How I Stumbled Upon Abs at Age 43
By Greg Evans
As a journalist and professional writer, I was essentially guaranteed, by God, a lifetime of zero muscle tone. I spend countless hours sedentary, grinding out articles that themselves have more muscle tone than I do.
Like most other people in the Western world, I never cared about what I shoveled into my fat hole. My diet consisted of beef, pork, chicken, fried fish, mounds of eggs and heavily buttered and salted potatoes and corn, or maybe a 1/4 teaspoon of some other processed vegetable, enriched breads, butter, sugar, heavily processed foods, lots of beer. Lots and lots of beer, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco in general, wonderfully unhealthy vices that release dopamine in the brain make life perceivably blissful. I lived like this for much of my life, at least from my late teens until only a few years ago.
In the process of “enjoying” myself, for years, I would be sick at least three weeks out of every month. I had aches and pains, fevers, digestion issues, insomnia, depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, typical ailments I associated with being human and growing older. It really wasn’t until my mid to late 30s, like 39 3/4, that I began making a conscientious effort to eat well, and avoid posh diet plans and the epic crashes that followed.
I also made it a point to exercise. I have never particularly liked exercising. In time, I learned the value of a string bean and the benefits of a bowl of kale. I started to cancel out the mountains of different animal meat, blood, and organs I consumed, substituting them with lettuce, cabbage, beans, herbs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and legumes, and was called every foul name you could imagine by the anti-vegetable eaters, who are, more or less, everyone that I know.
People, for whatever reason, get very uncomfortable if you cease to gorge on the standard Western cuisine and opt for, instead, a more Greek island, rural Indian, and forgotten jungles of Aztec Mexican spread.
One afternoon, I was reading an article written by National Geographic Correspondent, Dan Buettner, about a place called Ikaria, Greece. Ikaria is considered one of the 5 Blue Zones, locations around the world where people live an abnormally long life, and they live it well, not suffering from common debilitating diseases that affect seemingly 1-2 Westerners. I was immediately captivated.
So, despite suffering greatly, the skewers and arrows from my fat, sickly, medication-doused peers, I abandoned the western dietary ways and lifestyle (minimal to zero exercise). Gone were the aches and pains. Gone was the heartburn. Gone was the systematic disease that regularly ravaged my atrophied corpse. I was able to get 5 hours of sleep instead of 4. The fog of the world being a dystopian horror lifted, and I once again found myself motivated to look at the warm yellow sun and find the will to be productive and healthy. I learned to understand the importance of being disciplined and consistent as my cravings for most food that I was used to, food that leads the league in heart disease, mental deterioration, obesity, and other malodorous disorders, began to wane and seemingly disappeared. I learned to ignore snide remarks from my porky, baggy-eyed critics, as they’d limp away from the table to satisfy their irritable bowel syndrome.
Healthy, but not yet where I wanted to be, I continued to read up on nutrition and exercise, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries, and talking to people (many who (meaning everybody) scandalized me as a filthy, closeted hippy), always searching for something that I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for.
For a while, I started regularly going to the gym to lift heavy. I saw myself getting big muscles like Arnold, because I assumed that was healthy. It was a fool’s errand. I injured myself multiple times, forcing me to find an alternative exercise regimen, such as lying on the couch and lifting the remote.
However, it was learning about the casual exercise of the Ikarians and Sardinians that stuck with me, and I decided to alter my exercise habits. It’s around this time I discovered core exercises and other less aggressive workouts.
I started to focus more on aerobics, core training and calisthenics, and conditioning as opposed to brute strength building. What I found was a transformation of my body.
It was quite remarkable, actually. I was no longer achy and sore, injured and frustrated. I started off, carefully, participating in light workouts by people like Lucy Wyndham and short core workouts with Chris Heria. In time (over a few months), I built my strength and conditioning. My body began to trim down and sculpt, and my mind became strong and focused. These workouts were beneficial for both physical and mental conditioning. I found it easier to stretch, fall asleep at night, and wake up fresh. Eventually, I could do the full 20-30 minute grueling, yet non-whaling, workouts of Chris Heria.
At the age of 43, I was able to develop Abs and a tiny bit of chest definition only using light weights and regular workout techniques requiring no weight but gravity. I wasn’t chiseled or anything like that, but there were inklings of definition.
I have never had any noticeable brawn or muscle tone. Despite becoming fairly skinny once again, as I was in high school, at least I had the glimmer of blocks of stomach muscles, proving that even for a shirt while, a journalist can be in shape.
I am no longer in such shape, per se, with rippling abs. It took months and months to chisel out of the slop that is the western lifestyle, anything that could resemble thew, or a defined shape in various body parts, and 12 minutes to wholly destroy my progress with a few extra heaping helpings of tasty, greasy, horrible food. What can I say, I briefly fell off the wagon.
I am back to eating healthy enough, again, and I walk once or twice a day. I walk a lot of hills, like they do in Sardinia. Drink a lot of tea like they do in Ikaria and slurp vegetable curry like I’m Gandhi’s assistant. Through it all, I was never fully able to get rid of the lower belly; that greasy visceral man-made fat that sticks to the human body like modern unhappiness. Despite the semi-solid blocks of abs, there was always a bit of a flat tire.
My girlfriend at the time, also over 40, thought I was nuts working out as I was. Maybe I was nuts. Back then, I was writing a lot of great articles. It was a time of intense concentration, motivation, and I had energy and ideas, and writing and building abs at 43 was just part of the frenetic pace of the moment. Maybe all of that working out helped my writing like it did for Haruki Murakami. In retrospect, no 43-year-old really needs abs. You only need them when you are young in your 20s to get the cheerleaders, unless, of course, you are a software billionaire, which I wasn’t and will never be. At 43, abs become irrelevant.
But my goal, during those gritty months of absolute suffering, was just to see if I could do it. And honestly, I think the struggle benefited me in so many ways. Maybe I will do it again at 50, just a regular guy, fed up with being fat and lazy and giving it a shot, once again.
