David Sinclair is an interesting and pretty high-profile guy recently in the burgeoning conversation on aging. As an Australian-born Ph.D. in molecular genetics and a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School, Sinclair comes down squarely on aging as a disease that we will eventually be able to overcome.
He’s apparently moved the needle a bit with his discovery of the effects of a number of chemicals that appear to slow the aging process. Some view his work – and the work of others – as eventually leading to “magic pills” to solve aging.
Others, like me, are skeptical that this “magic pill” is anywhere close to fruition.
We’ve been talking about this stuff for a very long time.
Don’t get me wrong. I support what Sinclair and his fellow pioneers are doing. Why not? We all stand to benefit from the discoveries that come out of this type of deep research. While it may not lead to us living forever (scarrryyyyy!), the spinoffs from the research may help us live longer and healthier.
We don’t have to wait for Sinclair’s magic to materialize to “delay” the aging process.
We know all we need to know right now to slow the acceleration of our own aging.
But, I sense that we are inclined to want to wait and wish for the magic potion or formula to be revealed rather than take the initiative now to understand and change the “comfortable and convenient” lifestyle habits that are already accelerating our aging.
Take a look at the scoreboard:
- The five biggest killers in our culture – heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and dementia – haven’t changed in decades. They are all lifestyle diseases and are largely preventable.
- The average life expectancy in the U.S. peaked in 2010 and has turned down each year after a century of meteoric growth from 47 in 1910 to 80 in 2010. Our biologies didn’t suddenly change but our lifestyle patterns gradually did thus contributing to the downturn. The downturn has been helped along with opioid abuse and our susceptibility to a horrible pandemic. But the downturn started before either of those events.
Graphic source: Scott Fulton
- We “live shorter and die longer” in the U.S. than in any other developed country on the planet. We’re 46th out of 193 countries in terms of average longevity and have the longest average period of late-life morbidity.
- The American male population is 60% overweight, 30% obese.
- Type 2 diabetes has now become endemic – and it hardly existed 40 years ago.
- The U.S. population is “verifiably sick” with 88% of Americans walking around with some level of metabolic dysfunction that’s likely gone unrecognized. We haven’t been told because the ones that should be telling us don’t know what to look for.
I’m not waiting for David!
At 79, I can’t afford to wait for the Sinclair cohort to equip me with a magic health wand. So I’ve decided that I can educate myself on how my biology (body and mind) work and what they need to operate optimally and then work to design my lifestyle habits around that knowledge.
My theory is pretty simple: do what I can now to preserve and maximize my health so that I can be around to take advantage of any new bio-science and technology developments that will allow me to extend my healthy life even further – should they develop.
I can hope that David comes through. In the meantime, I’m feeling pretty good and am starting each day vertical. What more can I ask?
A quantum leap.
On the learning front, I responded to a tip from one of my favorite writers, Julia Hubbell, who encourages her readers to read a book entitled “Metabolical” by Dr. Robert Lustig, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Julia operates out on the edge of her comfort zone in every corner of her life so I considered the tip worth pursuing.
I’ve plowed through a third of the book and, even as a consistent reader of pretty heady stuff, am challenged and absolutely blown out by the book.
The immediate appeal of the book for me is that Dr. Lustig takes our medical establishment, Big Pharma, and our disastrous food industry to the woodshed and reveals how most everything we think we know (and have learned from these three behemoths) is totally wrong.
And we’re all sick, killing ourselves slowly, and dying early as a result.
I’ve written repeatedly about how we – especially as we move into the “third third” of our lives – must become more self-care literate with the core of that literacy being a fundamental understanding of how we function at the cellular level.
Dr. Lustig takes that understanding to a new level by unpacking detailed cellular functionality and revealing much of the truth that is hidden from us about that functionality.
We can all do this.
Truth is, there isn’t a lot of magic to what our biology asks of us. Our cells, of which we have 35 trillion or so in our bodies, have been doing their thing for billions of years and don’t ask for much beyond oxygen and good glucose to function and not go rogue.
Sure there are exceptions, like start-of-life “blueprint errors”, but nearly all of us start with a birthright of good health. Dr. Lustig goes into incredible biological, endocrinological detail showing how we screw up that birthright – and will continue to do so until we get knowledgeable in the right way.
If you are up for a tough read that will take your awareness to a whole new level on how to stretch your health longevity, buy the book but be prepared to get pissed off and be jolted by how much you’ve been misled.
We’ve proven ourselves, especially in western cultures, to be darn good at screwing up a magnificent 24×7 immune system kludged together from those 35 trillion cells to protect us from nefarious invaders (READ: COVID-19) while equipping us with the energy and smarts to stay vertical and move.
