Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    In his Washington Post essay “I’m on Ozempic. The Shaming Is Real,” Rick Reilly commits what remains, strangely enough, a minor social transgression: he admits that he loves GLP-1 drugs.

    Why wouldn’t he?

    They work.

    In three months, Reilly has lost twenty-two pounds. More importantly, he has escaped some of the relentless mental negotiations surrounding food—the calculations, cravings, promises, rationalizations, and internal committee meetings that can turn eating into a second occupation.

    You might expect people to congratulate him.

    Instead, they accuse him of cheating.

    Just exercise more, they tell him.

    Stop eating sugar.

    Use some willpower.

    In other words, please return to the traditional weight-loss program in which you spend every waking hour negotiating with a muffin.

    Reilly’s response is straightforward: Why is using effective technology considered cheating?

    Modern life is essentially one long conspiracy against doing things the hard way. We take statins to lower cholesterol. We use GPS rather than unfolding a map across the steering wheel while hurtling down the freeway. We undergo cataract surgery rather than accepting that God apparently wants the menu blurry. We use calculators, dishwashers, hearing aids, blood-pressure medication, cruise control, anesthesia, and increasingly cars capable of performing some of the driving themselves.

    Nobody emerges from surgery and announces, “Frankly, I think anesthesia was cheating.”

    Yet GLP-1 drugs somehow violate an ancient moral code.

    Even people taking them often behave like members of a secret society. At parties, Reilly says, people approach him and whisper that they’re on them too. Apparently admitting that you take a medication that helps control appetite now requires the discretion formerly reserved for revealing an affair with the tennis instructor.

    Why the embarrassment?

    Because body weight occupies a peculiar territory between medicine and morality. We don’t merely want people to lose weight. We want them to have earned the weight loss through visible suffering.

    Sweat.

    Hunger.

    Broccoli.

    Repentance.

    The acceptable thinner person must emerge from the wilderness carrying a food scale and a battered pair of running shoes.

    Tell people you lost thirty pounds by waking at five every morning, eating boiled chicken breasts, rejecting birthday cake, and performing burpees until your vision blurred, and they admire your discipline.

    Tell them a weekly injection quieted your appetite and suddenly an ethics committee needs to be convened.

    Reilly rejects the accusation that he lacks willpower. His problem, he argues, isn’t simply willpower. It’s time. Managing food can consume enormous amounts of mental bandwidth: thinking about what to eat, resisting what not to eat, calculating portions, experiencing cravings, compensating with exercise, and then beginning the entire negotiation again several hours later.

    There are only so many hours in a life.

    Why spend them arguing with a cheeseburger?

    Then comes the warning about “Ozempic Face”—the gaunt appearance associated with substantial or rapid weight loss. Reilly’s answer is that he is microdosing, trying to obtain the benefits without racing toward physical extremes. He isn’t attempting to disappear. He wants appetite control without looking as though someone left him overnight in a food dehydrator.

    So what explains the hostility?

    Some of it may indeed be envy. Watching someone obtain with medication what you obtained through years of dietary trench warfare can provoke resentment.

    But envy isn’t enough to explain it.

    Something deeper is operating: the lingering belief that appetite must be conquered through character. Discipline is virtuous precisely because discipline hurts. If technology reduces the struggle, people suspect that the resulting success is somehow counterfeit.

    This is the Moral Suspicion of Easy Weight Loss: when a difficult problem becomes easier to solve, we sometimes distrust the solution precisely because it eliminates the suffering we once considered evidence of virtue.

    There are legitimate questions about GLP-1 drugs—side effects, cost, access, long-term use, appropriate prescribing, and what happens after treatment stops. Those questions deserve serious attention.

    But “You cheated” isn’t a medical argument.

    It’s a moral complaint wearing gym clothes.

    Meanwhile, Reilly has lost the weight. The Food Noise has diminished. He has recovered mental territory previously occupied by appetite and negotiation.

    And he has no intention of surrendering it merely because someone else believes virtue should burn more calories.

  • Your Life Depends on Widening the Rest Stop Gap 

    Your Life Depends on Widening the Rest Stop Gap 

    I need to revisit the Bathroom-Proximity Principle of Retirement.

    The principle proposes that employment functions like a distant rest stop, maintaining a psychologically useful distance between you and your mortality. As long as work remains ahead of you—classes to teach, papers to grade, meetings to endure, students to advise—your body receives a reassuring message: the trip is still underway. We have miles to go. Maintain operations.

    Then you retire.

    The rest stop appears.

    Anyone who has driven the I-5 with a full bladder understands the phenomenon. For forty miles you are fine. There is pressure, certainly, but nothing a mature adult cannot handle. Then you see the sign:

    REST AREA — 2 MILES.

    Instantly, your bladder declares DEFCON 1.

    Nothing physiological has changed in the previous four seconds. What has changed is proximity. The body has received permission to stop holding itself together.

