The Mindset of Longevity
Healthy fit begins with a mindset—setting the intention. It challenges your vision of getting older. What does your vision of old look like? Does it look like the examples you see around you? In your Family? In your society? What are your thoughts on Nursing homes? How independent do you plan on being at 75? 85? Or beyond?
Your Theory of Everything—the unique perspective you hold about how the world works—is the primary engine that will either motivate or sabotage your long-term Health.
Consider this: Your theory on growing older has never been tested. It has been formed by observation, through the examples of others. It is indirect data and secondhand understanding, as you’ve not been that old yet.
If you have a fatalistic outlook that states this is my fate—it runs in the family, this is what happens to everyone when they age, I’ll sicken before I die—you have set yourself up for a challenge.
Are you up for it? Are you preparing for death today? Or are you preparing to change your future by changing your perception of Aging, thus revising your Theory of Everything (TOE)?
Can you revise your thoughts on sickness by being proactive? Can you find actual demonstrations of those who have overcome significant physical challenges and emulate their example?
Are you willing to search?
The Denial of the Clock: Why Busyness is Bankruptcy
Many people are so fearful of aging that they outright deny it. They ignore the decline, staying busy, busy, busy, denying the fact that the clock is ticking—spending their time like they spend their Money, living the day away.
But ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance, and that creates an ugly outcome.
Worse still, when the time comes for them to fall back upon the resourcefulness they’ve built—whether financially or physically—they find themselves bankrupt.
The House Always Wins: When Your Theory Of Everything is a Horror Story
Maybe your current Theory of Everything isn’t just “untested”—maybe it is terrifying. For many, aging is viewed as a high-stakes gamble where the odds are permanently stacked with the “house.” Are you planning for the future, or are you bracing for impact? If your vision of the future is a catalog of Heart Disease, Arthritis, Cancer, incontinence, dementia, and total vulnerability, you may wish to consider that you are operating under a “Deficit Theory.”
The tragedy is that you may be too afraid of injury or overexertion to challenge those fears, and, perhaps, you have become used to “taking it easy.”
I’m no different than you…I’ve worked that programming!
Here is a truth that challenges that fear, a fact I’ve had to face myself: What you fear, you rehearse.
If you believe your body will betray you, you stop Investing in it. You become a bystander to your own health, waiting for the diagnosis and prescriptions to arrive like a scheduled train.
The Social Web: The Helicopter Trap and Peer Pressure
The fear of decline is reinforced by the people who Love you most. It creeps up gradually as those children become “helicopter children.” They offer advice where none is asked for, masking their Anxiety as helpfulness: “Mom and Dad, do you need help with that?” They treat your age as a reason to stop, turning their love into a cage. This is a pervasive fear offered as a helpful suggestion—and it is a trap.
This sabotage doesn’t end with family; it is mirrored by your peers. Friends often reinforce the traditional narrative of decline to feel connected, pressuring you to agree that “it’s just part of getting older.”
If you challenge this, you risk being seen as the outlier. It takes courage to be the person who chooses training over “taking it easy” when the people around you prefer the comfort of shared decline.
If you are the adult child or the peer, I invite you to examine your own Theory of Everything. How could you be enabling family and friends, and inadvertently accelerating the very dependence you fear? Every time you encourage them to “take it easy,” you are implicitly confirming their fear that their body is a liability.
The Architecture of Action: Willingness and Discipline
The Willingness override is not strong-arming yourself into submission. It’s activating the most powerful force in the Cosmos: your own willingness to act. If you are willing, you will find a way. If you are not willing to do something, you may be forced into it, but you will never be truly committed. Nobody can make you willing.
This kind of training takes discipline, but here’s the first challenge to your Theory of Everything…discipline, in this way, is not what you think.
Discipline is merely the friction that occurs when you are at odds with your own identity.
Consistently apply yourself to whatever it is you are doing, with your eyes on the prize, and it will become habitual. Once a habit is formed, it becomes you. It becomes part of your upgraded character. You are now a disciplined person.
The Myth of the “Starvation Diet”
Challenging your TOE means challenging old ideas and habitual behaviors. Here’s an example for anyone who’s lived through the fad diet era: In the 80’s, dieting was essentially starving yourself. What we know is that a “starvation diet” can take the weight off, but weight is more than fat—it causes your body to catabolize itself, feeding upon its own muscle reserves.
Consider that the trends we believed about dieting are making you weak, contributing to sarcopenia. Many older individuals are “skinny fat,” starving themselves to stay slim while their body wastes away, preferring to fit into old clothes rather than to risk gaining a pound in the gym.
Starving your body of nutrition regularly leads to accelerated sarcopenia, bone loss, and overall weakness. This is one aspect of many people’s Theory of Everything that must be addressed, researched, and revised to become healthy fit.
Time, Regret, and the Thriver’s Mindset
Young people believe they have time. Older people hope we have time!
It’s obvious that if you are 20 or 30, you have more time than someone 50 or 60. But here is the question I’d invite you to ask yourself: How much time do you plan on wasting, tossing into the trash bin because you feel you have plenty of it left?
It’s always the perfect time to examine your Regret to Gain Ratio. What will be the cost if you do this? What will the cost be if you don’t? What will you gain by doing, or not doing this?