We’re amazingly illiterate about the very vehicle that propels us through life. If we were self-care literate would we –
- – take 35% of our meals through the side window of our cars?
- – continue to consume sugar in prodigious quantities?
- – allow Hormel hot dogs or Johnsonville brats into our refrigerators?
- – weigh, on average, 20 lbs more than 20 years ago without growing any taller?
- – allow over half of the U.S. population to be pre-diabetic (Psst? 70% don’t know it)?
- – spend 40 hours per week being one with our voice-activated remotes and La-Z-Boys?
- – waste $35B year-after-year on diets that don’t and can’t work?
- – know more about how our lawnmowers work than our bodies?
Fate versus choice
A mere century ago, lots of people died early – before 50, on average. They, within the existing body of knowledge, wrote it off as “God’s will” or “fate.”
We’ve moved past “fate.” We now have “choice.”
We can’t stand behind fate today. We have choices supported by discovery. Discoveries being made by the David Sinclair’s and Robert Lustig’s.
Our healthcare system, Big Pharma, and the food industry don’t want us to pay attention to those discoveries.
So we choose to stay in the dark and maintain our comfortable, convenient, and conformative lifestyles stressing our way through life hoping David and Robert will come through to save our bacon from our wayward ways with a magic pill or formula.
I’m cheering them on fully aware that they, and we, are up against incredibly powerful, wealthy, politically savvy, and profit-driven adversaries that put money before our health.
Let’s take a stand!
I’m digging in and not going to take it anymore! Lustig is doing that to me.
The aforementioned triumvirate – healthcare, pharma, food – needs to be forced to change. We can’t count on the government because it acquiesced (and partnered) a long time ago.
It’s on us.
Next week – and perhaps a few weeks following, I’m going to unpack how I’m going to wage my one-man battle against these three thieves of healthy longevity.
Tune in, join me, add to my plan. We may add a few healthy days to our – and somebody else’s – life.
Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash
Why Did Isocrates Live to 98 and We Can’t Make It Past 80? A Longevity Lesson from the Ancient Greeks.
Much has been said about the meteoric increase in average lifespan over the last century. I’ve made a pretty big deal of it all in past articles. Considering that we moved that needle from 47 years to about 80 between 1910 and 2010, I guess it’s worth a mention. Especially since we hockey-sticked it more in 100 years than in the last 100-200,000 years.
The emperor has clothes but they have worn pretty thin.
It makes for a great story, this hockey stick stat. That is until we pull back the curtain and find the glitter has left the gold.
Kudos are due to the medical establishment, government, and technology for teaming up to reverse the elements that resulted in a 47-year average life span. Together they:
A lot of “fixing.” A lot of “curing.” A lot of “downstream repair.”
All low-hanging fruit.
Then we hit a wall around 2010 and started going backward.
Now we’re stuck – with institutions that can’t, or won’t, think like the Greeks!
The ancient Greeks probably would have cautioned us to think deeper during that 1910-2010 sprint.
Hygeia vs Panacea
The Greeks, 2,500 years ago, had it right in many areas, but particularly when it came to good health. They identified that medicine had two components – Hygeia and Panacea.
Hygeia equals health preservation and Panacea equals repair. Hygeia equals prevention. Panacea equals cure.
For the Greeks, Hygeia held precedence.
Our 100 years of fixing and repair never got us to that model. We’ve moved far from it with limited interest in moving in that direction.
And the consequences are glaring.
We are getting sicker as a population each day – and have been for the better part of 50 years.
Hygeia and Eugeria
In his outstanding book “Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain, Unleash Your Talents, Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond,” author Mark S. Walton reveals a number of things that we (and our medical establishment) can learn from the Greeks when it comes to our health and longevity.
Many of Greek fame lived longer than most. At a time when the normal lifespan was around 35, many of the notable, quotable Greeks lived longer and aged happily.
Walton points out that a study by the Royal Society of Medicine in London explored this in 1994 and 2007, studying the “men of intellectual excellence and achievement” during that period. They found that the “men of fame” had a mean and median life span of 71.3 and 70 years, respectively. Twice the average!
It turns out that the Greeks had another arrow in their quiver of equal importance to hygeia – a term for attaining genuine happiness called eugeria.
According to Walton, eugeria required:
Walton examines the Greek eugeria formula and its components:
He reminds us that the word philanthropy was derived from two Greek roots: philo (love) and anthropos (mankind) and that:
Plato lived to 80; Isocrates to 98; Sophocles to 90; Aristarchus, Democritus, and Gorgias all lived past 100.
Today, you will be front-page media fodder for living 20% past the average life span i.e. to 100. In ancient Greece, living 2x the average or more wasn’t all that unusual.