    The Bathroom-Proximity Principle proposes—without the slightest concern for medical peer review—that retirement can produce a similar effect. For decades, employment kept the metaphysical rest stop somewhere beyond the horizon. Then you announce your retirement, clear out your office, receive several congratulatory emails, and suddenly the sign appears beside the highway.

    REST AREA — NEXT EXIT.

    Your body looks at the sign and begins shutting down departments.

    The knees reduce operating hours. The lower back announces a staffing shortage. The prostate initiates a major infrastructure project. The brain begins moving nouns into off-site storage.

    But I now realize that the Bathroom-Proximity Principle contains a serious flaw.

    It assumes helplessness.

    Knowing that retirement can trigger an acute awareness of mortality does not mean you must surrender to it. You can create distance between yourself and the rest stop again.

    You can create The Rest Stop Gap.

    The Rest Stop Gap is the deliberate distance you maintain between retirement and physical, intellectual, and social decline. Employment once created much of this distance automatically. Retirement does not. Therefore, you must manufacture the gap yourself.

    You must keep telling your body and brain:

    We are not there yet.

    There is work to do.

    I contemplated this recently while suffering on my Schwinn Airdyne.

    The Airdyne is technically classified as an exercise bicycle, although this description seems unnecessarily charitable. It is better understood as a medieval torture apparatus that happens to contain a seat. You pedal furiously while simultaneously pushing and pulling two large handles, thereby ensuring that no major muscle group feels excluded from the proceedings. Your quadriceps burn. Your shoulders complain. Your lungs begin drafting a formal letter to management.

    After forty-five minutes, the machine no longer feels like exercise equipment. It feels personal.

    Yet this suffering has a purpose.

    The objective is not to destroy yourself. At my age, crawling away from an exercise bicycle and spending the remainder of the afternoon convalescing beneath a blanket is not evidence of fitness. It is evidence of poor judgment.

    Nor is the objective to become lax.

    The goal is to find the edge.

    You work hard enough that the body must respond, adapt, strengthen, and remain useful. But you stop before productive stress becomes demolition. Don’t retreat ten feet behind the line. Don’t charge heroically across it and collapse on the other side.

    Walk to the edge.

    Learn where it is.

    Make friends with it.

    This physical challenge creates part of the Rest Stop Gap because it sends an unmistakable message to the organism: nobody is closing this facility. Tomorrow these muscles may be needed again.

    But exercise alone isn’t enough.

    This leads to The Three-Pillar Vitality Principle: maintaining the Rest Stop Gap requires continuing demands upon three parts of yourself—the physical, intellectual, and social.

    The first pillar is physical challenge.

    Move. Walk. Lift. Pedal. Stretch. Give your body difficult but reasonable work. Remind your muscles, bones, heart, and lungs that retirement is a change in employment status, not a liquidation sale.

    The second pillar is intellectual challenge.

    Read difficult books. Write. Study. Learn something unfamiliar. Develop projects that refuse to resolve themselves without sustained attention. Give your brain problems sufficiently demanding that it cannot reasonably conclude its services are no longer required.

    The third pillar is social engagement.

    This may be the easiest pillar to underestimate. Employment supplied human contact whether you wanted it or not. Students appeared. Colleagues knocked on the door. Meetings materialized with malignant regularity. Retirement removes much of this involuntary social infrastructure. If you do nothing to replace it, days can become strangely frictionless.

    You need people.

    Not merely text messages. Not merely podcasts. Not merely the reassuring illusion of companionship provided by listening to two strangers discuss politics through earbuds.

    Actual people.

    This is why the Walking Companion Principle matters. Find someone. Put on shoes. Walk. Talk. Show up again. A regular walking companion performs the remarkable trick of strengthening two pillars simultaneously: physical and social.

    Maintain all three pillars and you widen the Rest Stop Gap.

    Neglect them and you risk entering what might be called the Retirement Larval State.

    The Retirement Larval State does not initially feel terrible. That’s precisely the problem.

    You wake without an alarm. Excellent.

    You remain in your pajamas until eleven. Why not?

    Lunch becomes a Hot Pocket because technically it contains several food groups.

    You wander into the living room holding the remote control with the practiced grip of an orthopedic surgeon holding a scalpel. Netflix asks whether you’re still watching.

    Of course you’re still watching.

    What else would you be doing?

    Gradually, the boundaries of life contract. The workout disappears. Difficult books become strangely exhausting. Invitations seem inconvenient. The house becomes the habitat. The recliner develops gravitational properties.

    And the frightening part is that none of this feels quite as bad as you were warned.

    Decay can be comfortable.

    That’s why it is dangerous.

    The larval retiree does not wake one morning and announce, “Today I shall begin my physical, intellectual, and social deterioration.” He simply removes one demand after another until nothing remains that requires very much of him.

    The rest stop gets closer.

