Your abs are in there somewhere. The trick is visualizing, not exercising.
Your abs are in there somewhere. The trick is visualizing, not exercising.
A hoy there, Gen-X gentleman! Yes, that Hawaiian shirt looks well on you. I, too, am partial to New Balance sneakers. And isn’t it wonderful how spacious cargo shorts can be?
Like the rest of us fellows born in the Sixties and Seventies, you are in the prime of life, going out to slay the bear every day. But modern bear-slaying tends to involve a lot of sitting at desks, the gym is kind of far away, and Debbie from HR keeps making those wonderful brownies. The next thing you know, when you look down in the shower, all you can see are the tips of your toes. It happens to the best of us. (Well, maybe not to Gary the Marathon Guy, from Accounts Receivable. May he choke on his creatine shake.) More often than not, by the time age 50 comes into sight, we’ve all gone a bit Hitchcockian in the midsection. What was once anthracite now feels more like tapioca.
Fear not, muchachos! I have an elegant solution, my fellow sufferers of unplanned middle-aged circumferential expansion. It does not involve undue effort or draconian alterations in diet. It does not require you to forsake those IPAs, so cool and tasty on a summer evening. It expects merely a certain mental agility, the imaginative wherewithal to accept one’s circumstances. Call it Zen, call it emotional maturity; just don’t call it surrender.
The ladies’ magazines tell us that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Consider this column a ladies’ magazine for gentlemen. Tomato-y is a shape!
So don’t be a sourpuss when it comes to avoirdupois. In order to regain confidence and poise about that Double Stuf in your middle, the trick is to start counting more activities as exercise.
We must all master the tactic Homer Simpson modeled for us all of those years ago: gazing at one’s shirtless convexity in the mirror and seeing nothing but cobblestones of sinew delineated by knife edges in between. Homer-in-the-mirror is a true and accurate image of the real you, the best you, the part that goes unseen because of the decorative upholstery that reclines atop it. You wouldn’t say an X-ray is inaccurate just because it shows that which is ordinarily invisible, would you? True beauty lies beneath. And beneath it all, you’re fit to play touch football in the surf with Hangman and Rooster.
Remember that you are working that body every day in ways you rarely bother to give yourself credit for. Once you add up all the incidental exercise, you’re a workout fanatic — so you can think of yourself as perfectly fit. Give proper consideration to such exertions as:
Yelling at the kids. Why can’t they put their dishes in the dishwasher? Do they not know that clothes go back in the dresser? Who knows? The point is your diaphragm is getting a workout every time you make speech with it. More volume = more calories burned, so don’t hold back.
Jumping to conclusions. Something horrible happens, you learn about it on social media, you immediately assign blame to your political enemies, subsidiary quarrels break out, the actual motive was not what it appeared to be, and your neck and shoulder muscles get a nice workout when you shrug.
Surfing the Internet. You somehow just spent 106 minutes reading Yelp reviews, Loki recaps, and Elon Musk memes? Cowabunga, dude! Just clench your lower back muscles once in a while and call it “dorsal training.”
Walking back the boss’s remarks. Ask any White House spokesman about this. The rhetorical contortions to which they daily resort are more invigorating than yoga, and one doesn’t even have to change out of one’s work clothes to perform them.
Road raging. The Subaru wagon ahead of you is going 57 miles per hour in the fast lane; naturally, your blood boils. Your pulse pounds. Your heart rate skyrockets. It’s called cardio, my friend. Flip off the retired social worker driving the Subaru for an additional arm-extension rep.
Checking your ambitions. Maybe you’ve gone as far in your career as you’re going to go, and maybe that’s fine. Without the dependable middle of any profession, what is everything be centered around? Chase down those hopes, wrestle them into submission, hogtie them in your cellar and punch them in the kidneys. You’re practically a prizefighter. And the prize you win is acceptance. The internal push-and-pull of conflicting forces is not nausea; it’s isometrics.
Heading to the bathroom. Okay, maybe you just went in there to get away from the kids, but that doesn’t mean your time within is wasted. Are you straining? Grunting? Breathing heavily? Then isn’t the throne much like a Nautilus?