I Don’t Want My Old Body Back

There are things you can know intellectually for years and still be completely surprised when they happen to your own body. I think those of us who work in healthcare may be particularly good at this. We can understand the science, explain it to someone else, encourage them to make changes and genuinely believe every word we're saying, and then be absolutely terrible at applying the same information to ourselves.

Maybe there's a reason doctors and people who work in healthcare have a reputation for being some of the worst patients.

It's not necessarily that we don't know what to do. We know all the reasons something matters and all the things we should be doing. But knowing something and actually incorporating it into your own life are wildly different things.

Because the Kirsten motto is: why take your own perfectly good advice when you can learn it the hard way instead?

I knew muscle mattered as we age, and I knew that insulin resistance and chronic inflammation were serious business, I knew strength training was especially important for women as we get older. I knew that sleep and stress have a tremendous impact and that our bodies change as we age. None of this was new information to me. What was new was experiencing it in my own body.

This also wasn't my first time trying to find my way back to healthy. In my 30s, I had a really stressful job, lived someplace that I detested, gained a significant amount of weight, and my thyroid went completely sideways. When I started working in functional medicine, I changed almost everything about how I took care of myself. And honestly, my body responded really quickly. I lost the all the weight and more, my autoimmune markers normalized, and eventually I was even able to discontinue thyroid medication completely.

For a long time, I felt like I had figured out my body. I knew what made me feel good, what didn't, and what I needed to do when things started moving in the wrong direction.

Or at least I thought I did.

Then I got Long COVID, and two years later my dad died. The combination of illness, grief and a tremendous amount of stress did a number on me. I gained 50 pounds (again), developed insulin resistance, thyroid and autoimmune markers that had been quiet came roaring back, and signs of inflammation were showing up again. My joints hurt, I didn't feel good, and once again I found myself in a body that didn't feel like mine.

The frustrating part was that I knew what to do. I cleaned up my diet, stopped drinking alcohol, worked on my sleep, managed my stress, meditated, did breathwork, took the supplements and generally went back to all the things that had worked so well for me before. They definitely helped, but this time they weren't enough.

What I hadn't fully appreciated was that I wasn't trying to heal the same body I had healed before. I wasn't in my late 30s or early 40s anymore. I was 55, postmenopausal, post-COVID, grieving, insulin resistant, inflamed and carrying the accumulated stress of several really difficult years. Of course my body wasn't responding exactly the way it had more than a decade earlier.

It seems incredibly obvious to me now. We talk so much about finding what "works" for our bodies that it's easy to assume that once we find it, we've cracked some sort of permanent code. But our bodies aren't static, and neither are our lives. What worked beautifully at 40 may still matter tremendously at 55 and just not be enough anymore.

For me, that realization meant being willing to try something I hadn't needed the first time around.

About eight months ago, I started taking a very low dose of a GLP-1. My primary goal wasn't to find a quick way to lose the 50 pounds I'd gained. I was much more interested in what was happening metabolically, particularly the insulin resistance and inflammation that I couldn't seem to make a dent in.

Slowly, I've lost about 35 pounds so far, and don't get me wrong, I'm very happy about that. My clothes fit again, I recognize myself a little more, and carrying 35 fewer pounds around every day feels pretty freaking good. But surprisingly, the weight loss isn't the most interesting thing that's happened.

My A1c went from 5.8 to 5.3. My fasting glucose went from 103 to 82, and my fasting insulin dropped from 11 to 6. My ApoB improved. My cholesterol actually dropped enough that we've had to pay attention to it from the other direction.

Somewhere along the way, I also realized my body didn't hurt anymore.

It felt like everything hurt before. My back, my big toes, my knees and especially my thumbs were really painful. There were all these aches and pains that had gradually become part of everyday life, and I quietly started lumping them into the category of I guess this is what happens when you're 55 and become the poster child for osteoarthritis.

But then… they were gone.

That surprised me more than I expected it to. Not because I didn't understand the relationship between metabolic health, inflammation and pain, but because understanding something intellectually and experiencing it in your own body are two very different things.

One of the things I knew going into the GLP-1 was that I needed to pay attention to muscle. Significant weight loss can include loss of lean mass, and at 55, I wasn't interested in losing what little muscle I already had. So I started doing regular SECA body composition scans to make sure I was actually losing fat and not sacrificing too much lean mass in the process.