    The Three-Pillar Vitality Principle offers a different model of retirement. You no longer have to work for an employer, but you must continue placing intelligent demands upon yourself. Your body needs something difficult to do. Your mind needs something difficult to solve. Your social self needs people who expect you to appear.

    The point is not to manufacture another job and call it retirement. Nor is it to fill every hour with frantic activity because silence reminds you that you are mortal.

    The objective is simpler.

    Keep enough road between yourself and the rest stop.

    Exercise.

    Think.

    Connect.

    Then get up tomorrow and do it again.

    The sign will eventually appear. It appears for everyone.

    There is no reason to take the next exit.

  • The Cruelty of Retirement No One Warned You About

    The Cruelty of Retirement No One Warned You About

    Growing old and planning your retirement provide a cruel education in the merciless nature of bureaucracy. You spend forty years imagining retirement as an escape from work, only to discover that before you’re permitted to stop working, you must complete an enormous amount of additional work.

    Most of it involves paperwork.

    Except we don’t call it paperwork anymore because there is no paper. Paper would be too easy. Paper sits obediently on a table. You can hold it in your hands, read it, scribble notes in the margins, and return to page one whenever you get confused. Modern bureaucracy has improved upon this primitive system by replacing paper with websites, portals, passwords, security questions, verification codes, drop-down menus, disappearing screens, and online forms that occasionally erase everything you’ve entered because you spent too long looking for your Social Security number.

    This technological revolution arrives at precisely the right moment in your life: when your eyes are tired, your patience is gone, and your facility with navigating government websites is approaching that of a manatee attempting to operate an ATM.

    No matter. The gauntlet begins.

    First, Medicare.

    You arrive at the Medicare website expecting to encounter something resembling a large button that says START HERE.

    Instead, you are greeted by photographs of radiant senior citizens experiencing levels of happiness rarely observed outside pharmaceutical advertisements. Silver-haired couples stroll along beaches. Healthy retirees embrace grandchildren. Everyone appears recently moisturized. Nobody is squinting at a computer monitor wondering whether he needs to fill out Form B.

    Meanwhile, the website offers you an enormous quantity of information. There are links explaining insurance packages. Links answering frequently asked questions. Links explaining other links. You can learn almost anything you want about Medicare except the answer to the one primitive question pounding inside your skull:

    Where the hell do I start?

    You become a rat in a digital maze.

    Perhaps you need Form B. Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you need it eventually but not now. Perhaps filling it out now will create a problem later. Make sure you have all your information handy, although you’re not entirely sure what “all your information” means until the website requests a number you’ve never heard of that apparently governs your destiny.

    There is no benevolent angel sitting beside you saying, “You’re doing fine. Click that button.”

    There is just you, growing visibly older in the blue light of your monitor while a seventy-two-year-old stock-photo model smiles at you from a sailboat.

    I call this Portal Despair: the distinctive psychological state produced by staring at a beautifully designed institutional website containing enormous quantities of information but no obvious answer to the question, Where do I start?

    The happier the people on the website appear, the worse Portal Despair becomes.

    Once Medicare has softened you up, you move on to CalPERS and CalSTRS.

    Years ago, before our Human Resources coordinator retired during COVID, she warned me that there was some peculiar rule governing the timing of retirement when CalPERS and CalSTRS are involved. The dates have to align correctly. There is a sequence. Something has to happen before something else happens.

    I don’t remember the details.

    I only remember receiving the distinct impression that if I retire on the wrong Tuesday, my pension will turn into a pumpkin.

    So now I must contact the new HR person and ask her to reconstruct this ancient knowledge. My goal is to get CalPERS and CalSTRS working together in perfect harmony so that my retirement proceeds like a smooth stone skipping across a still lake.

    I fully expect instead to discover that one agency requires a document from the other agency, which cannot produce that document until the first agency verifies that I have requested it.

    Then comes health insurance.

    Because I’m leaving my employer’s health plan and moving onto my wife’s, her employer requires official documentation showing that she has “lost coverage.”

    Lost coverage.

    The phrase sounds apocalyptic. It suggests that our family has been cast onto the American healthcare tundra wearing burlap sacks and searching the horizon for a free clinic.

    We haven’t lost anything. We’re changing insurance.

    But the bureaucracy has declared this a loss, and therefore someone must produce an official document certifying the loss. My wife will then present this sacred parchment to her employer, which will presumably inspect the seal, consult the oracle, and permit us to purchase health insurance through her job.

    Then we have to investigate dental and vision coverage. My wife reports that the dental insurance offered through her employer sucks, a technical assessment I trust completely. Perhaps we should continue purchasing dental and vision coverage through my former employer. Perhaps not.

    And although her job will keep us with Kaiser, we don’t yet know exactly what version of Kaiser we’re getting. Perhaps it will be essentially the same. Perhaps it will be Kaiser Lite, with higher copays and subtle degradations that reveal themselves only after you’re sitting in an examination room wearing a paper gown.

    You won’t know until you’re inside the belly of the beast.

    Good luck.

