With my fiftieth birthday approaching later this fall, I have been thinking A LOT about getting older. Time is a twisty, funky thing, but milestone birthdays serve as way points that encourage some reflection. I've been pondering my health, wealth, relationships, career, parenting, and more.
I used to write a bunch. In the age of blogs, before Facebook, I posted often as a fun exercise to share news of our growing family and to simply get some thoughts out of my anxious, sometimes sideways mind. As I hurtle down the road to fifty, I plan to write again. To examine more closely some of the subjects I've been thinking about. If you enjoyed reading my stuff before, I hope you'll indulge me again. I'll cross post my stuff on my old blog. Yes, it still exists; nothing really goes away on the internet. I'll put the link in the comments.Of course, one of the great treats of getting older is worrying about your health. Aging has sharpened my focus on health issues I should have dealt with long ago. Instead of treating my body like a temple, I have used it like a demolition derby car that crashed into the chocolate fountain in a Golden Corral. Now, on the precipice of being fifty years old, weighing in at my heaviest poundage ever, I know I have to fix some things. Things that should have changed when I got married. Or when I stopped playing ice hockey. Or when Grace was born. When I was prescribed blood pressure meds at age 35. When my dad dropped dead at age 59. When gout became a semi-annual companion. When we were told Covid might be worse for the obese. When the scale crossed 300 for the first time. Or a thousand other instances that should have been a wake up call.
Most of the annoying maladies that plague me -creaky lower back, persistent knee pain, sleep apnea- would ease, if not disappear, if I lost fifty pounds. One hundred, would be better, but fifty would help immensely. It's so frustrating to know feeling crappy physically is mostly due to self-inflicted wounds. To know aches, pains, and worse, that we used to concede to "getting old" can be mitigated by staying physically fit. To know it really doesn't have to be this way.
So, why do I look and feel as bad as I do? Why does looking at my belly in the mirror remind me of that Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park? Because. I. Love. To. Eat.
I love healthy food. I love unhealthy food. I love the huge percentage of the American diet that is processed, factory-manufactured, food-type product food. And because I love it, I eat way too much of it. The irony is I love fruits and vegetables. I enjoy cooking. I like perusing the internet and cookbooks for tasty, healthy food. Yet, too often, the inconvenience (it's not really that inconvenient) of cooking a well-balanced meal loses out to food peddled by a clown or talking chihuahua. In a time when we have more information that we can possibly imagine at our fingertips, I routinely ignore it in favor of something, anything with extra cheese.
So that's what I'll be working on. I've been lifting weights again to protect the bones, have the bike out of the shed to strengthen the heart and lungs, and have been engaging in floorplay (read that again, you pervert) to work on mobility (a top-notch predictor of longevity and aging gracefully). Getting in the kitchen has to be the top priority. I'm putting the demolition derby car in the shop; I just hope it's not beyond repair.
