You're Too Old To Believe That You Can Outrun a Lifetime of Lousy Habits
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
A friend once said that our bodies send us love letters as we age
Really now.
I’m afraid my body’s love letters have contained some right spicy language, usually along the lines of
WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?
There really is no response to such a question except, perhaps, a bit of shamefaced remorse.
I constantly hear people complain about how old they feel. A flight attendant of 45. A child of thirty. Mind you, before you fling your Big Mac at me, I’m seventy.
At this age everyone looks like a child after I see my face in the morning.
The way we treat our bodies when we’re young is stunning. The younger we are the more passionately we appear to believe that physical rules don’t apply to us. That we, like the Teflon Don, won’t have to pay the price of lousy habits and poor judgment.
Most of us make it past a lot of those insults; some don’t. As with all things, it depends.
Some of the insults are inflicted upon us. Others we inflict on ourselves.
Sometimes we’re stupid, sometimes we get the result of someone else’s stupidity. Or brutality.
And sometimes we end up hurting ourselves as the result of someone else’s stupid or brutal or both.
Above all the journey forward as a physical being can’t be separated from our journey forward as an emotional and spiritual being.
One lesson above all is nearly always lost:
We are not our bodies.
I’m going to repeat that: We are NOT our bodies.
We identify with our bodies as though they are the be-all, end-all, as though how we look is EVERYTHING in life. All our bodies do is give us a way to move in this magnificent world, to learn, grow and evolve.
Look. I enjoy news like the below as much as anyone for the simple fact that this gymnast- and plenty of other people- are proof-positive that healthy habits and hard work allow us to enjoy physical excellence and agency well past what we in the Western world appear to believe is just SO OLD, say, at fifty:
So, kindly, balderdash.
Physical prowess in and of itself isn’t the point. A functionally fit body, and by this I did NOT say thin but fit, allows us to explore, experiment, fail, struggle, learn, evolve and grow.
Ultimately said growth is uniquely and exclusively emotional and spiritual, as the body lets go of us so that we can rise to whatever is next.
The body’s job is to give us a vehicle so that we can evolve. We miss the point when we make the body EVERYTHING, when it is the single thing guaranteed to deteriorate no matter what we do.
Given that we owe Mother Nature a body, and that our time is strictly limited, it makes a great deal of sense to make the most of the time we have to be fully in life with a vibrantly HEALTHY body.
I didn’t learn that lesson until forty years of eating disorders had taken all my teeth and threatened to kill me off entirely. When I finally ended that, my life was flooded with time I could spend, well, being in life, and not being face-down, staring at toilet bowl architecture.
When it comes to the physical, time takes. What we do with our body, how we use our bodies as the medium by which and through which we experience the world and our varied roles in it, are the grist for growth.
The larger issue here, though, is the cost to us of how we treat our bodies with such wanton disregard- and again my hand is way up here- and that we end up being so utterly distracted by our illnesses, ailments and complaints that we don’t live at all.
At all.
Increasingly that cost comes home to roost in our thirties if not younger, especially in Western nations. That underscores the point that we cannot outrun even a brief lifetime of bad habits.
This is all too often us:
We worry incessantly about our weight, even as we stuff ourselves with diets of some 60-73% ultra-processed foods, which are killing us slowly. Or we suffer, as I did, terrible, destructive, soul-killing eating disorders.
We worry incessantly about our looks as we age, and then spend billions trying to fix what can’t be fixed and was perfectly okay to begin with.
We constantly lose sleep- the one natural fix to nearly all our ills- over what’s wrong with us, our bodies, and cheat ourselves of Nature’s finest fix for much what ails us: pure, perfect rest.
Worse, we allow ourselves to become so fearful, we abuse our bodies for so long, that as a society we are imprisoning ourselves physically and emotionally.
That abuse now starts very early, effectively from birth with bad habits of the pregnant mother, and then sugary baby foods and crap baby formulas (Google it) and then the cell-phone-as-babysitter, so that our poor eating and sedentary habits have already caught up with us in our thirties.
My generation joked about being old at thirty, too. Until of course you get there. We also thought that sixty was just ANCIENT, until of course you get there.
These days in one very real sense we are indeed aged at thirty. Let’s talk about that.
What really determines age is biological age.
Here’s an article to explain the difference.
From that article:
Your chronological age and biological age might not be the same. Chronological age is the number of years you've been alive, while biological age refers to how old your cells and tissues are based on physiological evidence.
If you're especially healthy and fit for your age, your biological age may well be lower than your chronological age. But if you're sedentary, chronically ill, or in poor physical condition, your biological age may be higher. (author bolded)
The article states, incorrectly, that genes have a significant impact. Too many of us blame genes for what’s going on with our bodies, when in most cases, genes SUGGEST, they don’t always determine. Eye color, yeah. But health?