Walton provides a nice summary:
Our lifestyles, built around bad diet, sedentary living, seeking comfort and convenience, and an increasing lack of generativity would have been unsettling to the Greeks but it’s how we choose to live and thus pull up short of our full life potential.
We won’t get help from a healthcare system that grew up “fixing” and can’t/won’t move off a business model based on cure and a “downstream” mindset that avoids addressing the cause in favor of fixing the symptoms.
The Greeks believed in prevention. Our systems are geared to cure. The Greeks planned “upstream”; we react “downstream.”
The Greeks never stopped learning. We warehouse our brains at a certain age.
And-
-the Greeks had no inkling of the concept of retirement.
I suspect they would have found the concept foolish, maybe even offensive.
We’ve got a lot to learn. The Greeks can still teach us.
The question is: Are we willing to be taught?
What do you think about this? Leave us your thoughts with a comment below. We appreciate your feedback.
How does one work a 40 hour a week job, have time to cook healthy meals, sleep 8 hours a night, and go to the gym?
Maybe you’ve got this all figured out.
I don’t.
I know – we’re just supposed to get better at “time management.”
But then, we can’t “manage time.” Time is fixed, immutable, and unchanging. It manages itself and we can’t change what exists for us to function within. We can’t change that a minute is a minute and a day is a day.
We can only manage ourselves.
What we tag as “poor time management” is simply “poor self-management.”
I can sense your pain because you are baffled – as we all are – by “where does all my time go? How can I end up killing so much time?”
I’m a pretty organized guy that doesn’t finish a day without saying to myself: “Where the hell did my day go and why didn’t I get done what I wanted to get done?”
Have you tried doing the math on your day or week? I do it all the time trying to get better at not “killing” so much time.
Eight decades and I’m still frustrated with my progress!!
Let’s do a hypothetical and try to break down the question. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on some of this.
24% of the week untagged.
Isn’t it freaky how we can’t account for a quarter of our week? Or that it slips through our fingers so easily?
The gold for a fulfilling, happy, purposeful life lies in our 24%.
People who demonstrate productive self-management seem to have a handful of common sense things they have put in place:
You can see that the principles of good “self-management” aren’t rocket science. But that’s not to say they are easy. Life just gets in the way. Being able to roll with the unexpected that sucks up so much of that 24% and getting back on track takes discipline. And, without question, discipline is central to good self-management.
Two books to consider.
When I feel myself skidding off the rails on my efficiency, I’ll drag out one of two books that are reminders that this doesn’t need to be the problem that I allow it to become.
Time is our most valuable resource. Once spent it is irretrievable. Treat it with respect and it will reward you in kind.
What works best for you to get your time under control? Love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment or drop me an email at gary@makeagingwork.com
Are you “youthful” or “useful”? (The mirrors at 24 Hour Fitness answer part of that question for me!)
Part of me says it’s unfair to have so many mirrors in an athletic club. They are everywhere – and they don’t lie.
But then if you are part of the tank top, tattoo, tiny testicle, mirror muscle group hanging out with your lululemon-clad girlfriend, mirrors are essential.
For someone approaching geezerdom it’s, well, painful.
Undeterred, I endure the pain ’cause I’ve still got this illusory section in my brain that says that my biceps will grow, the droop over the beltline is temporary, and that the furniture disease wherein my chest has fallen into my drawers is just a myth. (sorry, bad joke!!)
My end-of-day athletic club workouts go 2 hours most of the time. Strength training followed by aerobic. And I usually work in a walk of at least 1-2 miles during the day to make sure I haul my arse out of the chair that keeps me at the keyboard and at 90 degrees too much of the day.
My flesh redistribution plan doesn’t seem to be working too well. No, you can’t fool Mother Nature. Gravity works.
Wrinkles versus wisdom.
Thus, I was challenged recently by a blog post from Chip Conley, entrepreneur, author, and founder of the Modern Elder Academy. I like Chip’s stuff and read most of his daily blogs. In a recent one, he told of reminding a late-middle-aged friend who was lamenting his inability to look younger that “our wisdom is more intangible than our wrinkles” and challenged him with the questions:
“How could you be more useful in the world?”
“Who could use a bit of your wisdom?”
It’s easy to get so caught up in trying to look and feel youthful that we forget that feeling “useful” may be more important than wrinkles in living a well-lived life.
Wrinkles are a given. There’s no stopping them.
Wisdom isn’t a given. It can atrophy and fade away. If couch potato replaces career, wisdom is wasted. It’s one of the traps that full-stop retirement can suck you into.
Dr. Ken Dychtwald of the AgeWave organization reminds us in his book “What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age” that the average American watches 47+ hours of television a week and that less than 25% do any volunteer work.
