Increase Longevity and create a life you look forward to without Heavy Lifting

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What are you waiting for?

Good night.

Hands down, having a better menopause experience alone ensures that you'll increase longevity and your healthspan. But usually we're talking here about preserving muscle, reversing bone loss, enhancing your walking speed when we're talking about longevity. Today it's a lot less sweat and breathlessness, but probably the hardest exercise I'll ever ask you to do.

I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I know you have choices. I love it when you tune in. Please know I appreciate it and appreciate all the comments and the ratings. If you don't mind taking a moment, go and give us a little rating at your favorite platform. It really helps us spread the word. The research we're talking about today found that older adults with more positive self-perceptions— self, now this is really important, now you've seen somebody else— but self-perceptions of aging measure up to 23 years earlier. So think about this, 2+ some decades ago, we measure maybe ourselves, right? So in my case, I'd have been 37, right? And I would be deemed to live 7.5 years longer than those with less positive perceptions of aging if I favored it, if I thought aging is going to be cool, it's going to be fun. I see myself riding a bicycle, doing all these crazy things that a lot of people at 60 or 70 or 85 maybe wouldn't have thought they'd be doing. But if you don't like what you see, this is a really important distinction. Change it. So if you're surrounded by people who are aging in a way that you don't want to, or that makes— is a downer, let's face it, make you want to run the other way when you think about aging. You got to be careful about surrounding yourself with those people. You know who they are. I'll throw out some terms that are just things I could hear probably within a 2-day span. I could hear every single one of them multiple times from people. Now, I'm definitely surrounded because I'm working with older adults between 40 and 70 on average. That's our primary age in Flipping 50. But let's say I were teaching at a university. You know, I would still be surrounded by peers and colleagues. And, you know, in my community, I'm still going to be surrounded by them. So there'd be things going on allowing you to be surrounded by a certain environment, an attitude that is going to influence you somehow, change the people around you, change what you are doing or not doing. By changing the people who are around you. The sample in this study, the research that we're talking about, consisted of 660 individuals age 50 and older. They participated in a community-based survey, the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement. By matching their scores— it's the acronym for that, by the way, so I don't have to say it again— is ALSAR to mortality data recently obtained from the National Death Index. The authors were able to conduct survival analyses. Findings suggest that the self-perceptions of stigmatized groups can influence longevity. If perceptions about aging are formed— get this— by the age of fill in the blank. Do you know what I'm about to say? Here it is. By the age of 6, our perceptions about aging are formed. That means probably you and I have contributed to our children's and potentially grandchildren, depending on who you are, to their early death or to their improved longevity. Right. So to say it seriously, not just to say their impressions of aging, but to say it in the way that the study and the data show it becomes a little bit more serious. So I want you to consider that. But next, you and I have either helped them live longer or stronger or believe the little things that we've said. And I quote from people and potentially from myself who've said these things. I'm getting old, right? We don't usually say this with a positive tone, by the way. First said often though at what, 25, 30 years old? I believe