This topic may not be of interest to the many younger guys here... or maybe it could serve as at least insight into a problem that they may encounter later in life. However, as I approach the beginning of my 50th year next week (49th birthday), I've been wondering if "male menopause" hasn't been creeping in. I don't normally go looking for "problems" but I, also, don't normally stand idlely by if I feel that I need to get busy addressing something serious in my life... which is how I got into fitness. [img]smile.gif[/img]
I sought out and was skimming a book in a bookstore on male menopause. I kept reading things that rang true so I bought it. One interesting point that the author made was that, at this point in time, we all have a greater chance to live longer than ever before and to experience what a human lifespan should be. With that comes a new set of problems such as living to experience a part of life that has not been as well mapped as the younger years.
I love the analogy the author made to climbing mountains. At 50, I may be an experienced veteran of the first phase of life. I've climbed the mountain, crossed over the top and am on the downhill slope. However, now I look around and find another one just as big in front of me, one that's just as unfamiliar and ominous to me as the first.
Because so relatively few others have experienced the road ahead (re: the living longer comment) and/or have shared their experience with it - the problem may be compounded by many men's unwillingness to express openly what they feel about most things - I don't know how to interpret my own feelings about it. Is this normal? Do I need to get busy working on something before it gets worse?
I confess that I just bought the book and haven't had time to read it so most of this is my own interpretation but I think the symptoms of this "dis-ease" are the all-too-common "husband leaves wife for younger woman" and screws up the lives of a variety of innocent bystanders in the process. In less severe cases, he just goes and buys a new corvette! In any case, there's something that happens to a lot of guys at this juncture in the road that causes them a lot of anxiety and they either suffer in silence (depressed) or make drastic changes in their lives!
In my own case, I don't want to screw up my own life or those who I love so I'm struggling with my own feelings. I've been working out for several years now and I haven't had any significant problems with the physical symptoms of this yet. Although I haven't actually had my testosterone checked to see what it actually is, "everything" still works fairly well so far which is actually part of the problem in a bizarre way. I find myself extremely attracted to younger women and feel as though they respond to me. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to get the hell out quickly because I was afraid that I was on the verge of making a mistake that I would have deeply regretted.
I interpret this as an attempt by an older guy to gain validation of his masculinity (which will inevitably fade in time ). I believe that, through the lifestyle I live now, I can postpone it for a lot longer and I actually feel as young as I've felt the past 20 years... I'm not but this is messin' with my mind.
I know that there are a few "older guys" out there. Care to comment?
Male menopause (shouldn't that be womanopause?) really is a low testosterone effect. You could get your T levels checked. Also take a ZMA supplement. This is zinc and magnesium, but as a more bioavailable form of aspertate. It should be taken on a empty stomach at night within 30 minutes before going to bed. Do not take calcium or milk around the time you take ZMA.
Another product you could take with ZMA or by itself is Tribex. This is shown to raise testosterone levels also. I do believe it is less effective as men get older though. As a last resort a doctor could put you on a testosterone supplement like androgel. This is the most common form of male hormone replacement. 1.5 million men take it in America currently.
I would recommend saw palmetto also, or propecia or proscar. (I hope I spelled those words right.) The last two are prescription drugs that reduce DHT. Testosterone can convert to DHT and if you increase the levels of testosterone you will also increase DHT. Propecia and proscar are the same drug, one for hair, and one for the prostate. The one for the prostate has 5 times the medicine as the other, but costs relatively the same, so people often cut the bigger pill into 5. If you can increase your testosterone and decrease the risks of prostate problems at the same time I think you will be very happy.
Q,
I am not too close to 50 yet (just turned 35), but I completely understand what you are going through. First, being attracted to young beautiful women is just being a heterosexual male... Nothing unusual about that. That ideal age seems to fall somewhere between 18 and 35, and notice that when you were 15 you thought they were attractive, when you were 25 you thought they were attractive, when you were 35 you still thought they were attractive, and at 50 they are STILL attractive. At 90 they will still be attractive! What does that tell you? It tells me that women at the are at the peak of their physical appearance at the ages between 18-35 (and that is not to say that I haven't met many HOT women over 40 either). A better qualification is that attractive women get your attention. So now that we have established that and determined that there is nothing wrong with you for noticing them, lets look at the next issue you bring up.
They notice you too. Correct me if I am wrong, but you have recently (in the last few years) rediscovered fitness in your life and gotten in really good shape, right? What are some of the intangibles of being healthier and more fit? We project ourselves as more "virile" and radiate masculininty and confidence. Women are not nearly as shallow as men (being VERY general here), so they probably respond more to those intangibles that men do... the actual image may not be this perfect little man with 5% bodyfat, but lets face it, when we are feeling good about ourselves, we act like that is what we look like. An older man is often much more appealing to younger women, who are more motivated by personality, power, and success than looks. So if you are an older male, AND you look good, and project yourself with confidence, you probably are very appealing to many younger women.