How can we serve?
Chip reminds us that:
That bolded sentence struck home this weekend when I took my 10-year-old grandson to lunch. We hadn’t done the one-on-one thing in a while because of COVID and I was reminded of how quickly time is flying, that we don’t know each other as well as we should, and that my window to help promote his well-being as his “papa” is fleeting. So, too, for his cousins, my two other similarly-aged grandkids.
It was a convicting experience.
Never too late.
As “third-agers”, we all have unlimited opportunities to serve and share our wisdom.
We’re wired to do so.
So instead of riding off into the sunset by retiring, we can ride into the sunrise with a vision and journey to serve.
This sick world needs your wisdom – wrinkles just help authenticate it.
Is Early Retirement As Good As They Say, Or Is It Like The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side? The Jury May Still Be Out.
I will say, however, I feel that the idea of early retirement is further validation of the tremendous grip this unnatural concept has on our psyche.
I find it curious and revealing that, in the U.S. where I live, you are considered deficient, unfortunate, or weird if you don’t retire and disengage from work on or around an arbitrary number established 86 years ago – age 65.
Conversely, you are considered heroic and put on a pedestal for being able to retire and disengage ahead of that number.
In some ways, it’s a sad commentary on what work has become for so many – a non-fulfilling, uninspiring slog through long commutes, bad bosses, unpredictability, and lack of control.
Do we need any more validation of that than the current “Great Resignation” phenomenon?
Early retirement may have a dark side.
Flunk retirement? No way!
In my experience as a career transition and retirement coach, it is rare that any retiree – early or not, and particularly, men – will admit that their retirement isn’t going well. And many retirements don’t go well because the advance planning only had to do with the money.
Over one-half of retirees enter their retirement with no semblance of a non-financial plan that would include discussion and a plan for the psychological, mental, physical, and spiritual sides of retirement.
Early retirees are guilty as well. One thing they may fail to factor in is the role of relationships in retirement and not consider that their circle of relationships will shrink and be difficult to restore because few people their age are retired.
One risk for any retiree is the threat of boredom. Far too many retirees retire from something and not to something. Self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement quickly wears thin for most, and without a purpose or a sustainable, inspiring reason to get up in the morning, boredom is in the wings. Boredom often leads to depression.
In summary –
– retirement fails to acknowledge the important role that work plays in longevity. We are built to work, to create, to produce. Retirement goes against that, and other, critical components of our biology which offers us only two options. We either grow or we stagnate.
The traditional self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement model just simply isn’t healthy in the long term as evidenced by the fact that, in the U.S., our elderly spend more of their years in chronic illness than any other developed nation.
We tend to “live too short and die too long.”
We can’t push all of that off on retirement, but we need to be honest and acknowledge that it does play a role.
I see no reason to start that deterioration process early – or ever.
How about you?
I’m 57, have no savings, and am unemployed. Is it too late to turn my life around? An open letter response.
An open letter to a mid-lifer that recently posed this question on Quora.com.
I’m 57, have no savings, and am unemployed. Is it too late to turn my life around?
Absolutely not!!!
It’s never too late to start but always too early to quit!
Consider that you may have 20–30 years ahead of you – maybe more if you have been taking care of yourself physically. That’s 1–2 generations. Think of how much we have progressed in that amount of time.
You can make lots happen in that amount of time also.
It’s been said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year and greatly underestimate what we can get done in three years. Think of it as momentum that develops through planning and compounded effort.
While I don’t know your life situation, I feel safe in saying that you got to 57 with some successes along the way. It’s only in your head that it’s disgraceful to be unemployed and with no savings. It’s no comfort to know that there are lots and lots of folks in this leaky boat with you, but it is a fact.
And, frankly, nobody is thinking about you or really cares – you just think they are. This will erode your self-image and make the road ahead harder if you concern yourself with that.
So start by reminding yourself of what successes you’ve had and what it was that made you successful at it. All of us have innate talents. Often, we leave them unpolished or unrealized as we strive to meet the cultural expectations of parents, peers, professors, and politicians that take us down a path of conformity and comparison at the expense of allowing these deep talents to flourish.
Ask yourself:
When you have that figured out, then get aggressive about finding a match for that combination. Let the match with your talents be the guide to your decisions and not money.
When you have your talents aligned with your work, you’ll see the rewards come.
In step with this, it sounds as if a change in self-discipline is in order as well. As in, spend less than you make. With a 30–40 year runway, you have the opportunity to make a solid financial recovery. Plus when you are doing what you love, you aren’t likely to succumb to the social pressure to “retire” and potentially squander a couple of decades of fulfilling, meaningful creativity and production.