    Then there’s the pension.

    A CalSTRS representative tells you the amount you’ll receive every month, and for approximately eleven seconds you feel rich.

    Do not enjoy those eleven seconds.

    That number is gross income.

    Taxes still exist.

    The government, having spent decades taxing your salary, does not shake your hand at retirement and say, “You’ve done enough. Keep the rest.”

    So when the pension representative gives you that beautiful monthly number, mentally shrink it immediately. Do not start pricing Viking cruises. Do not buy a Porsche. Do not inform your children that Daddy has entered the leisure class.

    You’re not rich.

    You’re simply receiving taxable income while wearing sweatpants.

    By this point you begin to believe you’re making progress. You’ve completed several forms. You’ve spoken to HR. You’ve created accounts. You’ve written down passwords. Somewhere in the distance, you think you can see light.

    You are delusional.

    There are more forms.

    Forms beget forms.

    One form requires an attachment. The attachment requires certification. The certification requires proof. The proof must come from another institution, which requires you to complete another form before it will provide the proof required by the first form.

    Eventually there are subforms attached to larger forms and subforms attached to the subforms. You begin with the innocent objective of changing your health insurance and find yourself three weeks later downloading a PDF called “Verification of Qualifying Event Supporting Documentation Supplemental Certification.”

    Chefs have an expression for reaching this condition:

    You’re in the weeds.

    I prefer Form Metastasis: the tendency of one bureaucratic form to generate additional forms, certifications, attachments, proofs, and follow-up requests. Form A requires Form B. Form B requires verification from Institution C. Institution C cannot provide verification until Institution D processes Form E.

    Nobody designed the entire system.

    That’s what makes it terrifying.

    I could have retired three years ago.

    I didn’t.

    You want to know one reason?

    I hate paperwork.

    I hate paperwork with such intensity that I would rather get dressed in the morning, drive to work, attend tedious meetings, answer emails, listen to administrators explain exciting new initiatives, and grade thousands of student assignments every year than confront the administrative machinery required to stop doing those things.

    Work, at least, I understand.

    Retirement requires training.

    But I’ve finally made the decision. I’ll be sixty-five in a couple of months. I’m retiring.

    Except “retiring” now strikes me as a fraudulent description of what is happening.

    I’m not retiring.

    I’ve changed jobs.

    I used to be a college instructor. Now I am an unpaid administrative assistant assigned exclusively to the Jeffrey McMahon account.

    My responsibilities include Medicare enrollment, pension coordination, health-insurance transitions, dental and vision decisions, tax withholding, beneficiary elections, document retrieval, password management, deadline compliance, and maintaining good standing with an assortment of institutions that possess the power to interfere with my money or healthcare.

    There will be no salary.

    There will be no vacation.

    There will be no administrative assistant because I am the administrative assistant.

    This is Bureaucratic Retirement Capture: the process by which institutions ostensibly designed to facilitate your retirement instead colonize your time and attention. You leave your employer expecting liberation from schedules and administrative obligations, only to discover that Medicare, pension systems, insurance companies, tax agencies, and benefits departments have inherited you.

    Which brings me to the cruelest discovery of all.

    The Retirement Paradox.

    Leaving the workforce requires taking on another job: the administration of leaving the workforce.

    Instead of meetings and grading, you get Medicare enrollment, CalSTRS, CalPERS, HR documentation, health-insurance transitions, dental and vision decisions, tax withholding, beneficiary elections, deadlines, passwords, portals, forms, subforms, supplemental forms, and forms verifying that you have completed other forms.

    For decades, I imagined retirement as a great exhalation. I would finish my final semester, turn in my grades, clean out my office, drive home, and feel the enormous machinery of employment finally release me.

    Instead, the machinery has merely transferred me to another department.

    How stupid am I?

    Why didn’t I just keep working?

    It would have been so much easier.

  • The Discipline Ceiling

    The Discipline Ceiling

    When I followed baseball in the 1970s, certain teams seemed to have permanent reservations in the cellar. The Milwaukee Brewers. The San Diego Padres. The Washington Senators. I didn’t need to study the standings. I knew where to find them.

    At the bottom.

    Eventually, losing ceased to seem like a temporary condition and became a form of civic identity. Other teams competed for pennants. These teams competed for mathematical elimination sometime around Memorial Day. Their fans could open the sports page in August without anxiety. There would be Milwaukee, comfortably settled into the basement, unpacking boxes and hanging pictures on the walls.

    This is roughly my relationship with 230 pounds.

    For seven years, I have tried to break through that number and descend toward my promised land of 210. Occasionally I approach the border. I eat well. I exercise. I begin imagining myself entering the exotic kingdom of the 220s.

    Then 230 appears at the checkpoint.

    Not so fast.

    At this point, 230 doesn’t merely exist. It has developed a personality. It flexes its biceps. It smokes a cigar. It leans against the clubhouse wall with the serene confidence of a last-place team holding a twenty-game lead over its nearest competitor.

