You're Too Old to Believe in Magic Pills and Quick Fixes

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

What one fitness influencer taught me about our gullibility

Eighteen months ago an online friend sent me a breathless email about one Joan MacDonald, whom many of you might know as a now 76-year-old fitness influencer. She has a great many followers, millions of ‘em.

I’m not one of them for several reasons. While I have the utmost regard for what Joan has done with her body and her fitness, I was troubled, as I always am, by all the older women/people who were equally breathless about how “I’ma gonna be JOAN.”

Can we have a reality check here?

This is magical thinking, and I am going to pick it apart.

I absolutely applaud her achievements with my whole heart. But people are fooling themselves if they look at her before and after and think it’s going to happen to them…especially without a great deal of sweat, tears, frustration and money.

We mentally accordion the time between those two photos and often don’t have a full appreciation of how long it takes.

Not one damned bit easy and you can bet your bippy it gets a hell of a lot harder as we age.

Let’s talk.

First, Joan’s remarkable journey took a good long time. The daily, slogging, steady work, the dedication, the frustration with an aged body. Most of us have no patience for the tiny, incremental changes that we win over weeks and months.

We aren’t prepared for the inevitable backslides, the failures, the tears.

She also, handily, happened to have a certified personal fitness trainer as a daughter. Said daughter likely- and for very good reason- saw a stupendous business opportunity in her mother’s journey. I applaud them both because damn, man, what a great story.

The daughter is gorgeous, social media eye candy. With a fitness center in Mexico. Wow.

I don’t have that. Do you?

Joan had some terrific things going for her that most of us don’t have. That’s not a criticism.

Why is having a trainer as a son or daughter key? Because if you worked out every single day for several hours a day with a trainer, and you had to pay upwards of at least $65 per hour (what I pay) to several hundred per hour in places like Manhattan, well.

It’s expensive to hire top-flight fitness help.

It can also expensive to join a gym. Worse, you’re a damned fool if you head to your local YMCA or rec center and start throwing weights around without professional guidance. Not only are you risking serious, permanent injury, you can hurt other people.

I see this kind of dangerously poor form at my Planet Fitness every single day. Old folks picking up weights they can barely lift and trying to do exercises with them.

Planet Fitness is cheap. Getting seriously and possibly permanently injured at the gym is expensive.

Doing this at home may not be wise, either. Good form for Joan may not be good form for YOU. Maybe you have scoliosis. Maybe surgeries or an accident have shortened one leg. Maybe….eight billion different scenarios. Proper form for YOUR body is a one-in-eight billion proposition.

Even walking can be problematic. So many folks haven’t walked for so long that their gait is off. Some of us need orthotics, and some of us need to have our gait assessed so that we don’t harm hips, knees and ankles.

This may not matter so much when you’re younger. But if you’re past forty or fifty, your body likely doesn’t work the same way any more.

Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash

That’s not bad news. It’s just reality.

That means investing in professional help, which Joan apparently largely had at Friends and Family rates. You and I deserve kind and competent coaching.

A professional trainer and physical therapist teach you what works for you and you alone.

My dear friend

Nurit Amichai

, who is currently training with her mostly older clients in Israel (one way they keep their sanity) is 75, a former bodybuilder, with all kinds of coaching credentials including life coaching and vegan food.

Professionals like Nurit know how to deal with the weight of our hearts which so often leads to weight on the body (my hand is up) and how to coax an aging body into vibrant health. She knows that a commitment to the body is to whole health.

And she is doing it in a country at war. You will understand if I bow in her direction. She knows that if we are to survive the world we are in, we must be fit, body, mind and spirit.

Back to Joan MacDonald.

Third, part of Joan’s advantage is that she’s short. The longer the muscle, the longer it takes to get that bicep peak, for example. In the bodybuilding world, some of the most successful men and women are from 5’2” to 5’7”. Short folks can build bigger muscles faster.

I don’t doubt that any of us can build muscle but each body is different.

Besides, this is about functional fitness. Being able to hike, bike, run, play, get on the floor with the grandkids and not need six family members and the neighbor’s tractor to heave us upright.

Fourth, there is no guarantee whatsoever that despite years of dedicated work you will have results even remotely like Joan’s. You will have results, but you aren’t Joan, and your body will respond very differently.

You could end up with better results. We just don’t know.

The final challenge to the Myth of Joan is your expectation. What do you think is going to happen if you get that fit body?

This is the magical thinking part.