Remember, that creativity is not age-dependent. And mental senescence is not automatic. Your creative brain will grow as long as you continue to challenge it.
A future bigger than your past.
So think of it as being 2/3 done with 1/3 left but with the advantage of being able to leverage accumulated life skills, work experiences, and wisdom into a lifestyle of work that can be more gratifying, purposeful, fulfilling, and financially rewarding than the first 2/3.
You are uniquely gifted and far from a slug. Recognize that, change your self-talk, get into motion, get help, and launch your restart. And remember that our society needs you to be a producer and not another “hanger-on” or someone on the dole.
Good luck – and thanks for putting yourself out there.
Beginning is half done!!
Why Do the Japanese Outlive Us in America – Without a 24 Hour Fitness?
Photo by Ash Edmonds on Unsplash
Remember when GM, Ford, Chrysler scoffed at the quality of Japanese “rice burners” that started showing up on the U.S. market back in the 1970s and dismissed their presence as a potential threat.
Not long thereafter, the American auto industry started rolling out gems like this rolling bathtub –
– while Toyota and Honda began eating their lunch with Accords and Lexus’s?
We’ve been slow to learn in lots of areas, refusing to budge from our “greatest country on earth” arrogance.
This may be another one. Did you know that –
– fewer than 3% of Japanese go to a fitness club.
– life expectancy in Japan is 84.9 years (#2 globally behind Hong Kong), 6 years longer than the 78.9 for the U.S. (which places us 39th globally, between Curacao and Poland).
–Japanese experience fewer deaths from ischemic heart disease and cancer (especially breast and prostate cancer).
-the obesity rate in Japan is about 5% for men and less than 4% for women, compared to an obesity prevalence of over 42% in the United States.
It’s not that the Japanese don’t exercise. They just do it much differently and, it seems, without the need for mirror muscles and “personal bests” in anything.
When researchers asked Japanese young people in their 20s about regular exercise, they got these responses:
No mention of dumbbells, kettlebells, Peloton, or BowFlex.
Approximately half of those queried offered that they barely exercised, about once a month or not at all. Exercises with names like rajio taiso, dai-ichi, dai-ni, dai-san are common and usually start with children.
So far, I haven’t heard any of those exercises offered up at my 24 Hour Fitness.
You don’t suppose that diet plays a role in this longevity?
Duh!
There are a handful of diets associated with good health and the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Those include the Mediterranean diet, the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), the vegetarian diet, and – VOILA! – the Japanese diet.
This chart contrasts the Japanese diet versus other developed countries and provides some of the “why” to this greater longevity (I’ve circled those components that stand out versus the Standard American Diet).
It’s no secret we like our meat, starch, and sugars. And we’re not inclined to give them up or moderate them even when nearly half of us in the U.S. have fatty liver disease and are overweight or obese.
It’s complicated –
-this whole diet thing.
I chirped a couple of weeks ago about the content of the book “Metabolical” by Dr. Robert Lustig. It’s a complex read and has drawn out considerable ire from several communities, including his own medical profession and from nutrition professionals.
I’ve watched a handful of podcast interviews of Dr. Lustig and find him very focused and consistent on his message. A one-sentence summary of his position is:
Protect the liver, feed the gut. Stop eating processed foods, increase the fiber, and eliminate the sugar.
With Dr. Lustig, calories don’t count. It’s what’s been done to the food that we eat that counts. Calories are independent of the content that is producing the insulin resistance that is leading to fatty liver disease and obesity. You can imagine how well that goes down in a medical and nutrition/diet community that has been preaching “calories in, calories out” for almost a half-century.
If you’ve plodded through the book, you’ll have discovered that he doesn’t advocate for any type of diet – vegan or ketogenic. He’s good with either one – or a combination. It’s all about the adulteration of the food, the lack of fiber, and the sugar. I’m sure he would endorse the Japanese diet with its reduced sugar and starch.
We all have a vote.
He’s predicting that “food will be the next tobacco” but that it will take 20-30 years to turn this ship away from unhealthy food. I found it interesting that he says on one podcast that our starting points that will get this change started are (1) eliminating food subsidies and (2) reaching the children.
In the book, he makes his point:
I’m feeling less guilty.
I followed “Metabolical” with another book recommendation and found myself entangled in equally complex and oft-confusing explanations of what goes on in all of us metabolically. This book doesn’t come from a clinician but from a highly regarded scientific journalist by the name of Gary Taubes in a book entitled “Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.”
Backed by amazing historical research revealing the bad nutritional science of the last century and an amazing grasp of our metabolical functions, Taubes builds a case somewhat similar to Dr. Lustig’s with regard to the elimination of processed food and sugar but comes down more in support of the importance of fat in our diet.