    Go ahead.

    Try something.

    I’ll be here.

    And it is.

    I eat mostly whole foods. In the morning, steel-cut oats. Later, a protein-heavy salad. After my nap, Greek yogurt. Dinner is protein and vegetables. I monitor portions. I exercise. I generally keep my calories below 2,500.

    Then I step on the scale.

    230.

    It’s like opening the sports page in 1974.

    Milwaukee: last place.

    Of course.

    At this point, the fitness tribunals will convene.

    “You’re eating too much.”

    Fine.

    “Reduce your calories.”

    I have.

    “Reduce them more.”

    And here we arrive at The Discipline Ceiling: the point at which a person is technically capable of imposing additional restrictions upon himself but decides that the marginal improvement isn’t worth making everyday life more miserable.

    This distinction matters because whenever weight loss stalls, the discussion inevitably becomes moral.

    You lack discipline.

    You don’t want it badly enough.

    You’re making excuses.

    Really?

    Come spend a week with me.

    Enjoy the steel-cut oats.

    Have another salad.

    Marvel as I spoon Greek yogurt into my mouth for approximately the ten-thousandth time.

    Then join me for dinner, where once again protein and vegetables await like two elderly relatives who have been sitting in the same chairs since the Eisenhower administration.

    I have discipline.

    What I don’t have is any interest in escalating it indefinitely.

    Could I eat 1,900 calories a day?

    Probably.

    Could I start intermittent fasting?

    Certainly.

    Could I go to bed hungry, wake up hungry, drink black coffee while contemplating mortality, and spend the afternoon fantasizing about a baked potato?

    Absolutely.

    I could probably reach 210 if I were willing to make weight loss the organizing principle of my existence.

    But I’m not.

    That’s my Discipline Ceiling.

    The modern optimization culture has difficulty accepting such a ceiling because its governing philosophy is that every measurable human characteristic should be improved until either perfection or death intervenes.

    Weight too high?

    Eat less.

    Still too high?

    Eat less than that.

    Hungry?

    Excellent. The program is working.

    Miserable?

    Even better. Misery demonstrates commitment.

    Soon enough you’re weighing blueberries on a digital scale and wondering whether licking the spoon requires an entry in MyFitnessPal.

    At some point, I decline.

    This doesn’t mean I’ve discovered that calories don’t matter or that my body has repealed the laws of thermodynamics. If I consistently ate substantially less, I would almost certainly lose additional weight.

    The question isn’t whether I can impose more discipline.

    The question is how much of my remaining life I’m willing to surrender to it.

    There is always another restriction available.

    Skip breakfast.

    Eliminate starch.

    Reduce dinner.

    No food after six.

    Fast sixteen hours.

    Fast eighteen.

    Count almonds.

    Fear bananas.

    Treat a tablespoon of peanut butter like an uncontrolled substance.

    Eventually you can become so disciplined that you spend your entire day thinking about the food you’re heroically not eating.

    No thanks.

    I would still like to weigh 210. I would enjoy seeing 225, then 220, then perhaps one glorious morning stepping onto the scale and seeing a number beginning with 21.

    But there are terms.

    I’ll eat nutritious food. I’ll control my portions. I’ll exercise. I’ll tolerate some hunger. I’ll maintain a degree of dietary monotony that would make a monastery cafeteria look like the Bellagio buffet.

    But I will not turn eating into punishment.

    That is the ceiling.

    Perhaps this means I’ll remain at 230.

    Perhaps 230 is my Milwaukee Brewers.

    If so, I’ll continue trying to climb out of the cellar—but I’m not going to set fire to the clubhouse to prove how badly I want the pennant.

    There is discipline.

    And then there is making your entire life kneel before a number on a bathroom scale.

    I’ve reached the ceiling.

    I’m not climbing through it.

  • The Volume Knob Principle

    The Volume Knob Principle

    When I returned from my family vacation on July 30, 2026, I stepped on the scale and saw 236 pounds.

    At sixty-four, that put me twenty-six pounds above my goal of 210 and six pounds above a barrier I hadn’t managed to penetrate since 2019.

    This called for action.

    Unfortunately, my preferred response to a problem is sometimes to attack it with a flamethrower.

    Within four days, I dropped to 230. Much of that was undoubtedly vacation water weight, but I was encouraged. The campaign had begun. I would eat properly, train hard, and finally break through the 230 barrier.

    Then I made the mistake of confusing enthusiasm with wisdom.

    I exercised every day for eleven consecutive days. Some days I did sixty-eight minutes of kettlebell circuit training followed by an hour on my Schwinn Airdyne. The kettlebells weren’t particularly heavy, but I kept moving. Then came the bike, where exercise ceased to be exercise and became a hostage negotiation with the calorie counter.

    My target was 700 calories.

    Not 620.

    Not 650.

    Seven hundred.