that my son said this when he was turning 20. Oh my goodness, right? And you just want to take them and spank them, right? But you know, when you at least have two-thirds or three-quarters of your life still to live and you're saying that when you're 20 or 30, right? So it it just sets us up. That's the beginning. That's our thought process. And that seed is probably there in the back of our head all the way through. So of course, the tone of voice, the connotation, and I'm gonna link to an interview episode I did with Ashton Applewhite, who's the author of This Chair Rocks, great episode on ageism. And it made me acutely aware as I was preparing for that interview and then in it, that I'm ageist and potentially that we all are just a little bit more ourselves, more to ourselves, will acknowledge that we're old or my skin looks old, right? We don't even sometimes say, you know, my skin is sagging. We say I have old looking skin. So the word old, being old, aging, in other words, gets a really bad rap. We're just throwing it under the bus. Think about this. Have you ever heard this or said this? Is hell getting old? Said at any age. Just you wait. That something said was said to me once, but said to younger women about trying to get fit or stay fit by older women. Grandma is old, honey. You have to be careful. I know in multiple ways this has been said. I've heard it said to young children by their mothers about their mother, you know, like, be careful, she's delicate. And grandma saying it to young children as well. I think we could all think of a movie where that might have been said by a grandma to a young child. There's nothing good about it in reference to getting old. Hate to throw anybody under the bus, but in case my relative is listening right now, you know who you are. So that's when it happens, or that's when things start falling apart. Now, I do believe I'm guilty of this one. I was chewing on a piece of gum earlier this spring, and I broke a tooth or a filling came out. I think, I think that was the problem. So I think a previously filled or capped tooth came out. I was like, what? What? You know, like, I'll never chew gum again, promise. But I was like, that's when it happens. It must have been just after my 60th birthday. I was like, are you kidding me? Right? So I am guilty. And next, I know I've said this one too, I am my mother, right? And you know, that is many things, but it does imply, you know, we are now falling into the same habit. We are aging potentially the same way, doing the same things that older, other older people do. So any of these, let me know if you've done them and/or throw one out to me in comments. If you're seeing this on social media somewhere, let me know what you say or what you've heard said. That I missed. So here's the deal. How important do you think are these offhanded, casual, lighthearted comments really? How damaging? I'll tell you. In 2018, a +1 study found that the changes of dementia can be reduced by 49.8, basically 50%. If a positive outlook on aging is maintained. Chances of dementia can be lowered or reduced by 50% if you have a positive outlook about aging. Who do you surround yourself with? First and foremost, what are your own thoughts? Do you think about you in 20, 30, 40 years, what that will look like? And if so, what do you see? How does it feel? What are you doing and who are you doing it with? Physical exercise and nutrition are the two most important of the tangible things that you could do. Tangible. But your mindset, that is number one. So yes, you have to move every day and we eat every day multiple times. You know, we think though 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day, and 90% of those thoughts are the same as yesterday. So unless we proactively are trying to change our mindset about aging and optimally age, think of it as ability, what you can do versus what you can't. Think about something you want to do and go to do it as opposed to stop yourself thinking, am I too old to do that?

