Working with Your Body: The Freedom of Making Peace with Midlife Biology (Part 4)
Updated: Oct 9
Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking about just how much energy we can waste fighting against our own bodies.
For years, whenever I looked in the mirror and noticed that my clothes were fitting a little more snugly than I would have liked, my first instinct was to eat less and exercise harder. It was exhausting.
Maybe that is one of the strangest things about getting older. We know perfectly well that everything else changes with time. Our hair changes, our skin changes, our priorities change, our children grow up, our careers change and the things we once thought were terribly important can suddenly seem rather insignificant. Yet when our bodies change, we somehow take it personally. We look in the mirror and think we have failed, when perhaps our bodies are simply doing what bodies do: changing as we move through life.
Accepting My Body
I am not going to pretend that I never look in the mirror and notice a body that is different from the one I had at thirty. I am not suddenly so enlightened that I never care about how my clothes fit or how I look. I still have a wardrobe, after all, and I would quite like to wear some of the things hanging in it. But I am no longer interested in spending my life being angry with my reflection.
I am sixty-one now, and I have finally realised that my body is not my enemy. It has carried me through more than six decades of work, family life, stress, illness, exercise, hiking, laughter, disappointments and ordinary everyday living. It has got me through every single day of my life so far, including plenty of days when I did not treat it particularly well.
Perhaps it is time I stopped criticising it for not looking like a body from another chapter of my life. Instead, I want to learn how to work with the body I have now.
What Does Working With My Body Actually Mean?
When I think about everything I have explored in this series, I realise that I spent a very long time asking my body what I could take away. How much less could I eat? How many more calories could I burn? How much harder could I exercise? How quickly could I get the weight back off?
My questions are different now. What does my body need? What helps me feel strong? What gives me energy? What helps me sleep, recover, move well and enjoy my life? Those questions have changed the way I think about almost everything.
Food is no longer something I need to earn or compensate for. Exercise is no longer something I have to use to punish myself for eating. Rest is no longer something I feel guilty about. And a few kilograms on the scale do not automatically mean that I have failed at looking after myself. That does not mean I have stopped caring about my health or how I look. I still do. I am simply trying to stop making those things the measure of my worth.
The Freedom of Not Starting Again on Monday
There is another lesson I have learned during this process, and it may be one of the most useful of all: I do not have to keep starting again. For years, I thought healthy living worked in a rather strange way. I would be “good” for a while, then eat something I had decided I should not have eaten, miss a workout, or have a few days where everything went slightly off the rails. Then I would decide that I had ruined everything and would have to start again on Monday. Monday became this mythical opportunity to become a completely different person. The new me would eat perfectly, exercise religiously, drink enough water, sleep beautifully and never eat too much chocolate again.
Of course, that is not how real life works. Some days go beautifully and other days are a complete mess. Sometimes I exercise, eat well and get a good night's sleep. Other times I am tired, busy, stressed and standing in the kitchen wondering how that packet of liquorice all sorts vanished so fast. That is life.
I have become much better at picking myself up and carrying on rather than deciding that I have ruined everything. I simply get back to my normal routine. That may sound almost ridiculously simple, but I think it has taken me decades to understand it. Consistency is not about doing everything perfectly. It is about continuing to come back to the habits that make us feel good.
No Guilt at the Dining Table
And then there is food. Making peace with my body does not mean that I have decided to live on lettuce leaves and never eat anything delicious again. Quite the opposite. I care about eating well because I want to support my health, my muscles, my bones and my energy, but I also want to enjoy my life.
I have a serious sweet tooth and I have absolutely no intention of giving up chocolate. I am simply learning to enjoy it without turning one piece into an entire debate about whether I have been “good” or “bad” that day. That is a completely different relationship with food from the one I had during my grape-diet era. I am no longer interested in seeing how little I can eat before I become miserable. I would much rather eat food that genuinely nourishes me, make sensible choices most of the time and still leave room for the things I enjoy.
Healthy eating should support our lives, not take them over. Food provides the nutrients and energy our bodies need, but meals can also be part of pleasure, celebration, family, friendship and everyday life. I do not want to spend the rest of my life trying to eat as little as possible. I want to learn how to eat well while still enjoying being alive. That feels like a much healthier relationship with food to me.
The Body I Have Now
Perhaps the biggest change in my thinking is that I have stopped trying to get my old body back. That body belonged to a different stage of my life. It had different needs, different priorities and probably a considerably less complicated relationship with sleep, muscle and metabolism. I cannot turn the clock back.
There are plenty of things about my life now that I would not exchange for my younger years. I know more about myself. I know what matters to me. What I want now is to build the strongest, healthiest and most capable version of the body I have today. I want to be able to walk up a steep trail and know that my legs can take me there. I want to have the strength and fitness to keep doing the things I enjoy. I want to look after my body because I need it for the life I want to live. Most importantly, I am beginning to understand that my body is not simply something I have to look at in the mirror. It is the thing that allows me to experience my life. It takes me hiking. It carries me through the gym. It gets me up the stairs. It lets me walk, travel, work, laugh, create and explore. It lets me sit down with a good book and then, thankfully, get back up again. That is worth looking after.
Making Peace with the New Rules
I suppose that is what this whole series has really been about. I started by looking at the things I thought were working against me: weight that seemed harder to lose, exercise that I once believed had to be punishing and the endless temptation to eat less whenever the scales moved in the wrong direction. I thought the answer was to try harder. Eat less. Exercise more. Be stricter. Have more discipline. Now I am beginning to see those things differently.
My body has changed with age, and I need to change the way I look after it too. It means accepting that fighting myself is exhausting and, frankly, not a particularly good use of the years I have ahead of me. I do not want to spend the next twenty years fighting with my body.
I want to spend them living. I want to walk, hike, exercise, create, laugh, eat lovely food, spend time with the people I love and keep discovering what I am capable of. I want to look after my body because I need it for all of those things. I want to be strong enough to say yes to adventures, fit enough to enjoy them and sensible enough to know when I need to rest afterwards.
Perhaps that is the freedom that comes from making peace with midlife biology. It is not about giving up on ourselves. It is about finally stopping the fight and starting to work with what we have. And maybe that is the biggest change of all. I want to become the best version of sixty-one that I can be.
So, as we come to the end of this little series, I would love to know what has stayed with you. Have you changed the way you think about food, sleep, exercise or your changing body? Have you reached the point where you are less interested in chasing the body you had years ago and more interested in looking after the body you have today? I would love to hear what “making peace with your body” means to you.
🌿 Continue Your Journey
If this blog resonated with you, here are three more stories you might enjoy:
What happens when you stop measuring midlife by the rules you followed when you were younger?
For years, I thought eating less and exercising harder was the answer. It took me much longer to realise that my body needed something very different.
Exercise doesn't have to leave you exhausted to be worthwhile. I'm learning to move in ways that make me stronger, healthier and better able to enjoy my life.
— Frannie ☕
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