Now lets look into the place that no man wants to look. We have many identities... We have our true self, we have the self that we think we are, the self that we think everyone else sees, and then we have the self that everyone does see that we THINK that they don't see and would absolutely die if we really knew just obvious those things are. That is the hardest reflection to look at though. It is there, but we play VERY deep games of denial with ourselves because it is almost physically painful to see ourselves through other people's eyes. That reflection is painful to gaze upon, so most people don't (that whole Freudian concept of avoiding seeking pleasure, avoinding displeasure I guess).
A good analogy would be if someone had a video camera on us when we really lose our temper... Later, after we calm down and watch the video, we would cringe with embarrassment at our infantile rage, not realizing that we actually looked like that. Lets look at it in terms of the typical man's midlife crisis... Sadly, many men out there also are in such a desperate state of identity crisis, realizing that they are no longer young and attractive, that they don't see how silly they look when they buy their corvettes and Harleys, doing a ridiculous comb-over -- as if NO ONE will realize that the hair is just dragged across the bald spot and not actually springing up from the scalp. They are desperate, and what they project is not confidence, but obvious clinging to any vestiges of their lost youth. They get a little attention from some opportunistic young woman who sees all the money that they are spending (whether they have it or not), and they think that this is "it!" Then many leave their wives of 20 years to go live in some fantasy life that won't last another five years, because the amount of energy required to maintain this illusion is substantial, eventually collapsing. Then the silly man is sitting there, wondering where he went wrong, missing his wife who was his friend, who loved him with his bald spot and love handles, who raised a family with him, and now is is alone, as the young woman has spent all his money and taken off after another man who has some money or a young buff guy.
It is really too bad that "future-cams" don't exist that could show people the outcomes of some of the choices that they are tempted to make. The ironic thing is that it does exist... everyone else can see it like writing on the wall, but the man in the midst of his own crisis cannot see it. Denial is a powerful thing, but if we were able to honestly examine ourselves, we would begin to recognize it and start looking at what we REALLY need, rather than patching ourselves up with bandaids, treating the symptoms but not the problem itself.
So what do we REALLY need? According to Glasser (Reality Therapy) all we need to do is make sure that our most BASIS emotional needs are being met. Those basic needs do involve validation, but it also requires a high level of honesty with ourselves and others. For validation, his theory acknowledges that we have a real NEED to love and to be loved in return, and then it further requires us to form responsible adult relationships with others. In this case our relationships are very conditional (NOT our love, just our relationships). In other words, we hold ourselves and others to a high standard in which we are completely honest and expect complete honesty in return. So in the case of the exclusive relationship there are a couple of things you can do to avoid screwing everything up. First, a dialogue with your significant other... open communication. Being honest with them about your needs for validation, and also trying to understand what their needs are as well. The other is honesty with yourself. What are you getting when you "trade in for a newer model", as I have heard some men crassly put it? In blunt terms, you are trading in one set of problems for another. We would be lying to ourselves if we believed that this new relationship would somehow flow more effortlessly. There is no such thing. That is the illusion that we form. No matter who we are with, things are going to get routine, sometimes boring, and there will be disagreements, and there will need to be a lot of hard work if it is going to work.
Whew... writing a book. I will come back to this later today... have a client so I gotta run. I have to complete my thoughts on this.
Originally posted by The Mage: Male menopause (shouldn't that be womanopause?) really is a low testosterone effect. You could get your T levels checked. Also take a ZMA supplement.
Thanks for the feedback! I do plan to get my T levels checked as a baseline but I really don't seem to have the physical symptoms of this as I understand them... yet. I do find that I have to struggle with the psychological aspects to some degree and I haven't quite sorted that out yet.
Originally posted by Jean-Paul: Q,
So what do we REALLY need? According to Glasser (Reality Therapy) all we need to do is make sure that our most BASIS emotional needs are being met. Those basic needs do involve validation, but it also requires a high level of honesty with ourselves and others. For validation, his theory acknowledges that we have a real NEED to love and to be loved in return, and then it further requires us to form responsible adult relationships with others. In this case our relationships are very conditional (NOT our love, just our relationships). In other words, we hold ourselves and others to a high standard in which we are completely honest and expect complete honesty in return. So in the case of the exclusive relationship there are a couple of things you can do to avoid screwing everything up. First, a dialogue with your significant other... open communication. Being honest with them about your needs for validation, and also trying to understand what their needs are as well. The other is honesty with yourself. What are you getting when you "trade in for a newer model", as I have heard some men crassly put it? In blunt terms, you are trading in one set of problems for another. We would be lying to ourselves if we believed that this new relationship would somehow flow more effortlessly. There is no such thing. That is the illusion that we form. No matter who we are with, things are going to get routine, sometimes boring, and there will be disagreements, and there will need to be a lot of hard work if it is going to work.
AH, THAT'S the kind of discussion I like! Yes, you're right about the confidence part. I'm easily more confident now than I've been at any time in my entire life and, yes, that's very attractive to women, from my experience.
JP, you are right on about the need for validation. That's the exact word that I've been using. Ironically, in my marriage, I'm the big communicator and I did have quite a good conversation with my wife just yesterday.
