I can’t change a tire, so when I woke up one morning with one around my waist, I knew I was in big trouble. “What the hell?” I thought as I tried to button my jeans, and in doing so, created a muffin top. This was not here yesterday; I swear. As I looked in the mirror, it seemed I had gone to bed with my 27-year-old body and experienced the invasion of the body snatchers overnight.
How dare the universe do this to me! In my magical thinking, I’d just assumed I would be exempt from this aging degradation because I ate well, exercised, and I’m just special. As the slow reality had begun to dawn on me that my body had given up its shape, I said out loud, “Oh, this is not going to work.” I was not ready to go into that good night. I was only 52!
Shakespeare’s Hamlet was wrong when he spoke, “Frailty, thy name is woman.” He should have said vanity; I hired a personal trainer whose two-hour three-times-a-week workout included at least 100 abdominals. I also went keto. Have you ever tried to eat only 60g of carbs a day? It is not pretty, especially when I realized that my daily cup of vanilla yogurt contained 22g of carbs! That had to go.
A Hottie?
My daughter took a picture of me in a bikini when I was 53, looking better than I did at 19. Oh, I was rocking it… until I stopped rocking it. I am convinced that my intense training with intense weight accelerated my joint disintegration and that winter I had my first hip replacement.
The long and painful recovery, complicated by the surgeon cracking the femur, gave me a ton of time to complicate aging and my stupidity and the cost of thinking I can change a tire. For me it was a jagged little pill to swallow, but swallow it I had to do.
My cousin, who is four years older than me, laughed and confessed her own aging demons she had wrestled, including skin treatments that left her skin looking like an alligator’s. I kept voicing my disbelief to her at how this tire had just shown up when my weight had not changed. So, she explained:
Fat’s Frequent Flyer Miles
Because her and I had gone through menopause in our late 40s, we, like all women post menopause, had little to no estrogen. Estrogen plays a big role in both fat storage and its distribution. Before menopause, fat likes to be a homebody and sets up house in the thighs, hips and buttocks. After menopause, fat likes to use its stored frequent flyer miles and packs up and moves to the midsection. It is like Cancun for fat.
And this fat lies deep – just like repressed memories – and it surrounds organs. Young fat is shallow and sits below your skin on your thighs, buttocks and outer abdomen. This fat is what makes a woman curvy, in a good way, and if biological anthropologists are right, watching a curvaceous woman can feel like a reward in the brain of men, much as drinking alcohol or taking drugs might. As such, it makes sense evolutionarily speaking that studies across cultures have shown men typically find hourglass figures sexy.
The Cave Man Lens
My cousin theorizes, and she is not a biological anthropologist but an astute observer, that there is a survival component for women to store fat after menopause that goes back to the Cave men. In her words, “Men won’t hunt for us anymore so we have to store our fat so we won’t starve to death. They’re bringing that slab of meat to a young hottie that can have babies.”
I laughed so hard, I forgot the pain from my hip replacement. While I have not been able to find scientific studies that substantiate this, and it makes my feminist-self bristle, it does make sense to me and somehow this idea pushed me over the edge into acceptance.
I suppose if you have only been valued for your physical appearance, it would be an affront to age, drip and droop. While I probably have my own dark psychological reasons, I also know that body acceptance and positivity, and the celebration of grey hair, is only a recent cultural shift.
Yet, my attractiveness to myself has ceased to be evaluated by the physical, and I love my two silver streaks growing and shining on the side of my head. The low waist jeans have all been donated. Good God I wore sneakers to work the other day because my feet hurt!
It is actually kind of wonderful – and freeing – and when I look in the mirror, I say, “Damn, you’re old… you lucky thing.”
Please Join the Conversation:
How did you come to terms with aging? What physical ideas of attractiveness did you let go? Are there still anti-aging ideas that you hold on to? And if so, why?
