You and I Are Too Old to Lie to Ourselves About Our Health
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
What lies do we tell ourselves about how healthy we are, especially as we age?
Dear Reader: Nothing I write should be construed as medical advice. Please seek care that is appropriate for you.
In a society were thin is everything for women, and musclebound is everything for men, according to movies and messaging, we have a terribly twisted notion of what healthy looks like, much less feels like.
Having been down that rough road for years, a long time ago I committed to much healthier eating, lost a slew of weight even as I still dealt with an eating OCD. I maintained a much slimmer body and the appearance of good health.
Truth also is that decades of eating disorders and the emotional trauma that visits the body after incest and sexual assaults combined with assaults on our psyche by a sick society all take their tolls.
I start off with this because a number of people in my immediate circle, and myself included, have been dealing with difficult health news lately. All of us have been diligent about eating better. Some of us have been obese (my hand is up), we lost weight through much better eating habits and regular exercise.
Some of us ended up with issues anyway.
Let me set the stage.
Fans of football movies might remember a scene from the Disney movie Invincible, based on the real-life story of Vince Papale. In 1976 when new NFL coach Dick Vermeil was hired to retool the Philadelphia Eagles, he held a walk-on. The movie features the fictional lineup of hopefuls, and this memorable set of moments of utter and complete denial by a 28 yo Eagle fan:
To a certain extent, we’re likely all guilty of this. I sure am. I honestly believe I am eating well, eating healthy. No sugar in the house for decades. Only stevia. Salads, chicken, fish, veges and fruit galore. On and on and ON.
So any self-respecting, self-righteous writer about health and fitness would feel perfectly justified in feeling as though everything’s right in the kingdom of the body, right?
WRONG.
All too often we have deadly silent agents at work inside us from forces we’re not attending well enough when our habits indicate otherwise.
A few stories to set the stage.
First, Tina Turner. She had terrible hypertension which had affected her kidneys. Tina saw herself as invincible, not without damned good reason. But years of abuse and the demands of her life put extreme demands on her body. Here’s what she said about it:
"I had not been aware that chronic kidney failure is called a "silent killer" because symptoms do not become noticeable until 80 percent of renal tissue is lost. As it happened to me, hypertension is one of the most frequent causes of kidney failure. I was lucky that Erwin offered to donate one of his kidneys to me," said Tina Turner. "My kidneys are victims of me denying the fact that my hypertension needed therapy with conventional medicine. I put myself in great danger by refusing to accept the reality that I required daily medication for the rest of my life. I considered my body an invulnerable and indestructible bastion for way too long." (author bolded)
Having the best gams in show business wasn’t enough. The emotional damage that Ike visited on her was life-long. Then the pressures of show business, starting over and all the rest took their toll.
So many young people assume their bodies can handle anything. That’s patently untrue, especially today when too many of us eat 60% of our diet made up of ultra-processed foods, which do us no favors at all, we drink and are volatile and upset too much of the time.
Blood pressure issues affect our kidneys, lifestyle issues affect everything, what we eat defines how our bodies operate.
Yet even when we “do everything right….”
A friend of mine Jim Stutsman was obese.
Jim writes here as
.They both needed better habits so they took their health in hand. With Jim’s dogged determination and impressive research, they shifted to an ancestral diet, started walking miles daily, eat once a day and transformed their bodies and their health.
Yet even still. Both of them, now in their seventies, have recently been hit with some seriously unpleasant news about their bodies, which stunned them both. Part of it may well be “just getting older,” a phrase that Jim knows I really despise for good reason, and part of it may well be just that, age, which is very humbling.
By this I mean that we age ourselves very very young through bad habits and can wear out our kidneys, heart, liver and more because we stress ourselves terribly with our Western lifestyle.
Having been obese, as I have, may well have done damage that is now coming home to roost. While we can’t always know this, truth is that even the best dietary and exercise adaptations can’t fix everything, which another reader,
pointed out the other day.Sometimes despite our best efforts, that 25% that we can’t control, the luck of the draw or lack thereof, can be one hell of a bad card.
Many of us abuse our bodies early on. It’s fair to say many if not most of us do precisely that through overeating, starvation, bad foods, drinking, smoking, drugs and all the rest. We may have have done serious if not permanent damage to our organs, damage which shows up later in disease.
In my father it was decades of smoking and alcohol abuse.
For me it was decades of eating disorders, including starvation.
