'Aging Successfully' Basically Means Not Aging At All

From where I sit on the aging food chain, 67 is not really the new 42 ― at least not according to my left knee, which still hurts like the dickens some 40 years after I wiped it out on a ski run on Vail’s back bowls. Thing is, it only hurts sometimes, and mostly, I just forget about it. That’s kind of a metaphor for aging ― real aging. In 2011, an estimated 10,000 baby boomers began turning 65 every day, and that’s a pace projected to continue until the end of 2019. As the number of U.S. seniors balloons, so has the propaganda that growing older is something we should resist. The ideal has become to age “successfully” or “gracefully,” which basically means looking as if you haven’t aged at all. I’d like quash this nonsense once and for all. Why do we congratulate the woman who won the gene pool lottery and looks 20 years younger than her age? Why, because of flukes in the MC1R gene, do we bestow the “aging gracefully” label on some, but not others?  And why do we glorify the handful of octogenarians who are running marathons and jumping out of airplanes and treat them as if they are the standard-bearers of aging?  More importantly, why do we treat people who have the misfortune of showing the signs or symptoms of age as if they are failing miserably at the aging game? St. Mary’s College of California researcher Anna Corwin, who recently published a paper sa...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news