    I would climb onto the Airdyne and begin pedaling like a man attempting to power Southern California during a blackout. The fan roared. Sweat poured off me. My legs churned. I stared at the monitor as though the glowing digits were reporting my moral worth.

    All this punishment produced a fascinating result.

    I didn’t lose another pound.

    After eleven days of dietary virtue and exercise fanaticism, I still weighed 230.

    Then something worse happened.

    On the eleventh day, I got on the Airdyne and my body resigned.

    Normally I could grind my way toward 700 calories. This time I barely reached 300. My legs were empty. My energy vanished. It felt as though someone had opened a panel in my back and removed the battery.

    Fine, I thought. I’m exhausted. I’ll rest.

    I couldn’t.

    I crawled into bed physically demolished yet strangely agitated. Instead of relaxation came anxiety. I tossed and turned, frightened by the depth of my exhaustion. For most of my life, exercise had been one of my great sources of bliss. Now it had entered the Fear Dungeon. I had pushed myself hard enough that the thing I associated with vitality suddenly seemed capable of hurting me.

    I began wondering whether I had crossed some invisible line.

    Then I thought of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Arnold has inspired me since I was thirteen. Now in his late seventies, he reportedly still trains seven days a week for about ninety minutes: forty-five to sixty minutes of cycling followed by roughly thirty minutes of weights.

    Seven days a week.

    At nearly eighty.

    I couldn’t survive eleven.

    Was something wrong with me?

    Then, during my next kettlebell workout in the garage, I had a revelation that should have occurred to me considerably earlier.

    Arnold isn’t trying to kill Arnold.

    The older Arnold isn’t reenacting Pumping Iron every morning. He’s not storming into the gym with Wagner blasting while attempting to punish every muscle fiber for the crime of aging. His workouts appear considerably more civilized. He rides his bike. He lifts. He talks to people. He jokes. A man of immense charisma, he holds court. For Arnold, the gym is partly exercise and partly social club.

    Meanwhile, I’m alone in my garage behaving as though the Schwinn Airdyne knows where the bodies are buried.

    The difference isn’t necessarily discipline.

    It’s volume.

    I began imagining my exercise program controlled by a giant amplifier knob.

    Mine was turned to Eleven.

    Nigel Tufnel would have approved.

    Every workout had to be harder. Every bike session had to produce the magic number. Every day off looked suspiciously like weakness. If 600 calories was good, 700 was better. If four workouts were productive, eleven consecutive workouts must transform me into a Greek god sometime before Labor Day.

    Except my body wasn’t becoming a Greek god.

    It was filing a grievance.

    That’s when I arrived at The Volume Knob Principle: sustainable fitness isn’t about turning effort as high as it will go. It’s about finding the highest setting from which your body can reliably recover.

    For me, Eleven was not heroic.

    Eleven was stupid.

    So I’m turning the knob down to Seven.

    I’ll continue my kettlebell circuits because I enjoy them. But I’ll allow myself a minute of rest when I need it. I’ll trim the workouts from sixty-eight minutes to about sixty-three and limit them to three days a week.

    The Airdyne requires a more dramatic intervention.

    Getting 700 calories in under an hour was beating me up. Doing it three or four times a week was beating me up with a folding chair after I was already on the ground.

    So the bike goes down to twice a week.

    And 700 loses its throne.

    The new target is 600.

    This sounds easy until you understand the psychology of the calorie counter. Once you’ve repeatedly produced 700, anything less starts feeling like moral decline. The machine reports 600 and some primitive voice says, Pathetic. You used to be somebody.

    That voice needs to shut up.

    Six hundred isn’t a failed 700.

    Seven isn’t a failed Eleven.

    A rest day isn’t evidence of decadence.

    At sixty-four, perhaps the great fitness challenge isn’t learning how hard you can push yourself. I mastered that trick decades ago. The harder lesson is learning when pushing harder becomes indistinguishable from stupidity.

    I can’t train exactly like Arnold.

    I don’t need to.

    I can steal the more useful lesson from the older Arnold: keep moving, keep lifting, keep showing up—but stop treating every workout like the beaches of Normandy.

    Turn down the Volume Knob.

    Eleven makes more noise.

    Seven lets you keep playing.

  • The Exhaustion Paradox

    The Exhaustion Paradox

    In 1974, when I was in junior high, a friend came to school looking wrecked. He had spent the weekend at his family’s cabin skiing at Bear Valley Mountain Resort, and when he returned home Sunday night, exhausted from two days on the slopes, he couldn’t sleep.

    This made no sense to me.

    Wasn’t exhaustion supposed to produce sleep? You depleted the body, crawled into bed, and disappeared for ten hours. That was the arrangement.

    His mother, a nurse, offered a different explanation. Her son had gone beyond ordinary fatigue. He was so exhausted that his body could no longer relax enough to sleep.

    I found the idea fascinating and horrible.

