Prime Time - Jane Fonda [43]
So, running and eating healthy actually changed not only how I feel physically but how I feel mentally—and it goes further than that. It changed how I react to things. I get upset sometimes but I don’t STAY upset. My emotional state is stronger and getting stronger. I know it has something to do with the fact that I’m no longer eating sugar, dyes, chemicals, artificial this or that, or preservatives. I am able to sleep better and I feel less fidgety and hyper.
Jogging and eating healthy is not gonna make unemployment, racism, discrimination, poverty, violence, the system, or any of the other stuff disappear from my life but I tell you one thing, working out and eating right is like armor. It makes me feel stronger and better able to deal with the tough stuff.
Well, getting older is “tough stuff,” and to handle it and keep our body, our “container,” as healthy and strong as possible, we need to pay more attention to how we eat.
Back when I was ten or eleven years old, on the mornings when I expected a school test, I would always eat oatmeal for breakfast (not the instant kind—I don’t think that even existed then—but the traditional kind, which takes a while to cook). To this day, I think I scored well on those tests due to the oatmeal, because if I’d forget and eat sugary cereals, I wouldn’t do as well. I’d be fidgety and hyper, just like my friend Kelly said. There’s a reason for this, which I’ll explain in a moment.
As I got older, I stopped eating breakfast altogether because I was always on some diet or other—or in between bouts of bulimia and anorexia. Sometimes I’d go for days—weeks, even—without drinking water or eating anything green or any fruit and never feel affected by it.
Most of us did all sorts of injustices to our bodies earlier in life, out of ignorance and a feeling of immortality. Our bodies were still young and resilient, so, beyond the immediate effects, we didn’t really notice. The rate of our body’s breakdown and repair on the cellular level were essentially equal. Our cells may have gotten damaged from what we ate or didn’t eat, but our repair mechanisms kicked in right away. It felt like a free ride.
But by midlife, our cellular self-restoration processes begin to fall behind, and as we grow older, what we eat determines a lot about who and how we are. Now, for better or worse, we tend to notice it. This is because, with age, the ability of our cells to utilize life-sustaining nutrients and eliminate waste products so as to remain robust is diminished. We become more vulnerable to diseases. Of course, the speed of the breakdown process varies widely, depending on a person’s overall health and her or his exposure to external toxins such as cigarette smoke, air pollution, pesticides, poor diet, radioactivity, and anesthetics, as well as excessive stress, time in the sun, and alcohol intake, all of which compound the normal damage.
This chapter is about how the quality of what we eat and how much we eat can intervene to slow down the cellular damage and keep us healthy for as long as possible. (Avoiding the external toxins I just mentioned is also very important, so it might be good to reread that list.)
Calories
A moderate calorie-restricted diet is especially good for us now, and not just as a weight-reduction strategy. So try to keep your caloric intake within a range that is appropriate for your age and level of physical activity. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans published by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services, a woman over fifty who is sedentary should eat only 1,600 calories a day. If she is moderately active, she can consume 1,800 calories per day, and if she is active, 2,000 to 2,200 a day is appropriate. A sedentary man over fifty can eat 2,000 calories a day; a moderately active man can have 2,200 to 2,400, and an active man can consume 2,400 to 2,800. The more calories you burn up though activity, the more you can consume safely. The main challenge for us now is keeping the calories we consume