For the first several months, the weight was coming off slowly, most of it was fat, and my muscle was holding pretty steady. Eventually, though, the scans started showing a little muscle loss. It wasn't dramatic, but considering I didn't have a tremendous amount of muscle to spare in the first place, it was enough to get my attention.

And here's where the whole healthcare people make terrible patients thing becomes particularly embarrassing: I knew how important maintaining muscle was, especially for women as we age, but I had somehow made it to 55 without ever actually lifting weights.

Ever.

The funny thing is, I had been active for most of my life. I spent a huge chunk of it in the ocean, swimming, surfing and generally happiest when I was in the water. Then I moved to Colorado and traded that for skiing, snowboarding, hiking and skinning uphill. I'd walked, done cardio, taken classes and always thought of myself as a pretty active person.

But actual strength training, picking up heavy things on purpose and repeatedly putting them back down, was completely new to me. I had made a false assumption without even realizing it: because I was active, I assumed I was strong.

It turns out those aren't necessarily the same thing. Not even close.

So at 55, I hired an awesome trainer and started lifting weights three days a week.

I would love to tell you I immediately discovered my inner athlete and couldn't believe I'd waited so long, but that would be a lie. It was hard. I wasn't very strong, I didn't know what I was doing, and there were plenty of exercises that made me wonder how something that looked so easy when my trainer demonstrated it could become so incredibly difficult when I tried it.

But I kept going, and fairly quickly I started noticing something I hadn't expected. I wasn't just getting better at working out. I was getting better at using my body. Things that had felt heavy weren't as heavy anymore. Movements that had felt awkward became easier. I had more stability and endurance, and I started noticing muscles in places where I'm more than certain there hadn't been muscles before.

Then the SECA scans started showing it too. I wasn't just preserving muscle anymore. I was actually building it.

I realize this is where anyone who knows anything about exercise is thinking, Yes, Kirsten. That's what happens when you lift weights.

I KNOW. That's kind of the point.

I knew strength training built muscle. I knew about the connections to bone health, metabolic health, balance and longevity. What I hadn't understood was what being stronger would actually feel like, and that part has been surprisingly emotional.

The last few years have involved a lot of things I couldn't control. I couldn't control getting Long COVID for almost a year or what it did to my body afterward, and I certainly couldn't control losing my dad. More recently, I've been closing a medical practice that has been an enormous part of my life while simultaneously starting a new business and trying to figure out what I want the next part of my life to look like. There has been a lot of stress, grief, uncertainty and change, and so much of it has required me to sit with things I couldn't fix.

Then three days a week, I walk into the gym and get to see actual proof that I'm getting stronger. Something I couldn't lift a few months ago, I can lift now. Something I thought there was no freaking way I could do, I can suddenly do. And then, just when I'm feeling pretty damn proud of myself, my trainer hands me something heavier.

And I LOVE that.

In the middle of a period of my life where so much has felt completely out of my control, there's something pretty amazing about watching my body get stronger right in front of me.

Strength training has also given all of that stress somewhere physical to go. I'm obviously not literally "purging cortisol" from my body when I lift weights, even though some days that is exactly what it feels like. I can walk into the gym with my brain going in twelve different directions, replaying a conversation, worrying about something I need to solve or thinking about whatever else happens to be taking up residence in my brain that day, and an hour later everything is quieter. Nothing has magically fixed itself while I was doing squats, but somehow whatever felt so consuming when I walked in doesn't have quite the same hold on me when I walk out.

There have been other surprises too, including some that feel almost embarrassingly superficial compared with everything else. My skin looks different.

I knew exercise, better metabolic health, circulation, sleep and nutrition all show up on the outside, but I wasn't prepared for how much my skin would actually change. The texture is different, especially the crepey skin on my chest. It looks healthier, brighter and firmer. It's not the skin or body of a 30-year-old by any means, but when I look in the mirror, my immediate response isn't, Who is this old person and what did you do with Kirsten?

And yes, losing 35 pounds obviously changes the way you look, but this feels different. I'm not just getting smaller. My body is changing shape.

For most of my life, exercise was something I associated with losing weight. You exercised because you ate too much, because your jeans were tight, because summer was coming or because you felt victimized by the number on the scale. Even when I knew better intellectually, I think some part of me still carried around that very old idea that exercise was primarily about making your body smaller.

At 55, I'm discovering how much more interesting it is to make your body stronger.