I told her that this (validation) is what I'm needing at this point in my life. After we get past the usual initial defensiveness and her thinking this is really an indictment of her, we actually made progress that helped ME quite a bit... as well as our relationship. Without going into all the details, I think she did eventually "get it."
It really pissed me off when I went to the MH "Over 40" forum (or whatever it's called) not too long ago only to find all these guys whining about their wives losing interest in sex. Many of them were ready (or had already) to become unfaithful or leave their wives. I didn't participate in that conversation but what I tell my own wife is that I understand that you didn't chose for this to happen... it just does sometimes! Women also have hormonal changes as they age.
The challenge for committed couples is to find a new path together that allows them to grow in new directions to accomodate the changes in their bodies. Sex at 18 is probably different than sex at 48, 58 or 68 for most people but not necessarily better. There's a whole new set of components to a relationship that require that time to develop.
One of the interesting things that I was reading in this book was a man in his 60's saying that, even though they still had actual sex intercourse, touching his wife's hand was a sexual experience to him now. Some younger people may laugh at that but I understood what he was saying. It has to do with the bond that develops between two people and runs deeper than what physical contact can account for.
Yes, some people make the decision to trade in their older wife for a newer model but often are just trading one set of problems for another. I have no interest in that and never have. I've always seen the folly in that. My wife has been through that once and I wouldn't do that to her or her children (I call them "our" children) again, even though they are grown, no matter what!
Well, this had been hurried and I have to go but I'll come back and try to explain the confusing parts later!
I was also going to respond that I have taken ZMA and am now taking what I think is the equivilent, just buying the zinc and magnesium separately.
By the way, today is this older guy's birthday so, to celebrate another year and another year on my quest for fitness, I had a friend take these pictures:
Whew! What a meaty topic—and now I’ve read J-P’s response to our Oakman, and Oakman’s response to J-P. But what I’ll put up here now is what I wrote on the basis of the first post, in which the topic is announced in all of its potential dimensions.
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Quercus: I know that there are a few "older guys" out there. Care to comment?
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At 68 (which as you pointed out, is really my 69th year), I am possibly the oldest guy on the MH fitness forum and certainly on J-P’s bulletin board. And indeed yes, I do care to comment, for the issues you raise have been much on my mind for a couple of years at least.
I’m taking the liberty of rearranging the order of your topics.
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Quercus: I sought out and was skimming a book in a bookstore on male menopause. I kept reading things that rang true so I bought it. One interesting point that the author made was that, at this point in time, we all have a greater chance to live longer than ever before and to experience what a human lifespan should be.
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You and I are not in the same generation, and J-P, who has responded to your post with great insight, is yet a generation younger. But these three generations of ours share this chance for greater longevity than our ancestors could reasonably expect. (The same thing may not be true of the generation of those who are just now about to enter their teens, thanks to unsound diet and sedentary lifestyles.)
My father died when he was my age. My maternal grandather, whom I did not really know, died at 49—and kinfolk said he died of old age. My paternal grandfather made it to 69. He was an old man then, as was my father, who had several heart attacks and a couple of strokes, the last one fatal. My paternal grandfather did get some exercise: he raised and rode quarter horses. He talked about his life, usually, in terms of regret. My father was more than regretful; he was bitter, especially toward his children, his four sons. But the psychology here is extremely complex. right before he died I learned something important: he was haunted by the idea that he had not lived up to his own father’s expectations.
I do not feel old, or at least do not feel that my age limits me in any significant way, except for a really crappy sense of balance or proprioception. I am physically active. I work out three times a week, for the past nine months with a trainer (because I wanted to wean myself somewhat from machines and learn to use free weights without injury). I go kayaking. I take long walks with my wife at dawn on beach or boardwalk. I am interested in the garden my wife and I have been making for the past 30 of our 44 years of marriage. I am passionate about classical music. I read most of the New York Times every morning. I have very strong political views, one of which is that I devoutly wish that George W. Bush was still governing Texas and Dick Cheney still enjoying Sunday services at Highland Park Methodist Church.
And, most important of all, I am in robust good health, but have known the other thing as well. Although I can take credit for being fitter today than I ever was before, I owe a lot to some excellent doctors. I have twice had surgery to open a blocked carotid artery. Five years ago I had even more serious surgery, to remove a carcinoma in my right lung. My pulmonary doctor told me in April that there was no longer any point in routine chest x-rays or in regular visits to her office, that “in your case, we can use the words ‘cancer cured’.” My regular doctor keeps me supplied with stuff that keeps cholesterol and blood pressure down. I take a baby aspirin every morning. And there’s one other medicine, but I’ll save that for a bit later...(You also wrote about problems of greater longevity; relying on drugs to keep numbers normal is one of these.)
The other night my wife and I watched a TV documentary about the movie star Gene Tierney. At the end there was a clipping of her obituary, giving her age as 70. “She had a very long life,” my wife said.
“Ummmgh, dear, “ I mumbled, “she was just two years older than I am.”