Do we really assume- as so many of us who have ever been obese- that when we get that body, the world will worship us? Maybe, maybe not. The true fan club has to be the person who looks back at us in the mirror.

Joan’s got a phalanx of folks around her now, the PR machine and the producers and all the rest because she’s a commodity. She’s on magazine covers. That takes a marketing team.

Again, I applaud her, more than you can imagine. She’s done so much to bring more mainstream folks to the gym. However.

If we in our heated imaginations believe that we, too, will become an Internet sensation and a commodity if we can just Look Like Joan, likely we’re in for a surprise.

Joan was preceded by other older women bodybuilders, notably the great Ernestine Shepherd and the lively and energetic Dr. Josefina Monasterio.

The days of the one-offs are over. “Oldsters at the gym” isn’t news any more. It’s normalized.

That’s the best possible news.

These women, all of them, who often started late in life, were willing to put in the endless hours, buy the right foods and supplements, and get the proper training to get themselves in that kind of shape.

The worst possible news?

Our fitness is harder-won the older we get. It takes more work to maintain, to eat well. It’s easier to just give up.

That’s why building courage and character along with our muscles is so critically important. We will face deterioration. We owe Nature a body.

Finally, there’s another price folks don’t discuss, a loss we often don’t see coming.

If you do indeed end up looking like All That and a Bag of Chips, you might find your friendship circle dwindling, your pals getting petty and jealous, and your support system slipping away.

You may have to create a new community to support the New You.

That’s a cost many of us fail to consider. When I lost 85 lbs, and threw myself into serious fitness training, my circle shrank. I was shocked, then I realized that it was inevitable. Are you prepared to possibly lose your circle if you play Circe and transform your body?

The author at her second home, age 67

I write about fitness too, having been obese, having dealt with eating disorders. But I’ve also lifted for fifty years. My entire adult life, through thick and thin, the gym has been my second home. It’s not some new shiny thang that I have hold of for a few brief moments.

Like writing, fitness is part of my DNA.

The point is not the body beautiful. Not about looking like some influencer. It’s about reaching and sustaining your best possible fitness so that you can engage in all the other aspects of life without being constantly distracted and sidelined by illness and disease.

And so now we come to it. Here’s the ugly juice part of the magical thinking.

The shape these women are in won’t stop them from dying. It will, however, give them options. They will likely not have to deal with most if not all of the awful lifestyle illness which ravage so many of us in the West.

Even so, some of us may find that the lifelong insults we have hurled at our bodies are too deep and too permanent to be fixed by a late-in-life transformation. That’s where kindness, patience and forgiveness come in to the equation.

Is it worth the effort? Damn right.

We need to keep right on working our bodies, eating better and all that for the rest of our lives if we want to keep on reaping the benefits. Fitness never stops. The moment you stop, the body begins to swiftly deteriorate.

I know all too well.

I just experienced that very thing, after five years of twelve major surgeries, seven in just the last year, and being forced to be unusually sedentary while healing. I lost a good chunk of my fitness. Gained 25 lbs.

I was unable to do much more than heal, do PT, the next surgery, rinse and repeat with spits and spats of exercise in between.

Then, by June of this year, most of that weight was gone again. Even after I broke my hip in July, the bonus round I didn’t see coming, I was back at the gym and hiking sand dunes about six weeks later.

That’s not bragging. That was hard damned work. That’s earned.

Why do I keep after it? Because this:

A third of people my age who break a hip die within the following year.

I don’t want that to be you. I want you to have a fit body. A fit body supports a fit mind, soul, heart. When your body is as fit as it can be, you have options.

Taking care of your body is an act of love and courage. Doing it for the rest of your life is an act of devotion. Your body allows you to grow emotionally and spiritually, which is why we’re really here.

So to wrap: it’s not about the influencer. It’s about you.

What fit looks like for you is unique to you and you alone.

Here’s what I want for all of us:

To live fully in this world to the end of our days.

That has nothing to do with an influencer. It has everything to do with knowing you are worth the investment, taking the steps to respect YOUR body, YOUR needs, YOUR style, what YOU are willing to do, for YOUR reasons. Your best life.

You and I are way TOO OLD to believe in magic pills and easy fixes.

Let’s do the work, let’s commit to ourselves. And then….

Let’s play.

Photo by JennyB, personal trainer Canada

Whew. I’m exhausted. You too? Well, I’m going to the gym now. Before that, though, if you got value, please consider

If you’ve got someone in your life who might get inspired, consider

Either way. We woke up with 24 gorgeous hours ahead of us. How will you spend yours? I hope you take time to play.