I know some of you are going to hate this chapter. A lot of people our age do. I challenge you to read it anyway. If you can jibe with it, it can help to keep you on the path. Not your cup of tea? No problem, friend. Just glance it over so we can all be on the same page.
Health isn’t about …
Health isn’t about how you look. It’s about how you love. It’s about loving life, loving our people, and loving our circumstances. But none of this is even possible without first learning to love ourselves.
Folks our age aren’t very good at loving ourselves. We learned instead to beat the hell out of ourselves. To gain fitness at our body’s expense. We patterned this after our heroes. Remember Rocky hoisting a log over his shoulders and running through hip-deep snow, in immense pain seemingly against his own will? That was the kind of stupid stuff we revered.
Unfortunately, I’ve watched a lot of people our age beat the hell out of themselves trying to become fit. There was a time when this worked, but these days you do it at the expense of health. The wrong workout is the fastest way to ruin your health.
Years ago I was forced to watch an egregious case of this. I don’t remember her name. I do remember the exact numbers. She was 5’5 and weighed 102 with a BF% of less than 12% (extremely unhealthy for most females). She was a mom of four VERY little ones. Every day she would relentlessly do an hour of step class followed by an hour on the StairMaster. ROUGH!
One day she came to see me. She asked, “Can you help me learn to lift? I need to boost my metabolism and finally lose this fat.” She grabbed her hips. There was nothing there. Not even muscle. “Plus my doctor said I need to lay off my foot while it heals. So I figured I’d better start weightlifting since it’s lower impact.”
It was no surprise she was wearing an orthopedic boot. Somehow, in my town, exercising your way into a microfracture of the fibula is a status symbol in the gym.
Congratulations?
I told her I would love to help her, but to do that I’d be reducing her exercise time and increasing her healthy calories. She smiled at me with a look that was equal parts “bless your heart” and “go make tender love to yourself.” Energetically, she said, “This sounds great!” then set an appointment for the next day.
She ghosted me.
She thought she had found an exercise hack. The hack was beating the hell out of herself until her body began to look like the images of females she saw in the magazines and movies.
But she was already all the way there. Actually, beyond. What the magazines and movies didn’t reveal to her was the cost of getting there. Without kindness toward herself, her body would temporarily comply, but only at the expense of her self-esteem, her energy, and her health - thus, the boot.
Since we aren’t big on the expression of love for ourselves, “beating the hell out of ourselves” is tempting to us. It’s our unique way of exercising.
Don’t do it.
When was the last time you worked out just to feel the movement? Just to “feel the flow”? People over 40 don’t really do this. If we are going to work out, we believe we have to get MAXIMUM effect. Anything less than our greatest effort, to us, is unworthy.
As we get older, despite our best intentions, this leads to skipping workouts more and more due to fatigue, soreness, and injuries.The negative effects of overtraining–a LOT more inflammation and damage–show up faster now. The pain causes us to skip more workouts. Skipping workouts makes us weaker and more unhealthy. This cycle spirals downward forever.
The cure for this is more love. Love for ourselves and love for our bodies. Love for the experience of becoming healthy and fit. No hacks. No gimmicks. Just pure enthusiasm for loving life, loving our people, and loving our circumstances.
No need to view our bodies as an enemy to be brutally hammered into submission. Instead, we should view our bodies as a blessing. We should view movement as poetry. We should see exercise as a flow of energy between the spiritual and temporal. This way of thinking puts us in touch with our truest selves and opens us to immeasurable joy. At 40+, this is the ONLY way lasting health and fitness can be found.