We're Too Old To Believe the Body We Have Right Now Will Last Forever

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back

Photo by Colynary Media on Unsplash

If you’re in terrific shape, GREAT. Just don’t get overly attached to how you look right now

Here’s what I mean.

First, the older we get, the shorter “forever” gets. Life starts to accordion swiftly after sixty.

Yup.

If you were lucky enough to be born with a body beautiful, and I wasn’t, you might have made the patently false assumption that said body beautiful would bear you hence forevermore.

Nope.

Our society wants to live long and prosper, as it were, but in a twenty-year-old’s body (for us girls, sans the cellulite, please).

Nature doesn’t agree.

We Westerners love to be identified by our bodies: beauty, brawn, how tall or curvy we are, youth, that perfect ASS, the biggest biceps on the block, whatever.

We spend billions upon billions on the one thing that is more ephemeral than true love: the illusion of perpetual youth.

Or for that matter, first orgasm, which for most of us girls I knew in high school in 1968 was a LOT more ephemeral than true love. Some are still waiting.

Wait. What were we discussing? Oh.

You and I are way Too Old to believe that the shape we’re in right now, good-bad-ugly-indifferent-unbelievable, is likely to be us forever.

Time will eventually take what we have. We can, and should, work hard for our best health at all ages. But let’s not fool ourselves: the body will eventually drop dead.

Even the late, great Jack LaLane, the godfather of modern fitness, got called home at 96. The joke is that the guy was such a miracle of fitness, he probably carried his own casket.

Along the way, your body will likely stop looking so good unless you have untold millions at your disposal. However, if you keep working at it, it can keep “working so good,” pardon the grammar.

You can of course look terrific while inside, your body is an unhinged apology for a jalopy, which it appears, many of us would accept. There are untold millions of thin Americans who suffer from metabolic disease, diabetes and much worse.

They just aren’t fat, which we confuse with fit.

Also many of those thin, sick Americans aren’t old, which we confuse with disabled and diseased.

Both are dead wrong.

I’ll be coming back to this regularly. I just want to poke the bear.

One of the hardest lessons any one who has ever reached a high point in their physical development- and kindly all of that is relative- knows that over time, we just can’t hang on to it. Not precisely in that form, forever, that is.

Okay well, if you’re into being frozen or embalmed, have at it. But you know what I mean.

Even the great Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose massive body inspired today’s love affair with the ubiquitous Marvel hero’s boulder shoulders, is starting to sag a bit. He’s 76, albeit one hell of a 76. Just greyer, older, more….well, worn.

That’s precisely the point.

Here’s how this applies to this writer. I promised to be authentic, so here goes.

I’ve been sharing photos of myself from 2017 in my first articles on Substack.

Best shape of my life, at 64. Damn, man. I thought that I’d be able to maintain that, well, for the rest of my life. Sure wanted to.

Exactly six years later I most assuredly didn’t look like that anymore. Didn’t have that body, either. Wasn’t just humbling. It was a fine lesson in letting the body do what it has to do to heal, irrespective of the cost to our oh-so-tender ego.

Here’s what happened.

I had worked my patootie off building on decades of bodybuilding to turn myself into an athlete in 2013. By all measures, I had done, well, sorta okay, as long as you’re comparing me to a 1958 Edsel.

I’d been obese in my early thirties, dropped 85 lbs, and kept it off for the next thirty-plus. Then, from 2018 to 2023, I underwent a spate of twelve big surgeries.

Three rotator cuff, kidney stones, oophrectomy (guys can’t have one of those, not yet anyway) four major hand and two foot reconstructions and a shattered kneecap thrown in just for good measure.

Oh, yeah and a fractured hip. For more good measure.

Lots of down time, recovery time, PT and a great deal of inconsistency in workouts because I didn’t always have working parts.

Any athlete, even one as minor as I am, who has ever been seriously sidelined, can speak to what happens to your head when your identification as an athlete- or anything else- crashes around you.

You can get depressed. If you’re anything like me, I feed my face when I’m sad.

Grief kills off the ghrelin gremlin, who is our best friend in such times.

Snickers snuck back into the house. I started visting the donut shop that so handily sits at the end of the strip mall where my gym also resides.

Some days I’d skip the gym and go pity party with hot donuts, six of them, all of which would be eaten by the time I got home.

Bet you can relate, too.

I hadn’t eaten those foods ince 1987 when I first dropped all that weight. Once that door was open, it proved devilishly hard to shut again.

