real high on the fun scale.

 

The famous fitness, exercise, and nutrition expert Jack LaLanne, who made it to 95, was once asked why he liked exercise so much.  His response:  “I’ve never liked it.  I just like the results.”

Like nearly everything we do in life, it gets down to choice.  We know what works and what hinders.  Yet we succumb to comfort and convenience and let our 35 trillion cells burn themselves out early and send us on to an early, saggy, droopy, stooped demise.

And then complain about what the mirror feeds back to us.

It can all get pretty comical, can’t it?

18 replies
  1. John Panter says:

    I listen to Dr. Hyman when interviewing a physician that also suffered MS. Confined to a wheel chair she started a regimen, of which was not part of the interview, including 19 serving of vegetables a day – error toward raw. Results: wheel chair bound to walking in a year. Aside from a vitamin regimen she was able to go back to treating Veterans at the VA and continues the work of helping folks with their dietary patterns.

    Reply
    • Gary says:

      What a great story, John. Thanks for sharing. I’m hearing more and more stories about these kinds of changes happening with MS, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart condition patients when they commit to a plant-based diet combined with exercise. It really isn’t magic.

      Reply
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