Desk-Belly

The other day I saw a trailer for “Creed 3,” with Michael B. Jordan and Johnathan Majors. It got me thinking about the first “Creed” movie. There were a lot of great moments and great lines from the first one, but one scene in particular had stuck with me since the first time I saw it. Rocky Balboa has Adonis Creed get into his boxing stance in front of the mirror in the gym. “You see this guy here staring back at you,” Rocky quietly asks, tapping Adonis’ reflection, his voice just above a whisper. “That’s your toughest opponent. Every time you get into the ring, that’s who you’re going against. I believe that in boxing, and I do believe that in life.” I’ll be 54 years old this year. About a year ago, I accepted a management position at a national company that has a great salary and amazing benefits. And, as is the case with most management jobs, the company expects more than a 40-hour work week out of you – I’m there at the office anywhere from 50 to 55 hours a week. This is the first sit-down desk job I’ve had since 2001; for the last twenty-odd years prior to this, I had done work that involved primarily standing and (sometimes strenuous) physical activity. I worked in sports injury rehab and fitness; I taught classes at local post-secondary schools, worked with athletes, and owned my own business. I was up and moving around most of the time, and always hitting the gym myself. It’s what I had been used to – I had an active and athletic childhood, was on the swim team in high school and the rugby team in college, and remained somewhat of a gym rat into and through adulthood.

And now, this. Combine later middle-age, slowing metabolism and lower hormone levels, a stressful but sedentary desk job that doesn’t leave you a lot of time for other pursuits after work, a diet that you’ve maybe let slide for the last year or so, and what do you get? It’s pretty simple math. The speed with which the physical slowdown, the aches and pains, and de rigeur spare tire around the mid-section have arrived has been shocking… but I can’t say it has been at all surprising. I needed to buy a couple pairs of jeans a few weeks ago and was horrified by the new waist-size I needed. There’s a thought I can’t escape: this has been after just one year of the desk job. Suppose it had been nothing but sit-down desk jobs since my early twenties? Granted, I’m older now, but one single year of this has wreaked havoc on me, physically and mentally. What if it had been the last thirty years?

I used to see the answer to that question in a lot of the clients that I worked with in my previous career field, middle-aged people who had lived a sedentary life and worked sit-down jobs and had eaten the typical Western diet their whole lives. Overweight, out of shape, poor mobility, low energy, feeling tired all the time, bad shoulder, bad back, bad hip, bad knee. It’s the perpetual malaise of modern life – the demands of the workplace or career, the healthcare, drug, and food industries that don’t actually seem to be geared toward real health and well-being. Circumstances become self-reinforcing. Unless…

This week, the long road back got a little shorter. I finally broke out of the inertia I had become trapped in, and started carving out time for physical activity and fitness every day, before or after work. I started getting back outside, and getting back in the gym, which was neither easy nor comfortable. I had visited a close friend of mine, a chiropractor, who I grew up with – he and I are the same age and have known each other since we were thirteen years old. We talked at length about health and aging. “Aging doesn’t happen gradually,” he told me. “It happens overnight. We’re at that point where you really have to work at it, you really have to fight it, or things start happening quickly.” It’s a new reality I’ve had to adjust to. Is it that doing the work to stay fit and healthy as we get older becomes harder, or that not doing it becomes easier? Maybe it’s both. But I was realizing that not doing it was becoming less and less of an option with each passing day. At some point the procrastination and the rationalizations and the stalling reach critical mass, and “One day…” finally becomes Day One. So that’s where things are. This week, I’m starting back at Day One.