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Because so relatively few others have experienced the road ahead (re: the living longer comment) and/or have shared their experience with it - the problem may be compounded by many men's unwillingness to express openly what they feel about most things - I don't know how to interpret my own feelings about it. Is this normal? Do I need to get busy working on something before it gets worse?
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But just think, my friend, about what you and I are doing here now. If you were of my generation, in the waning days of your 48th year, where would you have gone with those three questions of yours?
Yes, men have traditionally been unwilling “to express openly what we feel about most things.” We were brought up to belief that we should be strong and silent, that we should take on the chin whatever life throws at us. We kept quiet out of fear that others would find out ...what? something about us? That we were capable of being afraid, afraid of the dark, afraid of relationships going wrong, afraid of...the realization that our time on this earth is brief and that we are fleeting creatures. Many of us carried around all the way into adult life the hidden hurts we experienced in high school.
But the internet and a few websites and the possibility of speaking from the heart about things of the heart yet doing do anonymously has profoundly changed the possible relationships between male human beings. The MH forums are a case in point. “Dating” and “Health” are pretty slimy in places, and I wish there were two “Fitness” boards, one for those who are just learning how to shave and another for people who have knocked around for a few years. Nevertheless, some amazing stuff surfaces out of nowhere: meditations on fatherhood, Mahler (John) on Mahler (Gustav). And the protective shield of anonymity sometimes is set aside. Friendships do develop in cyberspace. Some of us know each other’s real names. Occasionally, as in a play by Ionesco, it may even turn out that two guys went to the same high school.
I must wonder if your wife knows about your posting here, and about its content. My wife knows that I sometimes (!) go to forums dealing with health and fitness. I have told her that other things come up, but she thinks I’ve gotten an unexpected, long overdue concern about physical fitness, that it’s on the verge of obsessional, and that I seek out people with similar concerns. I don’t tell her that my real concern is making sense of being born male and all that goes with that, from age 6 to, I would imagine, the grave.
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I think the symptoms of this "dis-ease" are the all-too-common "husband leaves wife for younger woman" and screws up the lives of a variety of innocent bystanders in the process. In less severe cases, he just goes and buys a new corvette! In any case, there's something that happens to a lot of guys at this juncture in the road that causes them a lot of anxiety and they either suffer in silence (depressed) or make drastic changes in their lives!
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Yeah, it happens. I got a real close up view about 20 years ago. My best friend, a guy with whom I team taught a popular course on philosophical ideas in literature was approached by an older student, about ten years his junior, married, with a couple of kids. She said she had fallen in love with him. He said, no thanks, I’m married.Two days later their affair began. A month later, the lovebirds were in a seedy motel when a photographer burst in. The consequences were horrible all the way around, including the death of my friendship with the other teacher. Or, just this past semester, a colleague e-mailed a little mash note to his lover, but accidentally sent it to his wife instead. Hell ensued.
But in re the new Corvette it can sometimes not be a substitute for a sexual affair. When the Andropause hits, guys may have more money than they did at 25. The kids are out of the house and long done with college. $2000 for a new iBook doesn’t seem very expensive, or $45,000 for a shiny new Lexus (although I drive a Passat). I’ve almost got the stereo that conforms to my idea of how recorded timpani on a Mahler symphony should shake the house without destroying the speakers. This weekend when my wife and I are traveling a short distance to see our eldest granddaughter graduate from junior high, we made hotel reservations without looking for the cheapest motel without cockroaches or stains on every surface from bodily fluids of strangers.
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In my own case, I don't want to screw up my own life or those who I love so I'm struggling with my own feelings. I've been working out for several years now and I haven't had any significant problems with the physical symptoms of this yet. [...]. I find myself extremely attracted to younger women and feel as though they respond to me. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to get the hell out quickly because I was afraid that I was on the verge of making a mistake that I would have deeply regretted.
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There are some younger women, friends of my wife, with whom I banter and flirt, but it’s only play. There was one point, around my fortieth birthday, when I was on the kind of verge of making a mistake of the kind you mention.
It strikes me that the trajectory of our lives is one in which we move from having almost endless possible choices to make to gradually defining our identity, who we are, by the choices we actually do make. We may date, play the field, consider as our life’s partner Sue, Rita, Gwen, Peggy, and Elizabeth (or Sam or Bill). But then, if we make a choice, we forego all the possibilities we didn’t chose. I really do believe in “forsaking all others, in sickness and in health.”
I’ve never had an affair. There are two reasons, one nice, perhaps even admirable, and the other not so nice.
The good reason is that if someone is unfaithful to his wife, he is also unfaithful to himself, to the person he has pledged himself to be.
The other reason is that I am a very bad liar, and my wife very good at detecting the tiniest fib.
I must also add that during my 30s and 40s I was a pudge. Other people hit on me very seldom. I’m now in decent shape. I recognize certain expressions of interest. I have some interests of my own. At one point, shortly after I got some hormonal matters tended to (about which more anon, I could look at a Xerox machine and find it oddly attractive.
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I haven't actually had my testosterone checked to see what it actually is
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Okay, and now we come to it, to testosterone and what I can say about it. I haven’t kept the story about me and my testosterone a secret, and have told it on occasion on the internet, so you may already know the story, but here it is.