It’s complicated and technical too, but I found it compelling enough to stop beating myself up for those occasional times when we sneak some beef into a stew or include a chicken breast as a part of a meal.
What’s a person to do?
First it’s this, and then it’s that. Then it’s don’t do this or be sure to do that. It’s like dancing on peanut butter, this whole diet and metabolism thing.
I certainly am not qualified to offer up any dietary advice. I will just say that, after these readings, I’m buying into both authors positions and aiming to:
Protect my liver, feed my gut by reducing processed foods, increasing the fiber, radically reducing the sugar, and being sure to consume appropriate amounts of healthy fat.
No vegan. No keto. Somewhere in between.
Maybe – more Japanese like!
Except, I’m not giving up my trips to 24 Hour Fitness.
Please Tell Me You Didn’t Do New Year’s Resolutions Again!
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
OK, I’m betting they may not be on paper, but you plan to:
In other words, become a New You for the New Year.
I know you are exceptional – you’ll make all of that happen. All in the same year and a New You comes out the other end toasting another new year on 12/31/22 and the start of a new list the next day.
We can only hope!
For most people, 13 of those 12 won’t happen.
Just imagine if we were all able to keep that sort of annual momentum year-upon-year-upon-year.
We could own the universe with all that compounding.
But then, who would want to own today’s universe?
I’ll pass.
I don’t remember when, or if, I’ve ever set New Year’s Resolutions. Certainly don’t remember ever putting them to paper. Maybe if I had I would be more of something. I don’t suppose it’s too late but as I prepare to start my 9th decade on this mudball, somehow it seems a little superfluous.
It fits better for me to do the three most important things I can think of today. String enough of those all together and the year should turn out OK.
Why don’t they work?
Setting goals is generally a good idea and is the rationale behind New Year’s Resolutions – except they also generally don’t pan out. It’s kind of a running joke that these resolutions are an exercise in futility. They usually run out of steam about April.
The classic seems to be the exercise resolution. (C’mon – you’ve been there!)
Need proof? For a few decades, I frequented an upscale athletic club daily for basketball and weight-lifting. But I always worked out at home for the first few weeks of each year because it got so overrun with well-intentioned, deer-in-the-headlights new patrons set on a “new me” in the coming year.
By the first or second week of February, the decks were pretty well cleared and things were close to normal again – certainly full-on normal by March 1.
The “January Bloom” is the only way an athletic club can make it. They convince people their membership will be “fun” and get their $39.95 on monthly recurring concealing the fact that exercise – especially as a newbie – is anything but fun and knowing that the combination of pain, inconvenience, and lack of immediate results will soon keep people at home. But still paying their monthly.
Who’s gonna admit they flunked exercise?
I don’t mean to throw water on the entire goal-setting process just because New Year’s Resolutions don’t work.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s something that works better than goal-setting – and eliminates the frustration of unachieved New Year’s Resolutions.
I’m trading goals in for “themes” that are on the path to mastery.
Niklas Göke is a writer on Quora and Medium.com who offers a different twist on goal setting perhaps worthy of consideration:
Goke and James Altucher, bestselling author, entrepreneur, angel investor, and former hedge fund manager, advocate for themes instead of goals.
Altucher suggests creating a theme of how you want to live your life and then do the next thing that is important to you.
A theme might be a single word — a verb, a noun, or an adjective. “Commit,” “growth,” and “healthy” are all valid themes. So are “invest,” “help,” “kindness,” and “gratitude.”
A goal asks “what do I want?” but a theme asks “who am I?”
Altucher’s position is that our overall life satisfaction isn’t determined by singular events but rather by the average of how we feel at the end of each day. According to him, when you have themes, “you build unbelievable intuition on what is the next thing you should be doing in your life. You’re no longer trapped by a long list of tiny inconsequential things you feel you have to do.”
So, I’m continuing to simplify it for 2022 by envisioning myself on a path to mastery of what I’ve chosen and love to do using today to advance that in some way, fully aware that true mastery is always out of reach.
It’s the goalless journey that matters.
I’ve stolen and adopted this theme from Dr. Ken Dychtwald, psychologist and founder of AgeWave:
Breathe – Learn – Teach – Repeat
It fits who I am. If I stay true to that, on December 31, 2022, I will be smarter, healthier, and maybe will have touched somebody. And I will not be bound up or worried about having missed a goal or having to set another one.
A theme or goalless journey is immune to anxiety and fear of failure.
Here’s a meaningful quote from Niklas Goke:
Here’s to you and I making 2022 a masterpiece – of our choosing – one day at a time.
How do you feel about this argument? Are you a committed goal setter – or do you have themes working for you? We’d love to have your feedback on the topic. Leave a comment or drop an email to gary@makeagingwork.com
Asking Your Forgiveness – I’ve Been Helping You Die Early.
Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay
I was mad last week.
I was only 1/3 through Dr. Robert Lustig’s book, “Metabolical”, at the time.
Now I’m 7/8 through.
I’m madder – with a permanent state of mad.
I’ve also discovered I owe you, dear reader, an apology.
I’ve misled you with some of my writing.
If you’ve tracked with me for a while, you’ve been subjected to a number of articles like this: What is the biggest failure in modern health? Maybe not what you think?
I’ve been pretty liberal in my use of some pretty ugly photos to draw emphasis to obesity. Like:
Well, the message with those pictures and my articles has been mostly wrong. The message has always inferred lack of personal responsibility and that obesity leads to sickness.
You can scratch that understanding if you bought into it.
Here’s the real truth, ala Dr. Lustig:
Obesity itself doesn’t make us sick. It’s what we eat that makes us sick, then we get obese, and from there we experience a cascading of diseases i.e. cancer, Type 2 diabetes, dementia, heart disease.
In Lustig’s words:
I consider myself duly reprimanded. For having done that, I apologize.
I was thinking downstream when the problem is upstream.
Tobacco debacle Part Deux
Remember how big tobacco denied for years that smoking caused cancer and that nicotine wasn’t addictive although they knew otherwise. And how it took massive effort on the part of the government to unpack those lies and hold them accountable.
Even when cornered, big tobacco shifted the blame with a party line that said “nobody forces anybody to smoke. It’s a personal choice.”
Big food has borrowed the playbook.
The Centers for Health Statistics revealed that 42% of U.S. adults were obese in 2018.
Obesity was rare 40 years ago, as was Type 2 diabetes.
Our metabolic processes didn’t change in 40 years. But what we do to them has – dramatically!
It’s undeniable that it’s all about the twin evils of sugar and processed foods – and especially the sugar in processed food.
Big Food knows this and that they are killing us slowly. The facts are undeniable, the evidence overwhelming. Big Food’s scourge is equivalent to – perhaps worse than – Big Tobacco’s scourge. The party line is the same:
“It’s your fault – nobody forces you to visit Carl’s Junior. We just make what people want.”
It’s complicated.
The metabolical processes, that is.
Not the solutions.
Dr. Lusting goes into mind-boggling detail in “Metabolical” to explain the chemical processes that go on in our bodies and how they are affected by what we eat. More detail than we need and lots of hard-to-connect dots. But he brings it all together into a six-word solution for avoiding the metabolic dysfunctions that lead to obesity and other chronic conditions.
Protect the liver, feed the gut.
Tell me – how much were you taught or have you learned about the connection between the liver and what goes on in your gut (stomach and intestines)?
OK – I’ll settle for nothing. That’s where I was pre-Lustig.
Tell me – how many conversations have you had with your PCP about the connection between the liver and what goes on in your gut?
OK- zero, I get it. They never had a Lustig in medical school and aren’t motivated to take the time to learn what he knows.
“That’s upstream stuff. I’m a downstream specialist” says your PCP.
Can you imagine your PCP saying to you that your high blood pressure, or high LDL, or A1C is “foodable” rather than “druggable?”
Ain’t gonna happen.
You then begin to realize that-
-so much of this is not our fault.
We are living lab rats.
Julia Hubbell writes daily on Medium.com. She’s on this soapbox too and recently put this twist on the issue:
Until we get “upstream” from the problem by understanding how we inflict ourselves with metabolic dysfunction and then vote with our food purchase dollars, this destruction will continue unabated.
It’s not about the calories. It’s not about the obesity.
It’s all about the processed food – and the money that spins off of its consumption.
Dr. Lustig let’s us know just how big that is:
Let’s all get mad.
A REAL FOOD diet is more available and less expensive than we realize. We need to get “upstream” and stop being lab rats.
We’ll take a look at REAL FOOD in subsequent posts.
Chime in here. Are you able to sustain a real food diet? What is it? How do you do it? Share your thoughts. We’re all in this together.
News Flash! David Isn’t Coming to Save Us! Don’t Get Caught Waiting.
David Sinclair is an interesting and pretty high-profile guy recently in the burgeoning conversation on aging. As an Australian-born Ph.D. in molecular genetics and a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School, Sinclair comes down squarely on aging as a disease that we will eventually be able to overcome.
He’s apparently moved the needle a bit with his discovery of the effects of a number of chemicals that appear to slow the aging process. Some view his work – and the work of others – as eventually leading to “magic pills” to solve aging.
Others, like me, are skeptical that this “magic pill” is anywhere close to fruition.
We’ve been talking about this stuff for a very long time.