This NYT article speaks to that process. We can get so very identified with THAT body, THAT time in our lives, THAT achievement that we can plummet. Some of us don’t get back up. Can’t get back up. Give up, in fact.

There was one thing going for me: I was in my late sixties. By this time I’d had plenty of practice with comebacks. I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and how to surf those waters even if it did stink.

It DID stink.

The point is to not sink.

By the month I turned 70, January of this year, that seriously in-shape body was seriously different.

Here’s the before:

The author at 64 in 2017

And January 2023:

The author at 70, January 2023

Not the “after” photo most of us want, right?

When this photo was taken I still had another foot surgery and two more hand surgeries ahead of me. This wasn’t the time to launch into a lean diet.

Hate fat? Wait. Hear me out. Fat has a purpose. Some fat. A little extra, not one hundred pounds extra. I had about twenty or so extra.

During all this time, I didn’t mind this extra weight at all.

Okay, I lied. Of COURSE I minded it. My tender ego was horrified.

If you have ever had weight issues, eating disorders and the like, fat is the enemy. And that is a lie.

Your fat is your friend- but it depends

The body uses its fat stores to protect your health. Think I’m nuts? The body doesn’t care how it looks or how appalled you are at your muffin top. That little bit of extra fat might just save your life, especially as we age.

This NPR article points out that being a little bit overweight is the key. If we get a disease or have an injury, or in my case healing from multiple procedures, that little extra fat can be enormously helpful to our health and healing.

Still want to throw your laptop at my bean? Read this article.

From that piece:

Fat plays such an active role in our body’s functioning that it’s considered an organ, not just passive tissue.  As an endocrine organ, it secretes two of the major hormones found in people, said Vernochet. Among these are leptin, which controls appetite, and adiponectin, which is connected to blood sugar levels. (author bolded)

Those who diet down to skin and bones- and I’ve been seriously anorexic so I know- are putting themselves at terrible risk. I came perilously close to looking like Eugenia Cooney before I got well.

Want a real Halloween horror show? Find her yourself. I won’t link to her.

When you and I are ill, or recovering, that is NOT the time to start cutting calories to revisit your seven-pack.

Look, I had so many wrinkles on my six pack I couldn’t see it anyway, but that’s beside the point. I have a “pack” all right, it’s one big fold into which I can “pack” my lunch for safekeeping.

When you are past the point where that extra bit of luggage you’re lugging around is helpful for healing, that’s the time to do something about it.

So I did.

Eight months after the “after” photo above, I had dropped within about four pounds of my fighting weight.

The author Oct 2, 2023

I can fit into the same clothing, the guns are returning, and with consistent hard work, I will get some version of my best fitness back. Lots of work to regain endurance, leg strength. All doable.

But I won’t get younger.

My body will never, ever look quite that way again.

Not only did those surgeries remove bones, costing me both balance and dexterity at least for now, there are subtle changes in my shape which may or may not respond to work.

After this brutal last year, I’m so damned glad to be upright, hiking sand dunes and slinging weights again that a big part of me really doesn’t care that much about yet another wrinkle here or there.

Are we going to moan and groan about that body we had once or are we going to celebrate a return to mobility, exercise and health?

You and I will evolve. Sometimes we devolve. Sometimes we bounce back. Sometimes we don’t. That’s the price we pay for our time on this planet.

Time takes, but time also builds. Time can give us the ability to see that no matter what life throws at us, we can still bounce back up emotionally. Energetically.

Even if we’re disabled, we can choose to get those parts of us we still have up and moving in whatever way we can.

We can choose to be indomitable.

That has little to do with the physical body.

Or we can choose to be so identified with a body, a way of being, a part of our past that our attachment becomes an anchor.

You and are way Too Old to think that we’re not going to get old, that the body we have will look this way forever.

If we’re lucky, we will get very old. If we’re willing to work hard, we will age healthy.

If we’re wise, we’ll be grateful for the body we have to help us get both old and healthy.

Just as a final parting shot, here is a story about a competitive athlete who succeeded in a category of master’s athletes ages 105-109.

Read that again and tell me you don’t think that’s seriously BADASS.

He wasn’t pretty. But he was still competing in sports. Still playing.

We don’t stop playing as we get old.

We get old when we stop playing.

-George Bernard Shaw

Let’s play.

The author after the first foot surgery, November 2022

Thanks for spending a few irretrievable minutes with me. I hope you got value. If so, consider reading more, and even, maybe doing this:

If you know someone who needs a boost in their aging process, kindly consider sharing this:

Either way, I so appreciate your time.