    Call it The Exhaustion Paradox: the state in which fatigue becomes so acute that instead of producing relaxation and sleep, it produces agitation, anxiety, and an inability to rest. The body desperately needs the very thing its exhausted condition prevents it from obtaining.

    I filed this strange idea somewhere in my adolescent brain and didn’t think about it again for more than fifty years.

    Then I decided to recreate the experiment.

    My current weight-loss campaign has made me eager to exercise. Usually, this is a good thing. I know my body well enough to understand that I need one or two days off every week. Recovery allows my muscles to heal and lets me return to my workouts with enough energy to attack them rather than merely survive them.

    But weight-loss impatience has a way of making perfectly sensible principles seem negotiable.

    If exercise burns calories, more exercise must burn more calories. And if more is good, ten consecutive days must be magnificent.

    So I trained for ten days without a break.

    On the tenth day, I climbed onto my exercise bike and discovered that my body had apparently resigned without giving notice.

    My usual power was gone. My legs felt hollow. I produced less than half my normal output. Every pedal stroke seemed to require a committee meeting. This wasn’t the satisfying fatigue of a hard workout. I felt depleted at the cellular level, as if someone had reached inside me and removed the batteries.

    Fine, I thought. Obviously I need sleep.

    I dragged myself to bed.

    And couldn’t rest.

    Instead of sinking gratefully into the mattress, I became anxious. The exhaustion itself was unnerving. I could feel how badly my body needed recovery, yet I couldn’t cross the threshold into it. I tossed and turned for ninety minutes, simultaneously desperate for sleep and incapable of surrendering to it.

    Then a memory surfaced from 1974.

    Bear Valley.

    My junior-high friend.

    His nurse mother.

    He was too exhausted to sleep.

    Fifty-two years later, I finally understood what she meant.

    I got out of bed and told my wife what was happening. She suggested I drink some water mixed with electrolyte powder.

    I did.

    Soon I felt considerably better. Whether the electrolytes were responsible, the water helped, or simply getting out of bed broke the cycle of anxious exhaustion, I don’t know. But the feeling of physical crisis subsided. I did a few chores and eventually sat down to write.

    The episode reminded me of something I already knew but had temporarily decided didn’t apply to me: recovery is not the enemy of training.

    It is part of training.

    You cannot bully the body indefinitely and call it discipline. Eventually the distinction between training and punishment disappears. The workout deteriorates, the body rebels, and even rest becomes difficult.

    At thirteen, I thought The Exhaustion Paradox was fascinating and awful.

    At sixty-four, I can confirm the awful part.

  • Waiting for the Norwegian Sweat Lodge

    Waiting for the Norwegian Sweat Lodge

    I often think about something Samuel Wilson Fussell wrote in his memoir Muscle. At the height of his bodybuilding obsession, he resented the hours between one workout and the next. Training made life bearable. Everything else was simply waiting.

    I understand that feeling better than I wish I did.

    Every workout is Christmas morning.

    The days between workouts are spent writing exercise programs the way children write Christmas lists. Should I begin with kettlebell swings? Goblet squats? Romanian deadlifts? Reverse lunges? The anticipation becomes its own form of pleasure. I don’t merely look forward to training. I ache for it.

    I’m almost sixty-five, and my one-hour kettlebell sessions in the garage have become my transcendental escape. They feel less like exercise than boarding a flight to a Norwegian sweat lodge hidden deep within a pine forest. There, steam rises through the trees like incense. The air is clean. My mind finally grows quiet. For an hour, I take a vacation from my own neuroses.

    Age, however, imposes its own theology.

    Injury is now the unforgivable sin.

    At twenty-five, I could bully my body into submission. At sixty-five, my body is the senior partner in the relationship. It insists on negotiation. I have to lift lighter, move smarter, recover longer, yet still wander close enough to my physical limits that my muscles receive the message without my tendons filing a formal complaint. Fifty years under the barbell have taught me where that narrow path lies. The art is approaching the cliff without tumbling over it.

    I cannot exaggerate how much I treasure those three weekly workouts.

    Three.

    No more.

    My body has cast its vote.

    The remaining days belong to the Schwinn Airdyne.

    Calling it “cardio” feels charitable. The Airdyne is less Norwegian sweat lodge than medieval torture device, a machine apparently designed by monks who believed salvation was achieved only through prolonged respiratory distress. If I could replace every Airdyne session with kettlebells, I would do it tomorrow. Unfortunately, my joints have become more persuasive than my enthusiasm.

    Training, however, is only half the bargain.

    Then comes eating.

    Or, more precisely, eating the right amount.

    People often say, “Just eat healthy.”

    That’s charming.

    I can eat salmon, berries, oatmeal, Greek yogurt, beans, and vegetables until I resemble a prosperous bear preparing for hibernation. My problem has never been distinguishing broccoli from doughnuts. My problem is that my default setting is abundance.

    Real nutrition isn’t merely choosing healthy foods.

    It’s choosing enough healthy foods—and then stopping.