Don’t get me wrong. I support what Sinclair and his fellow pioneers are doing. Why not? We all stand to benefit from the discoveries that come out of this type of deep research. While it may not lead to us living forever (scarrryyyyy!), the spinoffs from the research may help us live longer and healthier.
We don’t have to wait for Sinclair’s magic to materialize to “delay” the aging process.
We know all we need to know right now to slow the acceleration of our own aging.
But, I sense that we are inclined to want to wait and wish for the magic potion or formula to be revealed rather than take the initiative now to understand and change the “comfortable and convenient” lifestyle habits that are already accelerating our aging.
Take a look at the scoreboard:
Graphic source: Scott FultonI’m not waiting for David!
At 79, I can’t afford to wait for the Sinclair cohort to equip me with a magic health wand. So I’ve decided that I can educate myself on how my biology (body and mind) work and what they need to operate optimally and then work to design my lifestyle habits around that knowledge.
My theory is pretty simple: do what I can now to preserve and maximize my health so that I can be around to take advantage of any new bio-science and technology developments that will allow me to extend my healthy life even further – should they develop.
I can hope that David comes through. In the meantime, I’m feeling pretty good and am starting each day vertical. What more can I ask?
A quantum leap.
On the learning front, I responded to a tip from one of my favorite writers, Julia Hubbell, who encourages her readers to read a book entitled “Metabolical” by Dr. Robert Lustig, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Julia operates out on the edge of her comfort zone in every corner of her life so I considered the tip worth pursuing.
I’ve plowed through a third of the book and, even as a consistent reader of pretty heady stuff, am challenged and absolutely blown out by the book.
The immediate appeal of the book for me is that Dr. Lustig takes our medical establishment, Big Pharma, and our disastrous food industry to the woodshed and reveals how most everything we think we know (and have learned from these three behemoths) is totally wrong.
And we’re all sick, killing ourselves slowly, and dying early as a result.
I’ve written repeatedly about how we – especially as we move into the “third third” of our lives – must become more self-care literate with the core of that literacy being a fundamental understanding of how we function at the cellular level.
Dr. Lustig takes that understanding to a new level by unpacking detailed cellular functionality and revealing much of the truth that is hidden from us about that functionality.
We can all do this.
Truth is, there isn’t a lot of magic to what our biology asks of us. Our cells, of which we have 35 trillion or so in our bodies, have been doing their thing for billions of years and don’t ask for much beyond oxygen and good glucose to function and not go rogue.
Sure there are exceptions, like start-of-life “blueprint errors”, but nearly all of us start with a birthright of good health. Dr. Lustig goes into incredible biological, endocrinological detail showing how we screw up that birthright – and will continue to do so until we get knowledgeable in the right way.
If you are up for a tough read that will take your awareness to a whole new level on how to stretch your health longevity, buy the book but be prepared to get pissed off and be jolted by how much you’ve been misled.
We’ve proven ourselves, especially in western cultures, to be darn good at screwing up a magnificent 24×7 immune system kludged together from those 35 trillion cells to protect us from nefarious invaders (READ: COVID-19) while equipping us with the energy and smarts to stay vertical and move.
We’re amazingly illiterate about the very vehicle that propels us through life. If we were self-care literate would we –
Fate versus choice
A mere century ago, lots of people died early – before 50, on average. They, within the existing body of knowledge, wrote it off as “God’s will” or “fate.”
We’ve moved past “fate.” We now have “choice.”
We can’t stand behind fate today. We have choices supported by discovery. Discoveries being made by the David Sinclair’s and Robert Lustig’s.
Our healthcare system, Big Pharma, and the food industry don’t want us to pay attention to those discoveries.
So we choose to stay in the dark and maintain our comfortable, convenient, and conformative lifestyles stressing our way through life hoping David and Robert will come through to save our bacon from our wayward ways with a magic pill or formula.
I’m cheering them on fully aware that they, and we, are up against incredibly powerful, wealthy, politically savvy, and profit-driven adversaries that put money before our health.
Let’s take a stand!
I’m digging in and not going to take it anymore! Lustig is doing that to me.
The aforementioned triumvirate – healthcare, pharma, food – needs to be forced to change. We can’t count on the government because it acquiesced (and partnered) a long time ago.
It’s on us.
Next week – and perhaps a few weeks following, I’m going to unpack how I’m going to wage my one-man battle against these three thieves of healthy longevity.
Tune in, join me, add to my plan. We may add a few healthy days to our – and somebody else’s – life.
Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays from Makeagingwork.com
Thanks for being a reader and for your support and feedback over the last 4 1/2 years. Our very best to you and yours for this holiday season.
Stay safe. Stay well.
See you in 2022!