Should I be doing that?

You know, there really aren't any age barriers if you think about it. But if we have those 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts, 90% of them are the same as yesterday unless we do something dramatic to try and change that. We're gonna continue to live the same pattern over and over and change does become really hard. We will think about what was our mother like when she was old? What was that like? What happened? What was the trajectory of her getting frail or fragile or then falling and then going on a medication? And we may compare ourselves as if that might be our timeline. So you've gotta be careful about it. You've gotta look at who do I surround myself with? What are they doing or what are they not doing, right? So, you know, if The Price Is Right and Jeopardy are big activities for them, you know, that might not be your best group right there. So we get very comfortable thinking about ourselves in the way we've always thought of ourselves. And yet, you know, with aging, we also may get very comfortable thinking about aging because of the people that we were around and what we observed to be true for them. So if you were around a very diverse group, some aged one way, you know, others totally the other way. When you know somebody who's 88, 89, signing up for Ironman triathlons, as I do, the roof is suddenly busted. We can go anywhere. But if you're surrounded by people whose biggest aspiration is, you know, bad men, you know, that's active. That's certainly better than quilting only, right? But we've got to take a look at how do I want to age? What do I want to be? Is there a day when, if there's an activity that you love, fill in the blank, that I'll decide I'm too old, it's not safe to do X? And if that's not true, if you think, no, I'll never wanna give that up. And I think one example is our cell phones. So go figure, mine is plugging in, but normally it's right here, right? It's within arm's length. And, you know, we're probably never gonna give up our cell phones. We're not ever going offline. We're not gonna decide, oh, I don't do that. Now with my mother, she was the generation that, you know, I really wanted her to adopt it. I gave her my old computer when I got a new one, never used it. We never actually got that plugged in. I thought she would use it to play solitaire, and I think they did that a little bit and it just kind of fizzled out and she didn't— it didn't become a habit, you know, and because it didn't become a habit and it was something new, there was just too much obstacle to overcome and there wasn't enough draw there. Now, if she had been able to do, say, online quilting, and learned something about quilting by watching it, that might've inspired her a little bit more, but there just wasn't enough there. And there's got to be something there to pull you forward, something motivating, something you do want to do, a memory, something you want to keep doing or don't want taken away from you. And in my mother's case, when I think about this, and you're going to pull something from your mom, from your dad, or somebody that you loved. But when I think about it, she wanted to drive, she wanted to continue driving. That was a really hard one. And you know, you lose your independence. She loved to go. Unfortunately, she loved to go fast, which is why we all thought it'd be better if she wasn't driving anymore. But that's a whole nother podcast I can't really tell you about. So when we are really comfortable not only thinking about ourselves, but thinking about the people who've been in our environment, who have been our examples. That's comfortable, you know, getting out of the box and thinking, but I could be doing something else. I could be doing this, I could be doing that. It's going to take something, you know. And I've got clients who say things like, that's just me, that's what I do, that's who I am. And yet same client really wants change in the outcome that they're striving for, and they're not getting it because they continue to think the same thoughts. They think the same thoughts about the exercise they need to do or didn't do, depending on who it is. And these are the terms that they say, that's just me, that's what I do, that's who I am. I'm just going to keep doing it. Or may say, I just going to keep working harder. And that may or may not be the answer, really. And over 40, if you've been listening to me for a minute, you know that over 40, the answer isn't always working hard, it's working smarter. Yes, you're going to work hard, but you're not going to beat yourself to the ground and to the pulp. You're actually supposed to feel good after exercise. Novel idea. Oh my goodness. But people honestly often will say to somebody like Jodi, who is a model to many who are not doing anything. Keep on being you, right? That is a tough one. And that is, I think if we could rephrase that compliment, because that's what it's intended to be. The compliment is, I love how strong you are. I love how you do your own thing no matter what anybody else thinks. You're going to do it versus think that someone else might say, should you be doing that? Right. I love that you do that. I love that you are kind of striking out, creating your own path. That would be so much better than just saying keep on being you, because that statement actually suggests you will never change. You will never get the change that you want. If you keep on being exactly who you are today, I think it comes back to Sigmund Freud, actually, the, if you continue to do the same thing expecting different results, that's a definition of insanity, right? And of course that it is. But thoughts are the same way. We continue to think the same thing. Our thoughts create a certain feeling. They create actions and behaviors that become our habits. And that thing, that habit we do day in and day out, whether it stems from thought or it actually is the actions, keeps us where we are, keeps us from actually changing unless we're seeing changes even on a micro level daily or weekly that we're going in the right direction. A couple years ago, in preparation for a class reunion, I remember thumbing through a couple old yearbooks. We called them the annual. I don't know if you did that too, but for weeks every year when those annuals came out in a small high school, this is how it went. Everybody, everybody in the class pretty much, you know, got an annual. You paid your $12 or whatever it might have been. We would all carry them around, you know, and exchange books and say, you know, can I have your autograph? And at the beginning and the front pages and the back pages, there was usually space for— we would autograph and exchange messages and notes, and I still have all of those, but I would thumb through them before my reunion. I was reading through some of these things and it was so funny. So inevitably, many of these comments from classmates said something like, keep being you, or don't forget who you are when you go to— for me it was MUU, which was Iowa State University. Any Iowans out there, here you go. So in reality, we didn't intentionally do this. Of course, I mean, we didn't even know what we were doing, but that advice is some of the worst advice we could have given each other, whether we were 18, about to embark on a life where we could evolve and become anybody we wanted to, especially outside of the confines of a very small community with a lot of people thinking What will the neighbors think?

Right?