Three years ago I weighed over 200 pounds. My body fat was in excess of 30%. I had no energy. At my college I would take the elevator up one story, and if alone, I would sit down on the floor. A little apprehension about driving had blossomed into a full-fledged phobia that was a major problem in family relationships. During a routine physical, my doctor asked about my libido and I said, “Just fine.” By that I meant I was running on empty, but that was okay. I was an old man. I felt old. And old men aren’t supposed to have very active libidos, for then they are dirty old men.
But then my doctor decided not to trust my “just fine” answer. He ordered two new tests. One was to see if my pituitary was producing the luteinizing hormone that instructs the testes to produce testosterone. That test was okay. The other test was for free serum testosterone, to see if the testes were obeying instructions. They were very disobedient. “My friend,” my doctor told me, “you are a eunuch.” But then he told me that nowadays my condition was entirely remediable. All I had to do was open a little pack of clear gel called Androgel each morning and rub it into the skin of my upper arms and shoulders. He was putting me on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).
It took only a few hours for the stuff to work. I felt a tremendous sense of well-being, of almost euphoria. I felt like years, decades even, had dropped away. Energy soared. And, what’s this...a little nudge...a little feeling of warmth in my....Good Lord Almighty, that libido was back!
In retrospect, adding Androgel to my daily routine was the second most important event in my medical history, second only to successful lung surgery. It was directly responsible for the burst of energy that spurred me to start working out regularly and strenuously, and with excellent results. It suppressed that driving phobia, and banished recurrent bouts of depression.
But it also brought problems. It was probably over a twenty year period that I began to slump into the state I was in, including the decline and almost disappearance of desire. My wife and I never discussed what was going on. For her, my absent desire translated into “I am no longer desirable.” She became accustomed to life with a near-eunuch, but now this wretch smears goo on his shoulder and he gets horny. Is this going to last? Can he be trusted?
The ads for Androgel are deceptive, in that their premise is; libido declines, medicine fixes, and everything is hunky dorey right away. It doesn’t work that way. Real sexuality is something between people, not in just one person. If one person’s desire wanes, the other must accommodate in some way, must work out a way to live. Anything that then alters the equation—as for example, somebody who has drifted into asexuality suddenly becoming a sexual being once again—is unsettling. (I suspect that Viagra and its effects aren’t always welcomed eagerly by both parties in a long-standing relationship.)
It took time to work out some very basic aspects of our relationship, and I know that I will never be able to entirely undo some of the harm I did during my years of drought.
Unlike my father, I do not believe in living with regret about the past, for it cannot be altered. I also do not believe that problems in a marriage are always a matter of one partner being wrong. My wife and I can both be faulted (if fault needs to be assigned) for not communicating honestly. There has soemtimes been a problem, also, with her language. She is prone to say “You always...” or “You never... She would say, for example, “You never pick up your socks.” And I would answer, “But I picked them up yesterday.” In this pattern, there is something else, too. People can’t live together for decades without knowing each other very well indeed. But intimate knowledge of others can never be absolute; no human being has the kind of knowledge that religious people attribute to God. When I decided to go to the gym and make myself into a really fit human being, my wife thought it wouldn’t last more than a month, perhaps even a week. And she told me so. She didn’t know me as well as she thought.
One question presented itself almost immediately in regard to TRT and Androgel. Was my using this stuff a private matter that I should keep secret? There was one argument in favor of secrecy. TRT. well the very name says it: it replaces testosterone. Testosterone is among other things the male sex hormone. It raises the libido Libido is the desire for sex. Therefore if I tell someone I’m taking the stuff, they will assume, correctly, that I’m sexually active, which in a certain way is nobody else’s business.
But there was another argument, and a very powerful one, for not keeping this part of my medical history private. My life would have benefited tremendously if in, say, 1985 or 1990, I had learned about my increasing hormonal deficiency. Maybe someone who learned about my history would be inspired to have himself checked out, and as a result start therapy at 45 or 50, not 65.
Occasionally I run into someone I haven’t seen in three years. They expect a puffy, flabby, played-out male clearly in his declining years. Instead they get somebody who is in excellent shape at 68, who is lean and muscular, a man who used to slouch and slump but now stands erect. “What happened to you?” they ask. I always tell them that I got religion (metaphorically, not actually) and started working out. If the people who ask are males, in their late 30s or 40s, and looking a little bit weary, I may put in a word for something called TRT.
Okay, cut to the main point, my friend. To be alive, male, heterosexual, and fit means to have thoughts of forbidden pleasures, of getting involved in stuff we know would be dumb but sounds like it could be fun. If a guy is in shape, possibilities may present themselves, and they’re flattering, but dangerous.
Years ago, when I was in my twenties, a slightly older teaching colleague told me about a freshman in his English comp class, a girl named Jennifer Sane. “Oh, to be 18 and in love with Jennifer Sane, not married to the woman with whom I have produced three sons. But then I realize. This woman and I will grow old together. One of us will bury the other. And she will forgive me for the pee-stains on my underwear.”