Finding a balance as early as possible, developing a resilient mindset that allows you to recover from setbacks and reframe failures through action, will be very helpful when crap comes your way.
One isolated incident can strip you of your ability to function. That’s life. Living comfortably with ambiguity and risk catapults you into the domain of the thriver.
Larry was a guy who wouldn’t play a physical game because he was afraid he’d lose. He couldn’t get his mind around the idea of looking foolish to the degree that he refused to enjoy himself in even a no-stakes game. He couldn’t accept the idea that he didn’t know how to be good at something from the get-go, and was embarrassed to look like a loser, where in reality he would just have been a beginner.
Like with everything we begin, a new activity will feel awkward at first. This is a deadly fixed and rigid mindset that will accelerate aging because it slowly becomes who you are…a non-participant in your own life.
A bystander who cannot begin even if it’s been your dream for most of your life – how tragic is that?
The Spirit of the Warrior
Healthy fit depends entirely on your spirit. Are you fierce? Are you resourceful? Resilient? Relentless? A warrior, in this context, is one who never quits on themselves. It is the individual who meets their best version in the midst of challenge and gives them a fist pump.
After meeting many versions of myself, I know this: the only way to integrate that version of yourself is to get beyond the finish line. Then, you’ve earned your own respect.
Beginning is hard. At 39, I was the oldest woman in my Taekwondo group, with the majority being elementary school-age children like my son. It was regularly humiliating and often painful as I found out the hard way that the human body doesn’t bounce very well when it hits the mat, or the hardwood gym floor. I learned to execute what I’ve come to describe as my power moves from that decade of my life.
My instructor, in an offhand comment to the whole group, shifted the way I saw myself. He said, You are an athlete; act like one. I took that statement to heart. I guess I was prepared to hear it.
These experiences changed my Theory of Everything in a revolutionary way.
Sometimes it pays to pay attention…there could be a message waiting just for you.
Perhaps it’s in this post…
Don’t add letting yourself down to your regret load.
The Shift: Practicing the Thriver’s Mindset
Mindset is your most formidable opponent—the excuse maker, the complaint artist, the naysayer—lives rent-free in your head. Going 7 layers deep on this one is a necessary Exercise.
For example, if you ask, “What does healthy fit mean to me?”:
1. Why? Because I want to look good.
2. Why? Because I want others to admire me.
3. Why? Because I feel invisible as I age.
4. Why? Because I believe my value decreases over time.
5. Why? Because my TOE of aging scares the crap out of me.
6. Why? Because I’ve been waiting for someone else to tell me I’m capable.
7. Why? Because I haven’t taken responsibility for my own future self.
Action Item: Today, catch one “curse” you say about your body and replace it with a command for what you want it to do next.
A decade ago, my husband and I purchased hybrid bicycles. We loved cycling and immediately began to design our first epic adventure.
We love to watch the Tour de France and were inspired to take what they call a Century Ride. For those Americans among us, that would be 100 miles, but as Canadians, we were content to do a 100k bike ride.
We began on a crisp September morning to ride to the community of Nackawic and back – a loop that would encompass 100k.
When I say “crisp,” I mean darn cold. The headwind was relentless. I was frozen by the time we reached the turnoff to Nackawic – very tired and a tad cranky.
My husband just smiled.
It was warmer on the way home, but there were a lot of hills on that road. By the time I reached our local park, approx. 10k from home, I was exhausted.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going, right? Well…sort of….
It had always been my way, when the going got tough, to “bully” myself through difficult situations. Instead of hunkering down and getting the job done, I got frustrated and may have said an expletive…or three…
Nothing Mark said helped, and in that last 10k he became quiet. When we got home, and I had a chance to really see him, I saw defeat, sadness, and disappointment on his face. He had never biked 100k in his life before either, and by my behavior I took the fun out of what was the most epic cycling adventure in my husband’s life.
I thought, What have I done?
It was at that moment that I decided that no matter what…no matter how hard the hike or bike or kayak or run…I would NEVER complain again.
What I realized was this – nothing changed by bullying myself but one thing…I depleted my energy reserves even faster. And it didn’t matter that I had a Black Belt in a martial art because my attitude sucked.
Nobody forced me to take on that century ride; I chose it. I had aimed high, but I had not dug deep enough to find the resolve to complete the adventure with elegance and honor. I let myself down. I let my husband down.
I’ve kept my word. At 50 years of age, I changed my perspective on epic adventures.
In the years since that epic ride, I have been on his heel and on his wheel (he is bigger and cycles faster than I do) with elegance and clear-eyed resolve.
I have even dug deep enough to pleasantly guide others.
Truly, we have reserves within us that most of us never access. Your outlook changes when you choose to look at it from a different angle. I am grateful for the tough times in my life because, in the moments when you can choose to zig or zag, I now choose to value the process as much as the result, and that choice has changed everything.
Living well today is the best guarantee of living well every day.
Training your Theory of Everything to honor your excellence—shifting your perspective on health, fitness, and longevity—will change the way you live now. Guaranteed.
If every day is a training day, then you will be training for your future.
Always preparing is always prepared. If you prepare now, you will always be as prepared as humanly possible to meet adversity head-on, with a fist pump!
Originally Published on https://akasha111blog.wordpress.com/
