“We’re old. We’re not young like you…”
This is something my mother used to say to me when we would get into debates about her starting an exercise routine. She doesn’t say this anymore. She still doesn’t exercise regularly and she’s currently trying to avoid her second back surgery. When we talk about exercise nowadays, we tend to have more honest conversations about why she believes she can’t stick to a routine. In my view, this is progress. I’m constantly reminding her that a little bit each day starts to build up over time. Even if it’s just committing to walking a certain number of laps from the bedroom to the front door everyday… Even if it’s just doing a couple of exercises everyday with some small hand weights… Even if it’s just committing to getting up and down off the coach 2 times during every commercial break while watching TV… It’s something and it matters.
When I was a teenager, obese, struggling with patellar tendonitis in both knees, and beginning to have regular back problems, I can remember thinking, “Maybe I need to get my knees scoped?” This was the 90’s (I love talking about the 90’s) and I watched major sports on T.V. all the time. The commentators were always talking about athletes who had gotten knees scoped and other surgeries to deal with chronic pain. As often and as intense as I would experience pain, I assumed that I was most definitely headed for surgery some day. Thankfully, this never happened and a large reason for that is not only exercise but specific exercise protocols that I’ve discovered on the internet over the last 10-12 years. I’ve said this several times in previous posts, but I’me more athletic now in my early 40’s than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve always been an advocate of exercise and the older I get, the more I believe.
Of course, my experience is rare in a world where so many people hit their 40’s and begin a steady physical decline into old age. I think much of this has to do with the stories we tell each other about getting older. I’ve heard it my whole life:
- I just don’t bounce back the way I used to…
- You get old, you’re going to gain weight. That’s just the way it is…
- I’ve always been stiff and as I get older, I just get stiffer…
- Never Get Old!
There’s truth hidden in these statements but there is also assumption as well. The assumptions are where we’ve got to do work. My parents have made the ‘too old’ argument many times in the past with regards to working out. What’s interesting about the ‘too old’ argument is the same person who’s in their 50’s or older, who makes the argument that they’re getting too old for exercise will, under the instruction of a doctor, get a surgery like a knee or hip replacement (which I am not against).
Let’s think through the following comparison: someone is too old to get in better shape physically but having an anesthesiologist fill you with drugs that take you to the edge of death, then having a orthopedic surgeon cut your leg or hips open with knives, cut through multiple layers of tissue that include muscle, fascia, blood vessels, ligaments, and tendons, saw and hammer bone to remove it, and then take a foreign body and replace the bone with this foreign body, and then drill screws and brackets to hold it in place for your body to grow around and into it… Your body can do all that at an old age but can’t positively change from sustainable progressive exercise at an old age? That’s crazy. Clearly we must be believing a lie somewhere. I presume many of those lies are hidden in the stories we tell each other about getting older.
Different Stories About What’s Important
My parents come from the baby boomer era. As I’ve written before, I think in their time food was a lot less processed. Movement in daily life was more ubiquitous. I believe this possibly fostered an environment where health was more assumed than cultivated. Baseline life was generally healthier when they were kids so there wasn’t as much of an imperative to actively pursue health as one got older and the world became more convenient. The era from the 50’s on is also when innovations in food started to roll out into everyday society post WWII. Ready to eat meals that you simply heated in the oven, microwave meals, and eventually high fructose corn syrup and low fat processed foods that dominated food ads in the 90’s.
There’s also the medical innovations that have come about since my parents were kids in the 50’s (or even just since I was a kid in the 90’s). Advances in the ability to treat diabetes, heart disease, and even obesity itself have been huge in their lifetime. Also, tons of advancement in orthopedic surgery.
My parents are also avid believers in ‘what the doctor said’. Funny enough, they both tend to want answers from the doctor when something is going wrong (immediate solutions) but they’re completely unresponsive to the doctor’s recommendations for preventative measures, like exercise. I guess it’s more like ‘what the doctor said that I’m willing to do’.
In times past I’ve been very tempted to call them ‘lazy’. But I know this is a knee jerk reaction that comes from frustration and my sincere desire for them to be healthy. My parents both worked full time jobs and my mother only stopped working to be a full time caregiver for my stepfather’s grandmother. My stepfather recently stopped working at 72 years old due to an array of health problems. They both know how to work and they know how to work hard. They just don’t apply that mindset to their health for some reason. This often makes me think about the contentious conversations I had with both of them when I was quitting engineering. In their view, I was ungrateful, I wasn’t paying my dues, and had fallen from grace for a foolish decision. I didn’t agree with that assessment then and I believe time has proven me correct in my choice. I made a choice for my health and for reasons that don’t include laziness, my parents haven’t. I don’t fully understand it but I know our stories are different in terms of what takes priority in life.