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
I must confess that I secretly hoped that you would join in just because I knew that whatever you wrote would be a gem! I should also not have been surprised that it was such a LONG gem!
A few miscellaneous comments...
Quote:
Originally posted by gardener: I have very strong political views, one of which is that I devoutly wish that George W. Bush was still governing Texas and Dick Cheney still enjoying Sunday services at Highland Park Methodist Church.
By extension, I guess you also wish that Clinton was still in the White House? Probably best not to go there and stay on topic!
I just attended my niece's wedding at HP Methodist on May 17th.
Quote:
Originally posted by gardener: But just think, my friend, about what you and I are doing here now. If you were of my generation, in the waning days of your 48th year, where would you have gone with those three questions of yours?
You know, I have thought about what a sign of the times it is that a lot of my closest male friends and confidants are people who I've never met! It sounds strange but it makes a lot of sense really. In the past, the pool that we developed our friendships from was often the people that we shared interests and activities with. Because the Internet has allowed us to communicate with people with shared interests from around the globe, we group around those shared interests and friendships develop. Pretty cool, huh!
By the way, I've never been one to hold my feelings inside and, as I said, I'm big on communication! In my case, I was raised by a single mother with no father around (grand parents played a big part too) so that may have been a plus in that regard.
Quote:
Originally posted by gardener: Occasionally, as in a play by Ionesco, it may even turn out that two guys went to the same high school.
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Originally posted by gardener: I must wonder if your wife knows about your posting here, and about its content..
I'm open when it comes to communication but I also fiercely protect a portion of myself that I keep just for me, if that makes sense. I have my own study and everyone knows that it's my space. I share it but they know to respect it, too. The same goes for what I write to my friends online. That's really my business alone. No, my wife doesn't know what I write here. She knows how I feel and I've shared potions of the book with her as we've talked about this topic but I wouldn't be stupid enough to hurt her/us by telling her about a near miss where nothing actually happened other than scraring the crap out of me and causing me to take a much harder look at how I got into that situation. That's really what this is all about for me... trying to figure out what it was in me that allowed that to almost happen. It didn't, I knew that it would have been stupid and disastrous, I was still in control enough to know to back away quickly... but something there intrigued me and I wanted to explore that after-the-fact.
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Originally posted by gardener: It strikes me that the trajectory of our lives is one in which we move from having almost endless possible choices to make to gradually defining our identity, who we are, by the choices we actually do make. We may date, play the field, consider as our life’s partner Sue, Rita, Gwen, Peggy, and Elizabeth (or Sam or Bill). But then, if we make a choice, we forego all the possibilities we didn’t chose. I really do believe in “forsaking all others, in sickness and in health.”
Absolutely! You are right about how these things define our identity. I was shaken by this event but, when the dust settled, I found myself that much more committed to my wife and our life. It was like getting a glimpse of tasting the forbidden fruit but realizing that the sweetness would be very shortlived and then I'd have to live the rest of my life with the harsh reality of what I had given up.
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Originally posted by gardener: Okay, cut to the main point, my friend. To be alive, male, heterosexual, and fit means to have thoughts of forbidden pleasures, of getting involved in stuff we know would be dumb but sounds like it could be fun. If a guy is in shape, possibilities may present themselves, and they’re flattering, but dangerous.
Years ago, when I was in my twenties, a slightly older teaching colleague told me about a freshman in his English comp class, a girl named Jennifer Sane. “Oh, to be 18 and in love with Jennifer Sane, not married to the woman with whom I have produced three sons. But then I realize. This woman and I will grow old together. One of us will bury the other. And she will forgive me for the pee-stains on my underwear.”
Thanks for your response! I've very much enjoyed this conversation... with everyone. It is wonderful to have a safe place like this to share and talk about these kinds of issues. It has helped me and I hope it is useful to others as well!
"I was also going to respond that I have taken ZMA and am now taking what I think is the equivalent, just buying the zinc and magnesium separately."
Are these aspartate versions? One of the important things about ZMA is the fact that they are aspartate versions. Normally magnesium is sold as an oxide, and it has been found to have a low bioavailability. The cheapest ZMA I found so far on netrition.com was ISS and Biotest (surprisingly considering their products tend to have very high prices.) It has been over a year since I bought the GNC version of ZMA, and got a good price when I bought it at the buy 1 get the second at half price. I cannot remember what the price was though.
I know gardener talked about worries of being labeled a dirty old man. This is my goal.
The talks of longevity reminded me of a study I found that showed replacing corn oil with fish oil in short lived mice resulted in an increase in longevity almost equal to a calorie restricted diet. (CR) If you didn't know, CR diets produce life extension in every animal tested. (Under eating without under nutrition.)
Originally posted by The Mage: Are these aspartate versions?
Yep
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Originally posted by The Mage: The talks of longevity reminded me of a study I found that showed replacing corn oil with fish oil in short lived mice resulted in an increase in longevity almost equal to a calorie restricted diet. (CR)
I had heard about the CR stuff but was never willing to actually do it! That's really cool about the fish oil... I'd like to see the study if you could reference it. I've read/heard about Okinawans and their longevity and it seemed like their diet was largely fish. I don't think that the issue is that simple but I eat my salmon almost daily anyway. I just turned 49 and am shooting for triple digits!
