Musings 4 - On Aging

I have been thinking a lot lately about aging.  I saw my grandma at Thanksgiving and saw her on a oxygen tank taking 12-13 prescriptions every day.  She smoked most of her life and ate a pretty high carb diet.  That generation really got dealt a bad hand from a health stand point.  Prior to them, most people lived on farms and physically worked their butts off.  They ate natural foods like chicken, beef, veggies, cheese, eggs, and home made whole wheat bread.  Almost nothing was processed.  Basically they ate the P90X diet and did P90X level work every day.  They were ripped.

My Grandma's generation was the first to face the onslaught of fast processed food in the 50s.  They unwittingly reinforced the development of the market for easily accessible processed foods from the grocery store including the myriad of chips, cookies, twinkles, cokes and canned foods like chef boy r dee.  Also, they created the fast food industry.  Additionally,  almost all of them smoked.  Almost none of them realized at the time that these changes were going to lead to holocaust scale morbidity and mortality rates over the following 50 years.  Now our elderly are so sick that we need sophisticated nursing facilities to feed, medicate, bathe, and even breath for them.  Twenty years ago nursing homes looked like apartments with a few nurses checking in on the residents a couple times a day.  Now they look like mini hospitals with permanent patients.

I build and sell robots for dispensing medications in nursing homes.  It helps save nursing time and makes it safer for nurses to administer thousands of doses a day in a nursing facility.  That's how bad it is now.  We need robots to keep up with the level of care required to keep our elderly alive.

The greatest generation that defeated the Nazis was defeted by smoking and processed carbs.  What would they be like if they had eaten healthy, not smoked and had worked out?  I bet our long term care industry would be a shadow of its current self.  I bet more elderly would be able to age in their homes or at least in their children's homes without creating too much of a burden.

It will be interesting watching the boomers over the next 30 years.  Like my grandma's generation, the boomers were victims of the smoking wave and processed food revolution, but they also figured out working out.  In the 70s, and 80s most boomers were playing tennis, running, skiing, hiking, biking and having lots of sex.  Most of them were actually pretty fit.  You can talk to boomers who were doing protein shakes, eating wheat germ, and managing down carbs back 30 years ago.  However, the bad food and smoking won in the end and brought most of them down.  I have a theory that the microwave ovens played a material role in this downfall as it made it really easy to warm up vast quantities of highly processed and cheap foods in just minutes.  Just from personal observation, I think only 10% of boomers in their 50s and 60s are fit today.  The rest have big bellies, eat high volume high carb diets and are relatively slothful.  I bet the average boomer consumes 3500-5000 calories a day.  The good news is that most of them have stopped smoking, but heavy drinking is prevalent with boomers, so that may be a wash.

My guess is that boomers will see a similar fate to the greatest generation.  They will  have different morbidities though.  Diet related illnesses like diabetes will be more common than smoking related illnesses like COPD.  I plan to stay in the nursing home industry for the rest of my career because I think it is going to continue to grow and become get more complex for at least 30 more years and technology has a place in helping manage care.

Is it too late for boomers?  I don't think so.  Over the last three short months, I went from completely out of shape and obese to the best shape of my life.  It may take longer, but people in their 50s and 60s should be able to get there.  It will take dedication, diet changes, and a ton of work.  Most of them are retired or semi-retired at this point.  I cannot believe that they cannot dedicate 1-2 hours a day to getting fit.

My generation does not have any excuses.  We have known smoking is death since childhood.  We have also learned in recent years the dangers of bad diet.  Most people my age know that calorie intake is proportional to fat gain or loss and overweight people are generally less healthy.  We also have validated ways to work out efficiently to stay fit.  The biggest thing my generation faces is sedentary work life.  Most of us sit in front of a computer most of the day.

A fit person should be able to maintain their weight, strength and endurance with four thirty minute workouts per week.  Don't tell me that 2 hours of working out a week is not worth maintaining health.

The crazy thing I have learned through P90X is how fast you can get there.  90 days is nothing.  What else was I going to do?  Sit and watch TV?  That seems ludicrous now.  Almost every one of my peers should be able to get through a 90 day P90X round.  It will be really hard at first and you may only be able to do 1/2 of the workouts and need lots of breaks.  Thats OK.  It is amazing how quickly you can go from totally out of shape to fit.  Also, the diet side takes two weeks to get used to and then you do not want all the processed crap anymore.  Once you are fit, it is easy to maintain.

My hope for my generation is that we go into our 40s, 50s, 60s and even 70s still able to do push ups, pull ups, run, bike, sail, and ski.  The crazy thing is I feel like I did when I was 20 - seriously.  I literally erased 18 years of cruft.  So if a 38 year old can feel like 20, why cant a 70 year old feel like 52.  The reality is that it can be done and it is easier than most people think.

I love the idea of staying young.  I mean really young.  You know - goofy, playful, laughing, sporty, strong, quick, witty, alert and most of all durable.

I refuse to give in.  REFUSE!

There is no material thing in the world that will bring me any sustained happiness.  However, keeping my youthful body and spirit is like gold.

We only get one shot at this thing and none of us get out alive.

- Get fit now
- Stay fit
- Find positive people to play with
- Refuse to give in to aging - EVER!