That’s from habits. Even if you have the Alzheimer’s gene, good habits do a remarkable job of prevention.
Depending on the papers you read, genes influence perhaps 7% regarding our lifespan, so it helps to choose long-lived parents.
But lifespan isn’t healthspan, which we can utterly ruin via ruinous habits. As a Western society we are decimating our healthspan at a stunning speed.
Many researchers agree that our quality of life as we age is about 75% in our hands, which goes to the point about habits.
Once upon a time, by the time you and I reached fifty, that milestone so often greeted with a black-themed Hallmark card as though to say THIS IS THE END OF EVERYTHING, MIGHT AS WELL GIVE UP, our bodies have begun to have serious conversations with us about how we’ve used them.
These days, that milestone is far younger, not just because of attitudes but because of bad habits.
This article speaks to how cancer, especially colorectal cancer, is exploding among young adults fifty and younger.
From that article:
Ogino says the spike is due to an unhealthy stew of risk factors that are probably working together, some which are known and others that need to be investigated.
He notes that many of these risks have established links to cancer like obesity, inactivity, diabetes, alcohol, smoking, environmental pollution and Western diets high in red meat and added sugars, not to mention shift work and lack of sleep. (author bolded)
Younger people, who complain bitterly about being old at thirty, are all too often doing it to themselves. This article explores how younger people are getting sicker, younger. From that article:
Among the diseases whose rate increased across all age groups was diabetes mellitus type 2. Here, the scientists observed an expansion in morbidity. It is worrying that the disease is becoming increasingly common in early adulthood.
"This is associated with a prolonged duration of the disease and an increased risk of co-morbidities, i.e., the additional occurrence of concomitant diseases," says Professor Geyer. This is already evident in the age groups of 18 to 45 years old. The development of severe overweight, called obesity, in young years is also alarming. The proportion of obese people aged between 25 and 55 almost doubled between 2004 and 2020. It increased from 12.7% to 23.4%. Obesity in turn promotes diseases such as diabetes mellitus type 2, high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke and fatty liver. (author bolded)
You and I are way Too Old to believe we can outrun a lifetime of lousy habits.
But we can most assuredly turn around and greet them head-on.
Social media is full of stories of people considered past retrieval who took their health in hand and turned it around. I dumped 85 lbs at the age of 31 and have kept it off for the rest of my life but for Covid, and those pounds are gone too.
You and I can absolutely, positively rebuild our bodies with better habits at any time, regaining strength, body agency, energy, enthusiasm and, dare I say it, youthfulness and vigor.
You and I can absolutely, positively get back years of quality of life. Will you get your waistline back? Not likely. Will you get back that unlined face? Puh-leeze. Not without surgery you won’t.
And kindly, before you point this out, I am perfectly aware that wide swaths of our population do not have easy access to decent food, ways to exercise or basic healthcare. This isn’t that article.
Will you be better able to deal with depression and lack of sleep and other ills if you change your habits? Damn right you can. In fact there’s plenty of research proving that depression and sleep disorders can well be traced to shit food and sedentary habits and the lifestyle diseases we have heaped upon ourselves.
Like, for example, scrolling on our phones before sleep, which does a fine job of disrupting the critical rest we require.
You and I can’t outrun our bad habits.
But you and I can by god change them.
Change your habits, change your life.
Give yourself the gift of a functionally fit, healthy body, give yourself permission to be fully in life right until you are date-stamped.
More on that to follow.
For right now, let’s bask for a moment in the absolute knowledge that yes, you can change. But don’t take too long a moment, kindly, for real change, substantive change, takes commitment, time, practice and plenty of failures.
I am the poster child for failure in that regard. After all it only took me forty years to get my eating disorder handled.
But I did.
After that, well. There’s always hope, but hope alone doesn’t deliver results.
That’s for another article.
Let’s play.
Thanks so much for hanging with me today. You just gave me the irretrievable gift of your time, so I hope it was worth your while. If so, please consider
If you’ve got someone in your life battling some of these issues and who might benefit from a differing perspective, also please consider
Either way, here’s to a spring in your step and a terrific day.
Now that I'm 50 I often think about how I lived in the past. I was a pack-a-day smoker for decades and a very liberal rum-head for the 15 years that Jamaica was a big part of my life. It's only the last 4 or 5 years that I've quit all that and I wonder what kind of damage I've caused. But...I guess the grim reaper takes who he wants when he wants. Lord knows I've watched it way too many times in the past few years.