That's really cool about the fish oil... I'd like to see the study if you could reference it. I've read/heard about Okinawans and their longevity and it seemed like their diet was largely fish. I don't think that the issue is that simple but I eat my salmon almost daily anyway. I just turned 49 and am shooting for triple digits!
¡ Feliz cumpleaños ayer!
But what kind of salmon? Lots of problems seem to be emerging with the farm-raised Atlantic stuff. There's considerable pollution involved. Farm-raised strains escape and adulterate the genetic material of wild fish. And the flesh ranges from gray to very pale pink, and is therefore colored artificially for marketing. You can get smoked wild salmon if you look or order it by mail. And canned salmon is almost always wild.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
Originally posted by gardener: But what kind of salmon? Lots of problems seem to be emerging with the farm-raised Atlantic stuff. There's considerable pollution involved. Farm-raised strains escape and adulterate the genetic material of wild fish. And the flesh ranges from gray to very pale pink, and is therefore colored artificially for marketing. You can get smoked wild salmon if you look or order it by mail. And canned salmon is almost always wild.
I'm glad you posted this! Yes, I buy the farm-raised, pink Atlantic salmon. I have bought the wild fresh before but it's twice as expensive and I can't afford it.
I've read about the mercury problem and even tried to subscribe to a trade publication that the guys in the fish market told me about to find out more about farm-raised fish culture because I know it's probably not ideal for the consumer's health. Plus, I recently heard a report on the radio about a new drug that they are wanting to get approved through the FDA to further hasten the growth of the salmon to get them to our tables even faster.
Thanks for your suggestions on ordering smoked and buying canned! Any suggestions on websites for buying smoked salmon?
First, being attracted to young beautiful women is just being a heterosexual male... Nothing unusual about that. That ideal age seems to fall somewhere between 18 and 35, and notice that when you were 15 you thought they were attractive, when you were 25 you thought they were attractive, when you were 35 you still thought they were attractive, and at 50 they are STILL attractive. At 90 they will still be attractive! What does that tell you? It tells me that women at the are at the peak of their physical appearance at the ages between 18-35).
J-P, I suppose you’re right about women’s peak of physical appearance falling generally between 1 and 35, if you mean that after 35 gray hair may announce itself, the midsection may thicken, and so on. But you may find that as your years increase you will continue to find some women who are your age entirely attractive. (I had a thing for Kathatine Hepburn well into her 70s.)
Also, we need to distinguish between just finding women attractive, in the sense of noticing that someone is attractive, and continuing to find attractive a special person over a long period. When I first caught sight of the woman who became my wife, something clicked. She was very, very beautiful at 21, with the beauty of a young woman. Our granddaughters are beginning to show the same kind of beauty. Meanwhile, my wife is still very beautiful, though unaware of it. But it is a later-in-life kind of beauty.
An older man is often much more appealing to younger women, who are more motivated by personality, power, and success than looks. So if you are an older male, AND you look good, and project yourself with confidence, you probably are very appealing to many younger women.
Another way of looking at this is that the male contemporaries of these youger women have yet to transcend theirimmaturity and strange combination of self-centeredness and lack of real self-assurance. This shows up on the MH forums especially, but also occasionally on th fitness board. The goal of some of these younger guys isn’t really fitness. It’s gettingbig; it’s looking good on the beach; or it’s impresing potential girl friends.. Many guys in their mid- to late teens are on the geeky side. We get more interesting as we grow up.
But note: some young males are appealing because of their maturity of mind and character. And some older guys are perpetually clueless.
Now lets look into the place that no man wants to look. We have many identities... We have our true self, we have the self that we think we are, the self that we think everyone else sees, and then we have the self that everyone does see that we THINK that they don't see and would absolutely die if we really knew just obvious those things are. That is the hardest reflection to look at though. It is there, but we play VERY deep games of denial with ourselves because it is almost physically painful to see ourselves through other people's eyes. That reflection is painful to gaze upon, so most people don't (that whole Freudian concept of avoiding seeking pleasure, avoinding displeasure I guess)
Yes, of course. We may pick our noses all the way to kingdom come if we think no one can see. (Does anyone still read John Barth? His secondnovel, End of the Road, has a devastating scene. Jake Horner, a college English instructor, wants to have an affair with Rennie Morgan,the wife of Jake’s faculty colleague, Joe Morgan. Rennie tells Jake that Joe has perfect integrity, that he is always the same person, through and through. Jake suggests that he and Rennie spy on Joe as he shaves. And then....)
