Friday, June 24, 2011

Day 5: Younger Next Year for Women

"You do have to age, but You Don't Have to Rot," (Chris Crowley). I grabbed this quote from the book, Younger Next Year for Women that I am currently reading. It is my favorite of the summer so far. Now that is a fluid statement, as I still have many books to go before the sun sets on Labor Day, and I am back at work.  I read a variety of genres and can be entertained and intrigued by many ideas, but this one is making me really evaluate how I spend my time, better known as my life.

The book's author points out that if we fully engage in exercise 6 days a week we can, "eliminate 70% of the normal decay, that's rot, associated with aging . . . the weakness, the sore joints, the lousy balance, the feeling crappy can be forestalled almost until the end." Now that makes me wants to grab  my Brooks shoes and go running!

I want to be active until the end. I want to feel powerful and strong. The biggest commitment that I have to make is 6 days of exercise at 65% of my maximum heart rate and 2 days of strength training? Wow! That is like being handed Jack's magic beans. It is the gold!

There is a phenomenal analogy in the book about how as a species we have had a "job" to survive. We have had to "work." We have had to forage and hunt for millions of years. Our bodies got stronger and more resistant as we developed. The fittest really did survive. Our current lifestyle of technology, desk jobs, fast food and instant everything has sent the abhorrent message to our physical brain that we are done; that our bodies have finished the job. We can now decay. We are no longer active, hunting, foraging or for that matter living! When our physical brain gets this subconscious message it begins to rot. It begins to die.

 I am thinking about this every time I watch TV, a movie, Internet surf or just lay around and read even great books! I am grabbing this information and pushing it around. I am going to start really living. I am stopping decay. I have got work to do!

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