Keep changing and evolving, growing and becoming what have been wise beyond our years. But even if teachers didn't write things like that, you know, how could we possibly have ever written it? So people like Jodi or you or I, when we've acquired this sense of ourselves and the habits that Dr. Ellen Langer, the mother of mindfulness, tells us actually limit us. We will stay stuck getting the same results, changing very little if those habits are not changing who we are. In an upcoming episode, by the way, and I think I'm going to release this one on Christmas Eve, I'm going to talk about a recent meditation retreat I attended and my experience. But one of the reasons I do meditate is because it is supporting change and not the change of, I'm gonna put 3 miles, you know, on the calendar. I'm gonna put that I'm gonna do a yoga challenge and do yoga every day in December. Not that kind of a challenge because actually that's quite easy. I'm disciplined, so are you. I'm motivated, and I can be motivated to do that and complete it, especially if I tell all of you I'm gonna do it. But the harder part is the thought, the thought of I'm someone who simply does yoga every day, and I'm flexible and relaxed and focused and concentrated. You know, all the things that you really want from yoga. So changing your thoughts, your habits about default thoughts is far harder than actually doing 10 minutes of yoga. Would you agree?

We believe you can look and feel as good or better as when you were younger, as long as you don't try to exercise the same way you did when you were younger.

To get there.

We believe the science that there is saying there's no correlation between menopause and weight gain.

We believe that our bodies are meant to move, and when you stop moving, you accelerate aging.

Flipping 50 is for women who want to grow bolder, not older, who'd rather focus on lifting weight than losing weight and rewiring instead of retirement. They are the most powerful health influencers in the world, and they're using science to gain muscle, bone, and improve brain health now, and that their 85-year-old selves will thank them for. The Flipping 50 Show features guests and topics that help you do just that. Hosted by me, Debra Atkinson, 40-year fitness professional, founder of Flipping 50 and currently Flipping 60. Right there with you.

Here was my experience. I'll share just a little bit of this upcoming podcast. You know, I was away, traveled to Marco Island. It's not easy to get to. It's an entire day. And that's if things go well, right? And you know, away from business for 8.5 days. And that's not easy either. And here I was lying on a ballroom floor in a hotel with 1,500 other people to be in the presence of a guru that I trust. And my mind was drifting. And I had to pull it back and say, Really? Like, really? You went to all this trouble to be here and you're like going off thinking about things that might happen in 2 weeks or that happened 3 weeks ago? Get in here. Like, get back in here. So changing habits about our thoughts is far harder than going for a walk every day. Walking after my Masha so that my blood sugar doesn't rise. That was an easy habit to adapt to. To do my thoughts, not so much. Don't know about you, but here's my guilty pleasure. It's not a pleasure at all, but it's, you know, if there is a conversation that I have had that I felt could have gone better, I could have done better in it, I will ruminate. And I will sometimes have that conversation again and again thinking, this is what I should have said. Sometimes I'll be saying it out loud and Moses will look at me like, what did I do? Why are you talking to me? Were we having a conversation?

He'll say.

But, you know, changing that, and I'm now catching myself because I don't want to do that anymore. I want to be here in the present. And I wanted to just enjoy this moment. I can also be in the future too much.

What is that called?

