My times. Not the times.
When you reach A Certain Age, things don’t work as well as they used to. Wear and tear and the slow creep of time work their way into your joints, your eyes, your ears, your muscles…
I have reached A Certain Age. I have been proactive about dealing with things, mostly. Unlike many members of my sex, I don’t shy away from doctors should the need be evident. Being in my seventh decade on the planet, I am on blood pressure medication. I take something to reduce my cholesterol. I have lost twenty-five lbs from my peak, which was a too-high 255. I can stand to lose a bit more, particularly at my age. One of the things that the Ravages of Time does to men is reduce the amount of muscle you carry. You can stave that off, to some degree, with weights and exercise, but it is only to some degree, and like everything else, that degree decreases as you get older.
In order to get the weight down, I first cut out the apples I used to eat. I love apples, and I’d have one first thing in the morning with my coffee (black). Then I’d have one on the drive in to work. I’d have one mid-morning. Often, I’d eat one on the drive home from work, mostly as a kindness to the people sharing my living quarters, as I can be a bit of a bear between about four-thirty and dinner time. Oh, apples are healthy, you say. But three or four apples a day are at least 500 additional calories.
So I stopped the apples. Then I started 8/16, which is a modified form of intermittent fasting. Essentially, I stopped eating breakfast. I found the first week tough – by about 11 I was ravenous and shaky. But it smoothed out the following week, and now I mostly don’t eat before noon. These measures got me down from 255 to about 235, and they reduced my insulin response. So now I am much more even-keeled when my blood sugar drops.
This is not a diet. This is a lifestyle change. I am of the opinion that if you try to control your weight with dieting, you are setting yourself up for failure. When you go on a diet, you think of it as a temporary measure, as something that has an end. You drop twenty or forty pounds, and then you can resume the life that led you to becoming heavy in the first place. A lifestyle change, on the other hand, is something permanent. Going forward in my life, I will generally only eat between noon and eight pm.
There are exceptions to that, of course. I eat breakfast before skiing, for example, when I need the food energy to stay warm. I sometimes eat breakfast on a weekend when my wife and children are about as an exercise in companionship. But most days, nothing from 8 PM to noon the next day. I have found that to work well for me, and with moderate exercise, it controls my weight at a point that is a little too high, not a lot too high. My blood pressure, with medication, is 110-120/70, and my cholesterol profile, according to my doctor, is ‘excellent’. Once my legs are conditioned, I can ski an entire day without fatigue being an issue until late in the day, and I can ski every day for a week finishing the Friday as strong as the Monday.
For my seventh decade, I’ll take that.