'What's Wrong With Me?' by Lorraine Candy

Author:Lorraine Candy [Candy, Lorraine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-04-17T17:00:00+00:00

You do you: it’s mind, not body, that matters

I succumbed to the negativity of all the physical changes I was going through for a while because I had, like all of us, been indoctrinated into thinking that ageing is bad. It took a little while to gradually find a way out of that mindset and shut down that voice in my head that criticised what I looked like physically.

You can, of course, attempt to fight this by going high-maintenance on the body front with intensive exercise, or throwing money at all the modern fixes – or ‘tweakments’, as they’re referred to – but you are still going to grow and look older, and the entrenched ageism in our society means you probably won’t feel great about it. That is why the best line of defence is to shift your mindset around ageing.

This is far from easy. We’ve been told old is awful for women for so long it’s hard to reprogram our minds to think more positively about it. We’ve done so many Cosmo quizzes, read so much Bridget Jones, bought so many diet books focused on quick fixes and generally lived a life of debit–credit eating and drinking that I sometimes wonder if this negative attitude is in our DNA, that it is unthinkable not to make a joke about the size of our thighs in shorts. You may feel fine about looking older, of course, but most of the women I meet ‘hard agree’ that body positivity is a young woman’s game.

The language we use around ourselves, and the attitudes we hold, as we absorb the negativity around how society tells women to age, is important. With that in mind, a useful goal to help us reframe our attitude to ageing is to look ‘better, not younger’. We’re used to separating the mind and body, but they are one thing and it’s time we started treating them holistically.

This is one of the reasons why I recommend outdoor swimming so highly – no one cares what they look like in that situation. You’re so busy trying to stop your body going into hypothermic shock that the increasing droopiness of your midlife boobs as the tissue becomes less dense (yes, this happens) is the least of your worries. I find the attitudes of women around the lakes and on the beaches is good brain training. You get to see women of all shapes and sizes ageing actively. My swimming friends have, as someone put it on Instagram once, ‘waved the white flag’; they have accepted their bodies as they are because if you stay on that path of not accepting it, of battling against it, you’ll be on it forever, wasting precious second-life energy. Whereas if you choose to accept the body you are in as you age, you’ll gradually find peace with it. Watching swimmers is proof that the body has one purpose, as the writer Donna Ashworth commented on Instagram: ‘to see you safely through this adventure of life, to allow your spirit to reach full potential.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.