Blow out the candles

I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday last week and then my daughter sent me a greeting on Facebook and blew my cover. Facebook is amazing. A wonderful cascade of birthday wishes came pouring in from friends who saw her post, and my previously heedless brain started churning.

See, it’s like this: before the Facebook surprise I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday. Partly because this is an especially busy time at work and that’s taking up a big chunk of my attention, but mostly because I didn’t want to think about my new age.

64.

64 years old? Me? Naaah! Can’t believe it. Don’t feel it. Must be a mistake.

Because it’s going the wrong direction. I’m getting younger, not older.

Lest you think I’m also getting slightly unhinged, let me quickly acknowledge that there are just too many proofs that despite my subjective opinion, it’s indubitably obvious that I really am 64. I can remember having a black dial telephone and a party line, and not knowing what a pizza was, or a television, or a self-service elevator, and learning to type on a manual typewriter before electric ones (let alone computers) had even been invented, and hearing about Kennedy’s assassination while walking to class during my college freshman year … etc. etc. etc.

And of course it’s pretty normal to look in the mirror and see a senior citizen face and wonder who in the heck that old lady is. “Can’t be me, I still don’t feel grown up.” Probably most of us have experienced that kind of dissonance. Whereas I’m talking about something much more specific and particular to my life at this moment.

You know those assessments people get that tell them their physical age and whether it’s different from their chronological age? Sometimes the results say they have the body of a person 15 years older or 20 years younger. I haven’t had such an assessment, but definitely feel like I’m getting physically younger. I even said that in a conversation a couple months ago, a slip-of-the-tongue kind of remark: “I was older then” referring to a time a few years ago.

The guy I was talking with didn’t think I was cracking up, though, because he’d heard similar sentiments from other friends. Friends who, like me, had adopted a plant-based diet.

If you’re really passionate about chicken or steak or cheese and think vegans are actually intergalactic aliens in disguise, you should probably stop reading this blog right now. Because while I’m not about to tell you what to do, I am going to talk about what I did and why and what’s happened because of it. Take it or leave it. This is my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Recently my daughter published an excellent blog describing the journey she and her family have taken along the nutrition highway, a journey that paved my own way despite my initial resistance to joining them whenever urged. Buy organic? No way, too expensive. Eat hummous? Yech, forget it. Cook meals that require a lot of chopping instead of just opening a box? Who has time for that? The only thing I agreed about was avoiding sugar, because my diabetes demanded that concession. But I certainly wasn’t willing to also forgo artificial sweeteners.

Like a lot of people, I thought I was doing a pretty good job by eating a little bit less of this or tad more of that. The golden mean vs. radical extremism. So why was I gaining weight, topping 200 pounds, despite getting a fair amount of exercise at the gym and biking to work for at least half of each year? And why were most of my blood glucose numbers registering over 100 points higher than the top margin of the safe zone? And why was I feeling so bad so often?

OK, that last question isn’t fair, since the answer wasn’t diet, at least directly, although I’m sure it was a major contributing factor. The answer, as I finally learned almost three years ago, was that I had a gallbladder filled with cancer as well as the more usual gallstones.

The cancer was discovered during routine surgery to remove the offending gallbladder, and it surprised the you-know-what out of my doctor. I’ve since learned that there are less than 10,000 cases of gallbladder cancer in the U.S. every year, compared to close to 200,000 cases of breast cancer. But cancer is cancer, an oddball variety notwithstanding, so for the next six months I lived in oncology world, where the typical fun activities are major surgery, chemo, radiation, and spending most of your life lying on the sofa.

Since my October 12th blog already talked about how this cancer experience led to a major lifestyle change which resulted in a big weight loss, I’m going to skip forward, or rather back, to today’s subject: getting younger while getting older. Because I’m pretty sure that if I took one of those age assessments now, it would tell me that my physical age is closer to 44 than 64.

At least, that’s how I feel.

And the reason for this wonderful and unexpected development has to be my new plant-based diet, because that’s the only thing I changed. As previously noted, I already was getting at least some deliberate exercise. I hadn’t had a cigarette since 1984. And I couldn’t stop drinking alcohol since I’d never started. So I have to give credit where credit is due.

I’ve also learned a few things along the way. I’ve learned that I’d rather pay for organic chemical-free food now than for serious illness and general yucky health later, which I no longer assume is a natural and unavoidable component of aging. I’ve learned that sticking to a plant-based diet has caused unexpected changes in my food preferences; that I like stuff, hummous included, which I used to find unappealing or worse. I’ve learned that natural sweeteners like agave nectar or sucanat not only sweeten but are even beneficial.

I also found that a plant-based diet tends to include very few refined foods, which is a good way to avoid many carcinogens, while at the same time it fills ones body with mostly unrefined foods that require a lot more calories to digest.

So here I am at 64, with more energy and strength and general well being, not to mention a better figure, than I had when I really was 44. Hence my neurotic desire to deny the whole thing and –

Wait a minute. I could do that. Heck, Jack Benny did it. He stopped at 39. Never got a day older. So maybe I could just sort of sneak back to 44 when nobody’s looking and settle there for the duration, however long, or short, that may be.

Except for the indisputable fact that people who really are 44 would not have been born when Jack Benny was a TV star. Might not even know who he was.

Curses. Foiled again!

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