To me, being lazy is lazy in every part of life. It’s a general malaise towards showing any effort toward anything. That’s not my parents. I highlight the realities of 1950’s culture earlier in this article because I believe they adopted a narrative from that media environment that many people their age adopted. That narrative says that a successful life is one where convenience and the normalcy of the nuclear family is acquired through a steady commitment to an employer. “Hell, I’ll work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. Working long hours has never been a big deal to me!” My stepfather said that to me one day. He’s worked in food service, hotel, and banquet service his whole life. He’s always worked hard and he’s always emphasized high quality customer service in his job. I can remember him sleeping at the hotel for multiple days in a row. The man has always been committed to his work and more specifically, providing for his family. My mother was a single mom for a long time before meeting my stepfather and she was the same way. Again, they aren’t lazy people but health has never been a priority to them.
I’m talking a lot about their generation but if I’m really honest about it, It’s my generation too. This is a universal problem. I have friends my age and younger who despite all my encouragement and knowledge sharing over the course of our relationship have never made exercise a priority. Now as we move into middle-age, the consequences are emerging. As far as I can tell, many of my friends are caught in the same story that my parents are caught in. Work and family obligations, which are clearly important, are the ultimate priority and in some sense people may even feel guilty for setting aside the time to work on their own health.
I’m Lucky Things Were Hard For Me
I’m lucky that I got called fat and ugly growing up. I’m lucky that chronic stress at home and at school made me an emotional eater. I’m lucky I twisted my left ankle when I was little. I twisted it so badly I couldn’t walk for a couple of weeks. I’m lucky we never saw a physical therapist to rehab it. And I’m lucky that I struggled for years with patellar tendinitis because of it. Why do these things make me lucky? These adverse experiences created a crucible for me to navigate. They gave me a thorn in my side that I had to work to find a solution to. Without the obstacles in my health I don’t know that I would have been motivated to learn about my body and cultivate better health. Obviously, lots of people have similar challenges in childhood but don’t make the same choice. They don’t tell themselves the same story I told myself… that pain and disappointment come to make us stronger… I’m lucky I got to experience a manageable dose of pain and suffering as a kid because I learned how to make it work for me.
The more I think about it, I believe I cultivated a mindset of looking at my childhood as a superhero origin story. Superheroes always have some tragic component of their childhood that shapes the hero they become. The friction of being bullied at school and, in many ways, being bullied at home caused me to look inward at ways I could develop my strength and self confidence. That strong inward gaze led me to fitness and sports. The physical limitations of obesity, chronic knee/back pain, and the constant lack of athleticism when compared to peers at school, was the impetus to begin learning how my body works. The thirst to learn more has led to greater understanding and increased performance with time. Leaving me not only healthier/more athletic in my 40’s than ever but almost totally immune to many of the false narratives that exist around health. There are just certain things you can’t tell me about aging because my life and knowledge are in direct contradiction to those ideas. I have a different story than most people so the assumptions about the health and vitality I can have as I get older are different from most people.
Trying to Influence While Maintaining Personal Responsibility
The question is, how do you get people to stop believing things that objectively aren’t true?
For now with my parents, it’s about expressing honest concern about their current health and encouraging them to understand the value of small habits done consistently over time. I also try to be honest with them about my frustrations with their behavior but I try to do it in the most respectful way possible.
I’m trying to encourage them to have a vision. They’ve both been working and taking care of others their whole lives and I just want them to be able to enjoy however much time they have left. They’re in their early 70’s. I want them to take trips to big cities they’ve never been to, eat nice food, and enjoy themselves. They both like that kind of stuff and I think it’s what they should be doing. But their health isn’t allowing it at the moment, so I’m encouraging them to understand that small consistent steps with exercise and diet are part of the way through to that vision. Here, my 3 principles of ownership are coming into play: Small actions over time with exercise and diet, disarming the false stories about fitness in old age, and having a vision for the future. Just the same way we take ownership of our own lives we can help others take ownership of theirs.
Admittedly, I have had to get my emotions out of the way and I had to get old wounds out of the way. I mentioned the contentious conversations I had with my parents when I left engineering. There’s a part of me that feels they judged me poorly because I prioritized my health over money at the time. That urge to call them lazy is probably a function of still being frustrated with them for not seeing the situation from my viewpoint so many years ago. I try to focus on what I realized then that is still true now: we have different stories about what makes a successful life. What I have to do now is focus on consistent small actions of encouragement, disarm the narratives in my head that my parents are lazy, and focus on a vision of being a son who did his best to encourage his parents to a healthy and happy latter part of life. I have to take ownership and focus on what I can control. There are those 3 principles again.
Words of Encouragement
To be clear, in no way am I against medical intervention when it comes to health. However, I believe medical intervention has the potential to work much better when paired with the right personal habits.
A large part of taking personal responsibility for our own lives is disarming our own excuses. We have to be vigilant about being aware of when we are creating narratives that let us off the hook from making needed changes.
We also have to work to break down the stories in the lives of the people closest to us when we see those stories are causing harm. The key is doing so in a way that respects that we don’t fully know how they’re interpreting the world because their story is their story.
We have to hold ourselves to account, have the courage to be honest about our feelings with those we love, and hide forgiveness in our hearts because we all work ferociously to protect our stories sometimes, even when they’re false.
Travis Daigle 