The other truth is that emotional volatility, anger, trauma, instability, sexual assault, all of the deeply damaging events that happen to and around us absolutely affect our organs. From our roiling guts (the second brain) to our roiling emotions, these send cortisone coursing repeatedly through our bodies with considerable ill effect on all the major organs.
For those of you who have read The Body Keeps the Score, this might sound familiar:
"…for abused children, the whole world is filled with triggers."
Many of Substack’s most difficult essays are filled with stories about this very thing. I’ve lived it myself, which is part of why I write. Many people who live with a constantly-triggering and fundamentally unsafe-feeling world, and then end up with abusive partners, may end up with psychogenic pain (a somewhat outdated term but helpful here).
In my sixties, I developed severe kidney issues as a result of a bad relationship. When I did the research, I found this.
Stress and uncontrolled reactions to stress can also lead to kidney damage. As the blood filtering units of your body, your kidneys are prone to problems with blood circulation and blood vessels. High blood pressure and high blood sugar can place an additional strain or burden on your kidneys. People with high blood pressure and diabetes are at a higher risk for kidney disease. People with kidney disease are at higher risk for heart and blood vessel disease. If you already have heart and blood vessel disease and kidney disease, then the body’s reactions to stress can become more and more dangerous. Therefore, whether your goal is to prevent heart and/or kidney disease, or improve your health while living with heart and/or kidney disease, managing stress is an important part of maintaining your overall health. (author bolded)
Many of us truly, honestly, hear-breakingly believe that being thin is the picture of health.
That’s one of the great and appalling lies of our time. There are plenty of folks four times my size with healthier organs. It’s not necessarily the weight. It’s what we’re doing inside our hearts, minds and bodies. Like when we obsess about three pounds or three ounces, as I have most assuredly done.
Or when we’re terrorized about a half-doughnut. Scream at ourselves for not being able to zip up those pants. When we cruelly berate ourselves for eating that BAD FOOD. I’ve done all of that and far worse. Bet lots of you have, too.
I’d been diligent about eating better for decades. My fridge is full of salads, veggies, fruit, fish, chicken, eggs. oatmeal. It was, to all appearances, nearly perfect. I was the poster child for never getting ill, right?
WRONG.
My A1C was bouncing all over the place, all the way up to 6.1 which is square in the pre-diabetic space.
I was rushed to the hospital in March of last year on suspicion of a heart attack.
Despite four years of strict dietary discipline to control kidney stones, I have another one forming.
I just got lab work back from my kidney doctor indicating that my focus on calcium intake to deal with osteopenia was problematic. I have osteopenia because of two years of foot surgeries and recovery which kept me from weight bearing running and the like. I pounded down the calcium, which threw all my numbers, especially uric acid, into the danger range.
To that last, here I was thinking that all that calcium was helping my bones when it was forming stones. If you’ve ever had one, you do NOT want another.
I’d made huge adaptations in my diet four years ago after I’d been hospitalized with stones and two infected kidneys. Nobody provided a lab result on the stones so we all assumed, dumbly, that I had to strictly restrict oxalates. Four years of severe dietary restrictions quite likely for the wrong damned thing.
For those concerned with issues such as diabetes, liver disease, metabolic disease and kidney disease as well as heart disease, all of which are inextricably entwined as they must be, I strongly recommend reading David Perlmutter MD’s Drop Acid book.
From the overview:
Scientific literature is bursting with evidence that elevated uric acid levels lie at the root of many pervasive health conditions, but mainstream medicine for the most part remains unaware of this connection. This is especially alarming because a large number of Americans don’t know they are suffering from increased levels, putting them at risk for developing or exacerbating potentially life-threatening illnesses.
Look. I’m not always a fan of Perlmutter; there are things he does which make me squirm. But on this, he’s right.
My nephrologist was in complete agreement with what the book recommended. When we reviewed my unhappy lab results- even with an otherwise VERY healthy diet - I sped over to Natural Grocers and dumped serious money on the recommended supplements, a big bag of frozen tart cherries and more.
Most of what needs to be done is via food. Above all, calming the body, mind and spirit, which is even more essential.
My brothers and sisters who are military vets, those of you who suffered childhood trauma and abuse, we may well live in that constant state of extreme high alert.
We often may exacerbate it by partnering with people who mirror bad parents, and who perpetuate that sense of constant vigilance against threat and pain. I sure did.
