5 Things I’m doing at 47 to avoid regret at 87

Betty Rocker (00:15):
What’s up, rock stars Coach Betty Rocker here. Hey, thanks so much for joining me. I wanted to talk about some of the things I’ve been doing that have been making me feel like I was almost able to wind the clock back even after I hit perimenopause and thought that the changes I was starting to see were part of aging and that I was probably never going to be able to get my full strength and power back. And I mean, you know, aging can be seen as such a bad thing, but I don’t see it that way. We’re all aging every single day, but whether that means we’re falling apart or it means we’re getting smarter about how we live is all up to us. So no matter what age or life stage you are at right now, I’m sure you’d like the actions you’re taking to be things that help you feel and look your best right now, and also setting you up for years to come.

(01:06)
So the things I wanted to share with you today are all simple things. They’re probably things that you’re doing some or even all of, but maybe not as consistently as you could be because you didn’t realize what an impact they were actually having on you. And they’re all things that anyone can do and they really add up and have a big impact over time because really every single day the actions we’re taking are setting us up for our future self. Who is going to live in this body? I think back to my thirties and some of the health struggles that I had back then and how it was actually the things I did in my twenties that set me up for that because everything we do accumulates in our cells, in our bodies over time, and we don’t always pay the consequences of tremendous stress or actions that we’ve taken until years down the road.

(01:58)
You know, maybe you can relate. I mean, our twenties are all about experimentation and figuring out our limits and trying things out. I certainly pushed a lot of boundaries with my health in those days going way too hard, not eating enough, doing a lot of drinking and smoking and other experimental things. I mean, there’s the college experience that a lot of us have. There’s also the years when we’re just trying to figure out our identity. And I can say at least for myself, that I did a lot of really dumb things to my body and things I wouldn’t do now. And I was also just really hard on myself internally. I was living with a lot of internal stress that I hadn’t figured out how to handle or process and you know, I was just trying to find my way. And I know I’m not the only one who has that type of experience in in my younger years.

(02:47)
So when I look back on my thirties and I remember really hitting a wall and experiencing a lot of hormone imbalance back then from depleting my immune system and running down my energy and just a lot of adrenal depletion from too much stress, I think about what I was doing in my twenties and how that really played out in the next decade in both really positive and really negative ways because certainly I paid the price for the experimentation and going so hard. But while I could view those things as just a bunch of mistakes, I’m also grateful I had the opportunity to learn and make those mistakes because paying the consequences meant that I had to decide how I wanted to live moving forward. And I think pain as a teacher in this way, right, we often don’t change until we are suffering and we can’t think ahead in life until we’ve got some experience under our belt and understand that the actions that we, that we take really do have consequences.

(03:44)
So I would say that I started to get a lot more thoughtful and intentional in my thirties as a result of that. So I’m glad I was able to learn from my, you know, quote unquote mistakes. And as I look back at the person I was in my thirties now, and I, I often thank her because the woman I am now in my late forties is very much living in a body that was shaped by the choices I made in that last decade of my life. The training I did, the choices I made about eating and how I took care of myself that all accumulated at a cellular level. Of course, I wasn’t perfect and I had a lot to learn, but I also can see how much I did right. And I’m so grateful to that version of myself who came before I think about this perspective, we start to get, you know, I think about it a lot these days, especially when I hang out with some of my older relatives, like my aunt Joan, who’s in her eighties and is such an inspiration to me.

(04:39)
She’s got a busy and full life. She’s walking every day. She drives herself to run all of her errands, she runs her household, she calls the shots in her own life. And all of that is a product of the choices she has made over the past several decades. You know, she’ll, she’ll watch my Instagram stories and text me to say, you need to keep exercising and keep stretching like that so you can still be strong at my age because you know, she really values her mobility and I know I’m going to wanna have that same autonomy and ability to move when I get to her age. I really wanna be able to look back on my life in 20 to 30 years in a strong healthy body and say, damn girl, you set us up so good. So you know, here I am at 47 and a half and I’m probably five years into the perimenopause phase in my life.

(05:26)
It was my early forties when I first started noticed my body changed and I started getting my hormones tested and noticing those fluctuations. This is a totally natural and normal stage of a woman’s life. And while we may all experience it a little differently, there is this transition we go through that’s about so much more than our changing hormones. I think one thing that I noticed that was different as I got into these transition years was the things I valued had changed at the start of perimenopause. Before I figured out how to navigate it, my body changed and I gained some weight. If that had happened at another point in my life, I would’ve been really down on myself and upset. But I realized I had lived 40 years in this body and that I had learned to be a friend to myself and to value myself for all of my many qualities.

(06:14)
I wasn’t all down on myself for seeing some changes, though I was concerned for health reasons and wanted to figure it out. And I just found myself a lot more curious and intrigued. You know, part of that came from having started to shift more into a mindset of wanting to be strong more than I just wanted to be sexy