We all marvel at our own ability to hit another birthday. Is it an accomplishment? Not exactly. Time marches sprints on regardless.
Still, it's a thing. You got here, wherever that is.
And so it is with me. I'm here, halfway through my fifties, and the thing I am marveling at is not so much that time passed, but that things added up.
My menopause transition has not been painful. I have my healthy weight. My cholesterol is good. My blood sugar is exceptional (the benefit of a low-processing diet). My bone scan said I have the density of a healthy thirty-year-old woman, and my cancer screenings have been excellent.
This is marvelous news, especially considering my earlier history.
I spent the first forty years of my life taking marginal care of myself. That's not a criticism, just facts. I moved my body here and there. I ate salads and a lot of treats. I 'partied,' which really means I drank alcohol to excess with some regularity. The result was incremental weight gain year over year until I was 55 pounds over a normal weight.
I'd try to pull back on that with diets, apps, or whatever was trending, but it never created the meaningful shift I needed to make progress. That came from abandoning strict protocols.
No to gauntlets, I could only abandon. Yes to overcoming the friction that kept me stuck.
Instead, I began to build.
More movement, more awareness of my patterns, more self-binding strategies with sugar and alcohol, and more whole foods (until that was the basis of my diet).
I practiced the actions of health, not doing any one thing perfectly. The idea was to create a life rhythm that allowed me to naturally perform walks, bike rides, and cook whole foods at most meals.
It turns out that consistency is the hard part. Taking twenty minutes to make dinner isn't by itself a big deal; doing it most days feels hard.
But why is that? Our lives are too full, too far, and not oriented around health.
Diets, workout programs, and apps make it seem like a side hustle of sorts. 15 minutes a day! Eat the foods you love! Do it at home!
The big lesson of 55.
Nothing as important as your health and longevity can be done on the fringes. This might be the most important sentence in this whole essay.
Daily behaviors create health. That means the life structure has to exist to support that, which then means you need to make an intentional shift away from how you currently spend your time. Or rather, a series of gentle, intentional shifts.
It means letting go of things as much as heading towards something else. I no longer do happy hours or socialize over alcohol. I don't schedule consumption-based vacations. My hobbies all involve movement, I cook with my boyfriend for bonding time, and I live without my car as much as I can. In other words, healthy behaviors are baked in.
It's work, no doubt. But it adds up, beautifully, thoroughly, until you have something of real value to yourself: a body you can count on to move you through this next phase of your life.
At 55, I still have dreams and hopes for myself. All of them require health to enact them.
Luckily, that's exactly what I've got.
Yours in joyful living,
Rebecca
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