With a firm grip on my battle ropes
The menopausal woman takes control to stave off muscle wastage
I’m about seven years younger than my dad was when he died. My mum has currently got some health issues. I’m being bombarded with adverts targeted to menopausal women, all of them screaming about muscle wastage as you get older and how it’s harder to shift weight. And when I do exercise, there is inside a feeling that I should be doing better at it, that I’ve been running for a while and why do I still make the same times, go the same distances. That I could do a bit better. I mostly run for mental health reasons and have stopped aiming at better times but, perhaps I should rethink that.
This is all part of my background noise. Even if you try to think positively about your body this sort of noise does take a toll. So I decided to do something about it. I signed up for the Six Pack Revolution, a 75-day training programme (with a terrible name) that aims to make you stronger. I went for this one because it stresses they’re not interested in weight but want to make you strong, which felt much more positive than any of those awful weight loss programmes. I want to make sure I’m strong enough to get into old age with fewer problems than are necessary. I’m also terribly conscious of my daughter seeing me ‘dieting’ and hating my body and taking on these lessons for her own body image.
I cannot tell you how much of a dark blot on the horizon my dad’s death has been. To have it sitting there on my consciousness all these years, to be able to get to that age and then go beyond, feels incredibly important. I always knew he was relatively young when he died but now I’m approaching that age, it brings it home in a new way. And of course, he never seemed that young when he was alive, not just in that way that your parents never seem young when you’re a child but also because he was an old-fashioned father who had older ideas about parenting.
Mealtimes were not great fun as a child. We had to sit up at the table, everyone in sat in the same seats each night. Dad was very strict on what he wanted to eat. He preferred meat and two veg for most main meals, while anything we might like to have, such as pasta dishes, was labelled “foreign muck!” As a result, Mum would end up making two meals, one for him and one for herself and us, so that we could have some different food.
We weren’t allowed to leave anything. If you didn’t like something you had to eat it so it wasn’t wasted. He was old fashioned in his views: he had worked to put food on the table, ergo, you eat the food or you’re ungrateful. This presented a problem. I started to refuse to eat any vegetables. This was the eighties, and the British habit of overboiling veg was very much in vogue still. I hated all brassicas and sweetcorn and a pile of veg on my plate, getting colder and colder, was often what I was faced with when everyone else had finished and left the table. I was ordered to sit and finish my food before I could get down.
In the end what saved me was a shelf that ran under the table, which became the temporary repository of the veg so the plate could look clean. Later, I transferred the food from the table shelf to the corner of the dining room under the carpet. (I know, a sensible child would have transferred the food to the bin, but I think perhaps the logistics didn’t help if Mum was clearing up in the kitchen.) Of course, the carpet corner was discovered. I don’t remember getting into trouble for this, but I do remember that Mum gave up giving me the vegetables I wouldn’t eat and I spent much of my teenage years only eating peas and carrots with my dinner.
Somewhere in there, the lesson of not wasting food became ingrained, and we were given full dishes. As a teenager, I put on a lot of weight, mainly hormonal-based weight, I think now, but I was terribly unhappy and insecure about it. Nothing was ever said about it, my mother who wrestled with weight issues herself never spoke of it. I think she was probably reluctant to start me on a life of dieting and the horrors that would bring, for which I’m grateful.
Mum comfort ate but she also regularly attended Weight Watchers. It’s little wonder that at some point we’ve all been overweight and worried about our body image. But then again, every woman I know has been on a diet at some point.
The SPR programme is strict about what you can and cannot eat. But on the whole, it’s the sort of advice I’ve known I should really be following but couldn’t be bothered or didn’t want to do something different for the rest of the family or needed to comfort eat or just because I was bored. But to invest in the programme and make a conscious decision to follow it, it turns out I can adjust very easily and say no when I’m offered biscuits, cakes, scones, alcohol and so on, and walking past the pizza stand in town gives a nostalgic smell of pepperoni but no urge to eat it. Essentially, you put your decision making in someone else’s hands and it’s quite liberating. For me, anyway.
There’s also something about the combination of exercise and physical health and how I’ve always found it boosts my creativity and mental health. Quieten the voices, feel strong, reap the rewards for creative work and crack on. Do not go gentle into that good night, and all that.
I’ve done two weeks of the programme so far. I’ve done my exercises throughout the week, eaten all the things I’m supposed to eat and upped the amount of water I’m drinking. It’s a lot. I’m not hungry so far. And the protein shakes are chocolate and vanilla, and we can eat fruit so I’m also not missing sweet things. I’m waiting for something to happen but it’s early days. What has been noticeable is that although I was mentally beating myself up about not exercising as well as I could before, I’m not aching or too bashed out by the week’s requirements. The exercises are difficult, technique-wise (you use a battle rope, which I’ve never done before) but not totally draining. So, it turns out I was doing something right.
It's also obvious from a short amount of time, how much crap we regularly shovel into ourselves. My biggest challenge following the programme will be maintaining any changes and not reverting to eating a load of sugar and processed carbs. But already cooking for S and E separately I can see what more they’re eating that I’m not and need to consider how to suggest some changes without becoming a health bore. But as the above shows, these things go in cycles.
The programme runs until mid-September, so I have to maintain it through a holiday, an anniversary and a few days away at my mum’s. Plus, my birthday. But what’s been nice is that when I’ve been doing the exercises in the park, there have been lots of encouraging and supportive comments from passers-by. Usually with running, I get a nod or hello and that’s it. Either my technique is inspiring pity that people feel compelled to comment or they’re genuinely friendly. But the act of taking some control instead of feeling vaguely useless has already made a difference to how I feel and has quietened the critical voices. Let’s see how it goes.
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