I don't really care about being the smallest version of myself anymore. I want muscle and strong legs. I want balance, mobility and bones that will carry me through the next several decades. I want to hike and travel and throw my own suitcase into the overhead bin effortlessly. I want to get down on the floor and, more importantly, get back up without having to strategize.

Somewhere along the way, I had started thinking about getting older primarily in terms of hanging on to what I already had: protect my bones, maintain mobility, don't lose too much muscle, keep my blood sugar in check. Basically, do all the things you're supposed to do so everything declines a little more slowly.

It honestly never occurred to me that I could be better at something physically at 55 than I had been at 45. Or 35.

I'm not pretending I'm turning back the clock. I'm very much 55. I'm postmenopausal. My body has been through illness, grief and some incredibly stressful years, and there are things about aging that even a crap ton of squats aren’t going to fix.

But I had confused aging with inevitable decline in ways I didn't realize, and that's just not the case.

I've also spent a lot of time over the last several years working on stress in quieter ways: meditation, breathwork, sleep, and learning to notice what my brain is doing before I let it run away with me. All of those things have mattered enormously, and they still do.

But apparently, I also needed to lift some heavy shit.

There is a completely different kind of release that happens when I physically push myself, and lately I've noticed that the strength I'm building in the gym seems to follow me out the door. I feel more capable and grounded. I'm more willing to try things that used to intimidate me, and I trust myself differently.

Maybe part of that is because every week I'm collecting tiny pieces of evidence that I can do hard things. Something is too heavy until eventually it isn't. An exercise feels impossible until one day I do it, and then my trainer adds weight and we start the whole ridiculous process over again. And somehow, I've come to love the whole process, and it’s not remotely ridiculous. It’s empowering.

My body doesn't particularly care that I'm 55 or that I've never done this before. It doesn't care that I probably should have started twenty years ago. I ask it to get stronger, give it what it needs to do that, and remarkably, it does.

Apparently my body wasn't asking me to accept getting older. It was asking me to give it something different to work with.

When I look back at the last few years, I realize how much time I spent wanting my old body back. I wanted the weight gone, my old labs back, my thyroid and autoimmune markers to settle down again, the inflammation gone and my energy back. Basically, I wanted to get back to the version of me that existed before COVID, before my dad died, before menopause and before several years of stress took me down.

That made perfect sense to me at the time. I'm just not sure it makes sense anymore, because that woman doesn't exist anymore.

I'm not in my 40s anymore. My hormones are different. My body is different. My life is different. I've been through things that changed me physically and emotionally, and trying to recreate some previous version of myself suddenly feels like the wrong goal.

And then it hit me: why the hell was I trying so hard to go backwards?

The GLP-1 didn't replace the things I was already doing. I still have to care about what I eat, prioritize sleep, manage stress, pay attention to my labs and make adjustments when something moves in the wrong direction. It was simply another tool that my body needed this time that it hadn't needed before, and I'm grateful I had access to it.

Strength training started for an equally practical reason: I was beginning to lose muscle and didn't want to lose any more. Neither one felt particularly profound when I started, but together with everything else, they've taught me something I wish I'd understood much earlier. Taking care of yourself isn't about finding the perfect formula and then repeating it forever. What you need changes because you change.

I don't want my old body back. I want the body I'm building now.

I want the muscle I didn't have at 40 and the strength I didn't have at 35. I want to keep learning what this body needs instead of being annoyed that it doesn't respond the way it did fifteen years ago. Most of all, I don't want to spend the next several decades treating aging like one long exercise in damage control.

There are absolutely things I will lose as I get older and changes I won't be able to outsmart, supplement, meditate or deadlift my way around. That's part of being human. But I'm discovering there are also things I can still gain: muscle, strength, confidence, resilience and a willingness to try something I've never done before simply because it might make the next version of my life better.

At this age, after all the curve balls life threw at me, and a few years when I felt like my body had completely betrayed me, I thought the victory would be getting back to where I started.

Instead, I'm doing things physically that I couldn't do before any of it happened. I'm stronger than I was before. And not "strong for 55." Just stronger.

And for the first time in a while, I'm actually excited to see what this body can do next. Deadlifting my body weight, leaving my husband in the dust on the skin track uphill, and maybe even doing a pull-up. Let's not get carried away, but apparently anything is possible now.

For years, I thought getting healthy meant finding my way back to myself.

The reality is, I'm not going back. I'm building someone entirely new. And I like her.

This is my personal experience, not medical advice. Medications, including GLP-1s, have risks and benefits and should be discussed with your healthcare provider.