Yes, often we do have multiple identities. (I don’t present myself on this board in the same way I present myself to those I am in regular personal contact.) But there’s another kind of multiple identity that concerns our lives as they unfold over time. I want to say that I am the same person I was yesterday, last year, in 1990, in 1970, and so on. But my access to myself in the past is a function of memory. The problem is that we forget far more than we remember.. But paradoxically, I also want to say that I am not who I once was. I can change. I have changed. And of course all these changes are positive. (Ha!) When my mother descended forever into the oblivion and fog of Alzheimer’s I inherited the diary she kept during the time she was trying to decide whether to marry my father or not. But I’ll save that one for later. Sadly, many men out there also are in such a desperate state of identity crisis, realizing that they are no longer young and attractive, that they don't see how silly they look when they buy their corvettes and Harleys, doing a ridiculous comb-over -- as if NO ONE will realize that the hair is just dragged across the bald spot and not actually springing up from the scalp. They are desperate, and what they project is not confidence, but obvious clinging to any vestiges of their lost youth.
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This applies to women, too. The other day I happened on television recent interviews with both Mary Tyler Moore and Maggie Smith. Moore had had so much plastic surgery that her navel had migrated to her upper lip. Smith looked her age, wore her wrinkles proudly. She was by far the more attractive human being.
And, my Arkansas friend, what you wrote about validationand the requirements for honesty in those long-term relationships that arise in exclusive commitments is downright profound.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
Basically they studied short lived mice. Given a normal diet with corn oil as the fat they lived to 242 days. Switching to fish oil extended life to 345 days. This is compared to a calorie-restricted (CR) diet that produced a life expectancy of 494 days. Combining CR and Fish oil produced a lifespan of 645 days. NIH gives a good summary here:
There are a lot of people worried about farmed fish, and mercury in all fish. Fish oil is refined and won't have any mercury in it. Canned tuna should not have a high risk of mercury. Albacore has twice the good oil as normal tuna. Netrition sells a concentrated fish oil that is more refined (900 mg Omega-3 per capsule) that has the fish flavor removed. If you are worried at all about purity then this would be more pure then most fish oil with less contamination due to it's increased refinement.
Basically they studied short lived mice. Given a normal diet with corn oil as the fat they lived to 242 days. Switching to fish oil extended life to 345 days. This is compared to a calorie-restricted (CR) diet that produced a life expectancy of 494 days. Combining CR and Fish oil produced a lifespan of 645 days. NIH gives a good summary here:
There are a lot of people worried about farmed fish, and mercury in all fish. Fish oil is refined and won't have any mercury in it. Canned tuna should not have a high risk of mercury. Albacore has twice the good oil as normal tuna. Netrition sells a concentrated fish oil that is more refined (900 mg Omega-3 per capsule) that has the fish flavor removed. If you are worried at all about purity then this would be more pure then most fish oil with less contamination due to it's increased refinement.
Do you have any idea how this (CR) equates in terms of humans? I plan on living to be a ripe old age but I'm going to enjoy my food along the way, too. I don't believe I overeat, normally, and I eat a pretty good diet.
As to the fish oil, I just this week received my first trade publication from the fish business people. I'd like to learn a little more about it before I react and give up my yummy, grilled salmon that I have for lunch everyday. Grilled pills just don't have the same... je ne sais qua.
CR has been studied for a long time. I believe the first finding was almost a hundred years ago. But little human research has been done. There is only anecdotal evidence, but very positive. Anyone who goes on a CR diet has had an improved blood lipid profile, an improved glucose tolerance, and other positive factors. Unfortunately only the most extreme of people actually go on one of these diets.
Research has found an increase in lifespan in every species studied with this diet. They have yet to finish a study with monkeys, but it is looking very positive. I am of the belief that if it has worked for every other species tested, I don't see why it would not work for humans.
They have found that as little as 10% reduction in food produces a 10% increase in lifespan. And the correlation seems to keep up. For example a 20% reduction in food results in a 20% increase in lifespan, and 30% reduction equated to 30% increase. I believe it maxes out at 40%, so there is no benefit to greater then a 40% reduction in food consumed.
I should mention that CR is often called "undernutrition without malnutrition". All these diets were designed so there were no lack in vitamins and minerals. Often they would choose nutrient dense foods.
I have a theory about CR that I am putting together that might make it workable for most people, based on fairly recent research. I am putting an article together and will see if Testosterone magazine will accept it for publication.
I am convinced that I will live to 120 – 140 once I fully adopt my plan, and without sacrificing the ability to still gain muscle. And this is assumes current medical technology.
Very interesting stuff! I plan on just living to be 100 and that's enough for me. I'll outlive my retirement anyway if I do that but I am serious about living to be 100. I have a lot of people in my mother's side of the family who live into thier 90's so the miracles of modern medicine alone should extend me to 100. Problem is, I don't know anything about my father's side.
Of course, that's all assuming I don't get hit by a McDonalds 18 wheeler in the process (how ironic that would be).
which is actually part of the problem in a bizarre way. I find myself extremely attracted to younger women and feel as though they respond to me. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to get the hell out quickly because I was afraid that I was on the verge of making a mistake that I would have deeply regretted.
). I believe that, through the lifestyle I live now, I can postpone it for a lot longer and I actually feel as young as I've felt the past 20 years... I'm not but this is messin' with my mind. 
I do find that I have to struggle with the psychological aspects to some degree and I haven't quite sorted that out yet.
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