Two Reasons Midlife Women Become Little Old Ladies By Age 65

Little Old Ladies don’t happen just as a result of “getting old”. Here are two basic reasons why it happens.

1. They don’t understand the value of making lifestyle changes early in life to keep what they have. They don’t believe it’s possible to manage decline said to be associated with the aging process, and besides, at a young age, who thinks about that kind of stuff anyway? “Decline management” is easy to do but requires a steel trap mindset, long-range thinking, and rock solid determination.   It’s the lack of determination that does most of us in. We simply don’t have the guts to do what we know we need to do. But then, that’s our human nature that prefers leisure over effort. It’s assurance that debility and death will occur sooner than later.

By age 30, youth is kissing you goodbye with this unspoken message: “Hey babe, I’m leaving. I’ve given you 30 good years and now it’s up to you to figure out how to keep what I’ve given you.” At age 30 you are feeling great and assume the “feel good” and “look good” feeling will last forever. If you are aware of what you are up against, you can exert awesome power over the controllable decline in your aging process.

Establishing an exercise regimen early in life and sticking to it will keep you rockin’ and rollin’ as long as you live. Waiting until you are 60 to get into shape doesn’t usually work. If you have a muffin top waist as you head into your sixties, odds are good that you will have it forever because as the body ages it resists being pushed around. At age 60 the urge to sit is more compelling that the urge to move. (And not let’s forget the role our crappy American diet plays in our mental and physical destruction.)

If you can see that youth is a short term loan, you are way ahead of the aging game. Youth is the ultimate con artist. You look in the mirror every day and youth stares back at you seemingly unchanged from day to day. You can’t help but think “I’m doing great” and it is exactly at this point that women start to lose what they have. They are simply being conned by the deceptive and seductive nature of youth.

2. They are unduly influenced by tradition and cultural norms. They unwittingly adopt or accept decline oriented “senior” ideas and lifestyle as early as midlife because they don’t realize that midlife now happens much later. Worse, they don’t understand the deadly nature of senior thinking and living which is only about having fun and enjoying what’s left of life.

The deadly disease called “retirement” blossomed in the 1930s with the passage of the Social Security Act when people didn’t live much longer than age 65. However, the lifespan has increased by 30 years in the past century which means that age 40 is no longer middle age, but we still think and behave as if it is.

We have forty-year-old women claiming to have “senior moments” and declaring “I must be getting old” at the slightest ache or pain. We have fifty year olds moving into “seniors only” communities where they spend the rest of their lives playing and decaying almost exclusively with old people, adopting their old attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. And then, at age 65 they wonder why they are in rapidly advancing  decline.

These mistakes are easy to avoid when you are aware they exist and if you have the awareness and chutzpah to do what it takes to dodge them.