Thread: The Fountain of Youth

Juan Ponce De Leon came to Florida searching for the fountain of youth. I remember as a little kid being taught that in elementary school and mentioning it to my Mother. She had a wistful look on her face as she told me that there was no such thing. Well Mom was wrong in this case. I was in fair shape most of my life up until my late 40s. I started to gain weight and didn't care. For 36 years I smoked on average two packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day and had minimal physical activity.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties I was active and athletic as a kid playing baseball, basketball, boxing and bicycling. The first twenty years of my working life I was a structural ironworker and got enough exercise to maintain some semblance of conditioning. When I got into tattooing I became completely sedentary I really started going downhill and knew it but didn't care.

After ten years I was beginning to melt into the chair. I was short of wind and had gotten to the point where a XX t-shirt was becoming tight. One day I was getting up from a chair and didn't use my arms to assist my knees. I wrenched one of my knees so badly that I had to use a cane to get around for a couple of weeks. This was a turning point. I came home from work late one Saturday night and plopped down into my "Lazy Boy" rocker recliner and turned on the TV with the remote.

There was a show on from a university class on nutrition. So I sat there and started to listen to the topic which was on our metabolism. At the end of the class the instructor mentioned a book called "Live Right For Your Type". This was a book hypothesizing that by tailoring your diet to your blood type you would optimize your health and well being. So the next time I was in a book store I picked up a copy and looked up type A. I decided that I liked what I was reading and bought the book and applied the theory and went on the diet. In a few weeks my knee was healed enough and I had begun to lose weight on the diet.

I began walking a quarter mile at first increasing to a half, to a mile and ultimately to four miles a day six days a week. A year of so of this and the pounds were melting off. I felt much better and I stopped smoking cigarettes. I replaced them with the tobacco pipe. Not as good as quitting nicotine entirely but I don't inhale so better than the cigarettes. I dusted off my Schwinn Paramount and rekindled my love affair with the bicycle. I gave up walking and began riding the bike daily for 10 to 12 miles.

A couple of years of that and though I'd never felt better in my life I had lost so much weight that people who knew me wondered if I might not be ill. Another dark cloud came along that had a silver lining. I took a fall from my bicycle and broke my collar bone. This put me out of work for five weeks and cramped my style with the bicycling. Not to be deterred I bought a stationary bicycle trainer that you mount your bike in and pedal against resistance. It came a week later and I was doing an hour a day on it with my arm in a sling. By the time the five weeks were up I was actually a stronger rider than before the accident.

During my time recuperating I did a lot of reading on the internet and found that weight training was highly recommended for avid cyclists. Had I been weight training before the accident it is possible that with the increased muscle mass and bone density I wouldn't have broken the bone. One way or the other I began to get into squats, deadlifts, clean & jerk and other movements.

So now five years since the broken collar bone episode I feel better than I did when I was half my sixty years. The weightlifting has also cured the lower back trouble that I had since I injured myself in my early twenties doing ironwork. So to sum up, I discovered the fountain of youth and it consists of proper nutrition and exercise.