That's called worry. And I would love to think that I don't do that. But how about you? Do you think about the future too much? Think about what might happen? You go down scenarios and here's where this could be and here's what we might want to do. And sometimes we call that strategy and we call that planning. And sometimes planning ahead is a good idea. But other times when we are just worrying about things that may or may not happen, we are wasting energy and we are wasting the present moment that we have because we're not in it. We're somewhere in the future or we're somewhere in the past. What a waste of right now, right? And so I encourage you to look at whether you might do that and just wanted to volunteer that I really feel like I have to disclose to you what I personally do in order to ask you to reflect for yourself. But I hope that was helpful. So, you know, reframing anything, changing your thoughts is possible. You've probably done it before, but unless your best habit to break habits, right? Your best habit is to break habits that no longer serve you, that keep you doing and repeating thoughts that aren't getting you results, you'll continue on the path that you're on right now. Virtually, you won't change all that much right now to 30 years from now. You'll be very much the same. So think about this. For instance, you may have had to run in high school for punishment, right? You, you were late for practice, you dropped the ball, you, I don't know, you know, the coach wanted you to do something and your team was terrible at it, and so you had to run. I don't know about you, but that was softball, that was sometimes basketball practice for me. And I'm going way back, but definitely it was not a, oh, you did great, let's all go run together. That's not ever how it went. But you know, you running was bad then. As an adult, you may have come to love running and solitude and the relaxation because maybe somebody you loved or envied did it and seemed to enjoy it. Not eating for a long period of time seemed so difficult, right? It was like dieting, which was a negative and has a negative connotation stemming from deprivation. But today we know not eating between meals and going at least 12 hours between dinner and breakfast without calories is actually positive. And that some often go 16 or more hours without consuming calories, and they call it intermittent fasting. It's funny. So when I go in for a blood test, like a fasted blood test, and all that means is I haven't eaten since dinner the night before, and it's 7:30 in the morning because I'm usually there when the doors open, they ask if I'm fasting. And then the phlebotomist who's drawing my blood asks, you know, what are you— so what are you going to eat first? And I didn't even catch it last time. I was like, what? Like, I always think— she's like, I always think I want to, like, a Big Mac, or I'm like, it's only been, you know, 13 hours.

Like, This is just normal, actually.

I do like to have coffee with cream, so I'm going to go do that first. But no, no, no, no, no. Okay. So it's very, very interesting. I'm always a bit surprised if they refer to it like it's a hardship that I haven't eaten, you know, for 11 hours while I was sleeping most of the time. But that's a reframe, right? That they could do and that I've definitely done. So when I, you know, have you here for a minute with me, I, those of you who've been here, I've shared Dr. Ellen Langer's work, her well-known counterclockwise study. And there's a book by the same title with older adults asked to pretend as if they were in their younger years, they were their younger adult self. Shelves. And this was like in the '40s and the '50s. And so they were surrounded by like movie billboard pictures of that era. They were allowed to watch movies of that era. Magazines sat around on the tables of that era. It was everything like as if, and they were asked to act as if they were that age. And, you know, at the end of that, fast forward, They, it was only a week, right? But they could see better. They had pre-tested and they post-tested. They could see better, they could hear better. They were not using canes and some of them had showed up with canes. They were playing touch football in the yard. They were, you know, operating and had health measures to show blood pressure was better, cholesterol was better, simply by their thinking.

Thoughts.

So if they can do it, and it was documented. And the problem with that study is that although it's quite renowned, it wasn't repeated because it was very expensive. I mean, they bussed these, I think maybe 8 guys in to like this big mansion, had 'em in seclusion so they didn't have access to anything outside or news. And today with the internet and connectivity, it'd be a little bit harder. But to replicate that was very hard, the testing pre and post and all of it. But we do know, and if you look at this, is so relative to the recent retreat that I did. The research on meditation is pretty powerful. Thought alone is healing people, changing thought, changing the frequency of waves. And I won't go any deeper into that. But it does stem from what you're doing with your mind and the ability and the power that we have. So those people who were only exposed to music and periodicals and movies of the time when they were younger, by the end of the week, those older adults who had arrived using canes and moving slowly, they could hear better, see better, were playing touch football. Simply by changing their thoughts about aging. So what's possible for you? Going back to the way we started this episode, you can extend your longevity by 7.5 years longer if you have a positive outlook about aging. Pretty easy way to gain a few years, and not just the years, but the quality and the life in the years. Who's in? Should we go all the way?

Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit flipping50.com. Where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman. So go and listen right now. Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you'd love to ask, or maybe story you want to tell. Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups and the answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group, but it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions, or tell your story, would you like to be a guest? So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset, and looking forward to every new year. Join the Flipping 50 Insiders group. That's Flipping 5-0 Insiders on Facebook.