My last ex was the source of stress which landed me in six different hospitals in quick succession while I was on an adventure trip in Indonesia. He had shitcanned me on my birthday the morning I landed in Bali. That was the final straw for my body.
Oh and here’s a fascinating tidbit. I went back into my medical records and found my A1C dating back more than twenty years. It spiked nearly every time my ex was in the picture.
PLEASE tell me that emotions don’t rule the body.
That is how we kill off our organs.
Here’s what finally getting in front of the right specialist gave me. The peace of mind to know this:
I don’t have diabetes, but the last several years of hugely stressful events (home sale, big move, near-deadly car accident, loss of my company and all the income, twelve major surgeries etc) had a direct impact on my A1C.
I needed a talk therapist (which I now have) and less physical pain.
Your diet can be perfect and you can still get ill.
I didn’t have a heart attack. But the extreme, constant, excessive pain load of all those big surgeries, including those which impinged on big nerves in the hands and feet, led to the heart attack. Just too much physical pain.
People with chronic pain can get seriously ill because there is just no respite. All too often their pain is ignored or dismissed, especially among people of color and worst for Blacks and Black women.
The incidence of all the above diseases and worse are prevalent in the Black and Brown communities in part because of the burden of racism. That’s a huge factor but this isn’t that article. However I’d be remiss if I didn’t call it out for these things have touched - and killed off- some beloved Black people in my family and in my life.
The PBS article tagged just above provides this quote which touches all of us of all colors in our hyper-stressed world:
Allostasis includes the so-called fight-or-flight response—the way your body reacts to a perceived threat. A stressful situation involves more than just abstract emotion; your body also prepares for conflict. Your blood pressure increases, along with your heart rate. Blood is diverted to your extremities to allow for easier movement. And your system is flooded with hormones like adrenaline and norepinephrine, which give you access to lots of energy quickly—key for either fighting or fleeing.
The catch is that these systems have evolved to be used for a few minutes at a time, then returned to baseline once the threat has passed. The problems arrive when stress becomes chronic. “Your body then remains in this hypervigilant mode, where you’re constantly anxious, constantly worried,” explains Tyan Parker Dominguez, a clinical professor of social work at the University of Southern California. “If you have your foot on the gas pedal of your car, and you’re just constantly revving your engine with no let up, that’s going to wear down the engine of your car much faster. (author bolded)
What I did and what you might want to consider
It took me a full year of fighting tooth and nail with the VA to finally get referrals both to an endocrinologist and nephrologist. Both were critical in giving me an accurate health picture, as well as a way forward.
My diet was vastly better than most, but my health history demanded that I get a clearer picture to make sure I was on the right track. That, and I am now in my seventies- our bodies change.
Our nutritional needs change as we age.
You notice I didn’t say we deteriorate, I said our nutritional needs change. So in order to maintain our best health going forward, we change to accommodate an aging body.
All the research backs this up. Every so often we’d be wise to get checked. When we get the lab numbers, we make the appropriate shifts in diet, exercise and living conditions as much as we can to accommodate.
Reading dietary advice on line isn’t the only way to eat better. First, there’s a lot of pure junk advice on line. Second, a ketogenic or paleo diet may not be a good idea for you at all.
That’s true for vegan and other diets which are based on moral principles; just because we feel badly about killing animals, our bodies still may desperately need some kind of meat.
That’s why you need to know your lab numbers, which a good specialist will help you interpret into the diet you need for YOUR body. Not some idiot fake-fluencer who doesn’t give a damn if you die from their diets.
After all, more than a few of them have died from their own diets, and I take that as fair warning.
And of course, the ultra-processed food industry has hired its fair share of fake-fluencers to peddle their evil crap as well. Please see this. The only person who really has your best interests and health in mind needs to be YOU.
Just another reason to take ALL online advice, advice from well-meaning friends and your Uncle Fred who swears that Hostess Ho-Hos saved him from cancer, with a large barge of salt.
For my part, fellow Substacker
is one of the best sources of general nutritional advice on line and has written a book about brain health. That said we still need to tailor all advice to our particular body.
The challenge all of us have, which Tina Turner alluded to above, is that Western medicine is all about fixing emergencies. She had no idea she was sick and it cost her a kidney. The invisible killer. Worse, we often don’t take action until we have a heart attack or land in the ER after a disease is almost too far advanced to fix.
