Another Miracle Diet! Who Cares?

Just how hard is it to lose weight after the age of fifty? Really hard. The magazines in my online account are all blasting the same message right now - how to lose weight quick and get in shape for that beach body we are all looking for this summer. Low carb, Paleo, vegan,  liquid meal replacements, low calorie, no white food, "clean" food. It's a steady stream of what and what not to put in our mouths to get the desired result which is less fat on our bodies.  At my age it seems that you have to run harder just to stay in the same place with things like weight control and fitness. Results are hard to come by due to changing hormone levels and slower metabolisms.  My husband is a huge believer in the low carb diet and it has worked very well for him in the past but lately the results are not as impressive. I favour the low calorie, high fibre kind of diet. Again, results are not as impressive as they once were. What to do now?

I can barely remember a time when I was not concerned with my weight. That is a sad thought but true.  I was my mother's plumpest baby, with adorable, squeezable, chubby legs and arms. I grew into a normal sized child until about ten years old when the chubby reappeared. I preferred reading over running and loved potato chips and cookies so the weight stuck around. I wouldn't have made it onto the Maury Povich Show as a freakishly obese child but I did get some teasing and knew that I was not like my skinny sisters who bookended me in the family. Puberty struck and with it a huge surge in height which achieved a much desired result- I slimmed down. That stage was short lived. After high school, began a forty year period of ups and downs in my weight which continues till today.  The fat ever so slowly creeps onto my body and once I awaken to its stealth attack I ever so slowly wrestle it off. It is a slow motion battle between exhausted adversaries who will not give up the fight. No magic diets, no fast and amazing weight drops. Just a grind.

When I was chasing after my own two small children every day I could eat what I wanted and not gain weight, but otherwise I have pretty much mentally tallied every calorie that has gone in my mouth as an adult. That is a tiresome job, people.  A good friend and I have a deep bond over this issue as she, too has "dieted" most of her life.  We are living calorie counters, no app required.  The good news for us is that almost all of our slimmer peers have gone on to gain as much or more weight than we have. Age - its a great leveller. The pretty grow plain, the slim get heavy.

So now instead of being the "big girl" as I felt I was in the skinny era of the seventies, I sit in the middle of the pack even though I am over twenty pounds heavier then when I was in my twenties. My two sisters have suffered a similar fate and I'm betting it's even harder for them to deal with as their inner vision of themselves is probably much slimmer than mine is of me. Once chubby you are always chubby in your head. I can feel you "inner fatties" nodding. I understand.

Me at 18 years old,
Oh, to be so "big" again!

Weight loss is not out of my reach, its just an equation, calories in, calories burned. Simple. But here's where I see the real change for those of us over fifty, beyond metabolic rates and loss of muscle...we just don't care as much.  The media finally has less effect on us and our self worth as determined by our thigh gap (I've never had one - see picture). We want to enjoy life and what we have worked hard for and sometimes that includes a piece of chocolate, an extra glass of wine or some of the demon white flour in the form of pasta or a baguette. No young man with the body of a Greek god is breaking down my door, promising me love if I would just lose those extra ten pounds and then we could run away and make the world envious with our physical beauty. No, that is not happening. I am invisible to young Greek gods now but I am healthy, reasonably fit, not on any medications.  That is what I care about now.

I just read an article in Prevention Magazine about health and fitness expectations for every decade in a woman's life. After sixty, it said, don't worry about those few extra pounds. They are needed to protect you if you fall (padding!) and will come in handy if you get seriously ill. Now that is the best news I've read all year. I will no longer consider myself overweight but rather I am in self protection mode.

Do You Believe in Miracles?

My mother once told me that every marriage was a little miracle. Quite a statement. She was married for almost sixty years so she witnessed her own little miracle. Any marriage of that length has its ups and downs and to be able to ride them out and have a happy enough final decade of marriage that you are bereaved when it's over, well, that's a miracle in my books. Unlike many widowed women, my mother was anxious to get right back into another relationship, she missed her marriage. I know of other older women who were griefstricken at the loss of their husbands but when that passed they had no desire for another one.  None. Life was much easier with only one person's needs to take of and no one trying to control you. I can see that but it does not mean their marriage wasn't a miracle while it lasted. It was.

I was at a celebration of life for my dear uncle on the weekend and he had had a long and happy marriage to my aunt. She predeceased him by more than a year and a half and he longed to be reunited with her even if it meant death. That's a commitment to your marriage! While at the gathering I chatted a bit with my cousins children who are at the beginning of their adventures in miracles. One is married, two are engaged and one lives common law. My niece and nephew recently had marriages of their own. It comes with the age bracket I am in now, children of friends and relatives are getting married for the first time. It starts one to pondering.

I believe that living together and marriage are not the same thing. I have done both so I know what it feels like, and that being said, I admit that living together for a long time with someone with or without the label of marriage is quite a feat. I don't know of as many lengthy common law relationships as I do marriages but that is changing and I will be interested to see if common law marriages last as long as often as the old fashioned kind. We humans can go through some pretty profound changes as we mature and keeping a relationship humming along through all that is challenging. Throw in the destabilizing factor of children and career changes and well, it really is a miracle that the divorce rate is only about 50%.  Are you the same person you were ten, twenty or thirty years ago? Some parts of ourselves never change but our opinions, tastes, interests and health certainly can. The challenge is to keep subtly reinventing a relationship as each party in it morphs and becomes more who they really are. Age strips away some of the willingness to please, to accommodate, to make the glass slipper fit by cutting off a toe. We just want to be ourselves and be accepted as such. Many, if not all couples see rocky patches in their marriages and often it is that fragile but binding thing called "marriage" that keeps them together until they can find their balance again. Sometimes it works and the marriage continues, often it doesn't. When a marriage falls apart it doesn't mean that marriage was a failure, it just ran its course and ceased to be a miracle. For some the marriage was never a little miracle in the making, it was just never going to work.

Watching the young couples around me marry and start down the road of trying to create their lasting miracle makes me think what an optimistic lot we are, us human beings. I mean, really, the divorce rate has hovered around the 50% mark for decades now, higher for second and third marriages. Some of this young love is doomed to fail when it comes to adapting to living with another person and yet the institution of marriage is still there and a whole segment of people are clamouring to get in on it. Gay marriage is a growing market showing again that marriage and living together are different animals. For some people living together is just not enough. And just as surely as the horse gets followed by the carriage, gay divorce will follow gay marriage for many couples. Divorce lawyers are thrilled as a whole new demographic is being added to their practice. Miracles are hard to create, gay or straight.

Marriage is so full of compromise. And what is compromise but a state in which neither party gets exactly what they want. Sort of a fine/fine rather than a win/win or win/lose. And yet we continue to marry and to stay married, and to remarry after divorce. But then people keep opening new restaurants on the site where others have failed so there is that unbridled optimism again. You have to hand to us, it takes a lot to keep us down sometimes.  I am traversing my thirty fourth year of marriage and at this point feel I will stay married until the "death do us part" thing happens but it's not totally up to me, it takes two people to make each little miracle happen. In these times where miracles feel far and few between I will take what I have, consider it miraculous and wish the same for those just saying their vows. Good luck to you,  and believe in miracles.