Jan 29 2010
Aging Well: Fat, Active, and Happy
Since hitting mid-life I have done some thinking about how I want to age. Age? Do I have to?
Hair starting to go gray . . . needing reading glasses of increasing strength . . . muscles that respond to work-outs less like they are pep rally sessions for growth, more like they are a form of torture . . . a metabolism that seems much more capable of converting food into not energy, but mass. So no, I won’t have a second piece of pie. In fact, I better skip that first.
How do I want to age? Well, to continue being happy tops the list. Maybe “content” is a better term. That one I have quite a bit of control over. For me, making progress on projects gives me quite a bit of satisfaction. Heck, I even do quite a bit of work on weekends. Pure leisure seems a bit pointless to me. Fortunately, my projects do not involve heavy lifting. I should be able to persist at them until very late in life.
Active? I have some control over this, too. If I keep active now, chances are better I can remain relatively active. But my muscles and, more so, my joints may have some say about just how active that will be.
And . . . fat? But I’m not fat now, and for the first few decades of life I was on the opposite end of the spectrum. A bean pole, if anything. But that bean pole has added some padding over this past decade. Not a lot, but enough to notice. It’s been unintentional, and has occurred despite some effort to prevent it.
Maybe I’ll do less to prevent it in the coming years. Intentionally.
Huh!? Let myself get (relatively) fat? Though my social self recoils at the thought (and my self-concept will likely say, upon looking in a full-body mirror, “Who dat heavier dude?”) it could actually be good for me.
But wait, fat is bad, right? Maybe not. At least not always. Again we are discovering that black-and-white thinking misses a more nuanced reality. New research suggests that being overweight during your seventh decade and beyond is actually good for your health. All other things being equal, of course.
Here’s the results of research published yesterday in the Journal of The American Geriatrics Society:
The study began in 1996 and recruited 4,677 men and 4,563 women. The participants were followed for ten years or until their death, whichever was sooner, and factors such as lifestyle, demographics, and health were measured. The research uncovered that mortality risk was lowest for participants with a BMI classified as overweight, with the risk of death reduced by 13% compared with normal weight participants. The benefits were only seen in the overweight category not in those people who are obese. [source, bold added]
Wow. That’s interesting. But no, I’m not going to buy a dozen donuts anytime soon. Question is, will I ever feel differently about the appearance of excess weight? As a member of our thin-obsessed culture, shaking that bias isn’t going to be easy. If the research holds up, however, perhaps my future focus should change from shedding pounds to dropping an unhealthy bias.