Even so, as my nearly year-long full-on battle with the VA proved, they were triaging me. Their argument was that I couldn’t be seen unless I was at death’s door. For an organization that loudly touts prevention and balanced health care, that’s bullshit.
So I fought, fought hard, fought even harder, fought louder, lodged a Congressional complaint, engaged the help of a patient advocate. And won.
I got the referrals.
And I was bloody well RIGHT.
Seeing the kidney specialist likely not only helped me better manage the stone that was forming, it might well have saved my life.
What is also hugely helpful is the talk therapy. And one other thing which my therapist provided me: a small bio-feedback device, which allows me to monitor the level of stress. This little biofeedback unit ( not an affiliate link) has also helped.
I keep that unit in a kangaroo pocket or near my desk especially if I go on line to research. That biofeedback unit is a fine way to teach yourself just how much bad news poisons us through high blood pressure. The VA provided me a loaner, I’m saving up for one of my own.
It’s critically valuable information about how being online hurts us.
Specialists give us the numbers we need which allow us to see OUR body, not everyone else’s, and what WE need, rather than to follow some fake-fluencer whose habits can cause terrible harm.
Since most doctors don’t have solid nutritional training, that’s why you and I would be wise to see a nutritionist.
That said, this underscores something else I regularly write about: no diet lasts a lifetime. If you’ve been through a big emotional hit, and a number of my favorite writers have via death or trauma, then whatever you’re eating right now may not be what you need to support a body experiencing high emotional stress.
With turning the big 70 milestone many aspects of my life changed drastically. All those factors impact our bodies, minds, emotions. It was past time for me to get checked. Being older, being female, all too often we aren’t taken seriously or seen as hypochondriacs.
If you’re Black, in particular, I don’t need to tell you how your concerns are ignored, unless you’re seeing a Black doctor who understands.
That said, fight for the right to be seen by specialists. Even when we make good lifestyle choices like my friend Jim and his wife, as I did, stress can do untold damage. We have to stay on top of these and not get sucked into the “thin is healthy” lie.
Know your labs, what the numbers mean, and get thee to a trained nutritionist who will get you onto the foods that will make your precious, unique, wonderful machine of a body work better.
There is no point where it’s all perfect and easy. I’ve never said that, nor have I implied it, because it’s just not true. The hard work you and I do to eat well and exercise much give us a far better than fighting chance to better manage what is dealt us. No guarantees, but I’ll take stacking the odds in our favor.
There is the joy of learning what works for now, shifting it when we shift, and being as committed as we can to a healthier body and mind.
To that, mind your body, mind your mind, find our your numbers, and above all,
Let’s play.
And by the way, my play today? I am adopting a dog from a local rescue. We have two weeks to find out if we’re a good match. The reason I chose her? Get this: unlike the Blue Heelers whose intensity always matched my own, Mika is uber uber UBER chill, sweet, gentle, and a very old soul. I chose her for her nature, not her breeding or beauty. That’s a whole other article.
This was a difficult post to write, but it was important. I hope it was valuable to you and inspired you to take your health very seriously. We can’t play if we’re sick, and we can’t get well unless we know what’s going on inside us body mind and spirit. If this was valuable, please consider
If someone you know could use this information please consider
Either way, be well, be mindful, and take the time to play much and love hard. Now I’m going to go get Mika.
Thank's for the honest and detailed description of health issues. So important to stress how each of us are different. I have finally gotten more assertive, after too many situations over the decades where I wasn't and was damaged because of it. Even the specialists didn't serve me well because they thought they knew what was going on, even thought non of them had ever encountered anyone with my particular rare underlying chronic problem called Sheehan's Syndrome. I am better as pushing for answers, and I have been better at figuring out the importance of having a primary care doctor who doesn't think she knows everything and will work with me to find answers. Doesn't mean I don't have health issues, but I feel as if I am in much better shape to deal with them. And yes, a nutritionist, I worked with helped tremendously! As a long time vegetarian, who can not longer tolerate all most of the usual sources of protein because they come with a level of carbs I can't handle, her suggestions on how to make sure I got sufficient protein with each meal were very important. Again, thanks for taking the time to write something that I know wasn't easy for you.
This is one heck of a well-written, informative, and mind-blowing article. The emotional component is huge. And you really got me with Tina Turner, my all-time favorite since I was a kid. This gives me a lot to think about moving forward... and releasing stress and anger must be the first addressed. Thank you for writing this painful subject.