    That is where the real battle begins.

    Like most people, I live with a steady stream of food noise humming in the background of my consciousness. Portion control doesn’t silence that noise. It merely lowers the volume enough that I can hear myself think.

    Yesterday was a perfect example.

    Breakfast was oatmeal, protein powder, soy milk, and berries. Lunch was a shrimp-and-tuna salad. After my afternoon nap came plain Greek yogurt with mango. Dinner was salmon over a salad with white rice and garbanzo beans, followed by an apple.

    Roughly 2,400 calories.

    Objectively, I ate well.

    Subjectively, I was hungry for most of the day.

    Not Hungry with a capital H.

    Not the desperate hunger of starvation.

    Just small-h hunger.

    And over the years I have learned something the fitness influencers rarely advertise between shirtless selfies and discount codes:

    Successful weight management is usually hungrier than unsuccessful weight management.

    If you’re never a little hungry, there’s a good chance you’re eating enough to maintain exactly the body you already have.

    That isn’t a tragedy.

    It’s simply arithmetic.

    If I want the leaner, stronger body my kettlebell training is trying to build, then I must accept small-h hunger as the price of admission.

    So I make peace with it.

    Because somewhere in the distance, beyond another measured meal and another day of anticipation, I can already see that Norwegian sweat lodge rising from the forest. Steam drifts through the evergreens like a veil. The kettlebells are waiting.

    And, like Christmas morning, it will be worth every hour I spent waiting.

  • Resurrection Fatigue and the Will to Begin Again

    Resurrection Fatigue and the Will to Begin Again

    My first memory of stepping onto a scale came in September of 1973. I was eleven years old, living in Nairobi, Kenya, recovering from the flu. I had barely eaten in several days and wondered whether I still weighed one hundred pounds. Curious, I wandered into my parents’ bathroom, climbed onto the scale, and watched the needle settle at ninety-seven.

    It seemed like a trivial moment.

    It wasn’t.

    Six months later my family returned to California, and I joined the Junior Olympic Weightlifting team at Earl Warren Junior High. From then on, weigh-ins became as routine as brushing my teeth. The scale was no longer a bathroom fixture. It became a judge.

    Within a year I was competing in the 148-pound class and, for a brief, glorious moment, ranked number one in the nation. Then I watched Pumping Iron.

    Like countless teenage boys before and after me, I fell under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spell. His charisma was so overwhelming that Olympic weightlifting suddenly seemed like yesterday’s religion. I converted to bodybuilding.

    From that point forward, every weigh-in became an attempt to measure myself against Arnold. He stood six-foot-two and weighed about 230 pounds. I was five-foot-eleven, so simple arithmetic convinced me that 220 pounds would make me his earthly cousin.

    By sixteen I weighed 195 pounds, naturally lean and deeply tanned. A classmate named Kay McQuade told me I looked perfect.

    Poor Kay.

    She didn’t realize she was competing with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Compliments bounced harmlessly off my ego because perfection had already been assigned another number.

    By eighteen I weighed 210 pounds and could bench press four hundred pounds. I assumed 220 was inevitable.

    It wasn’t.

    At nineteen I competed in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest and finished runner-up. Contest dieting stripped away fat—and a good deal of muscle—until I weighed a shredded 180 pounds. I had never taken steroids. I wasn’t enormous, but I looked the way I had imagined a bodybuilder should look.

    Soon afterward I retired from competition.

    I continued lifting because it steadied my mind as much as it strengthened my body, and I settled comfortably around 205 pounds.

    That became my dating weight.

    Then, at thirty-two, something quietly went wrong.

    My weight climbed to 235 pounds with astonishing speed. The muscles remained underneath, but they now seemed trapped beneath an expanding layer of softness. I no longer looked powerful. I looked inflated.

    I became obsessed.

    Calories.

    Body fat.

    Scales.

    Mirrors.

    Thinking about my weight occupied so much mental real estate that you would have assumed all that rumination would produce results.

    It didn’t.

    When I began dating the woman who would become my wife, romance arrived carrying a dessert menu. We celebrated by eating at restaurants, lingering over dinners, and ordering sweets with cheerful abandon. Love and indulgence turned out to be enthusiastic dinner companions.

    By 2003, one year into our marriage, I weighed 257 pounds.

    There is photographic evidence.

    Somewhere on my wife’s Mac sits an image of me sprawled across our living-room couch with a bowl of popcorn studded with chocolate kisses. Melted chocolate decorates my face like war paint from a battle I had decisively lost.

    My daughters love that photograph.

    They laugh every time they find it.

    I don’t.

    When I look at that man, I don’t merely see obesity. I see someone whose appetites have staged a successful coup. He looks less like a husband than a failed republic.

    The next two decades became an exhausting cycle of resurrection and relapse.

    In 2004 I embraced a reduced-carbohydrate diet and returned to a respectable 205 pounds.

    Mission accomplished.

    Then came complacency.

    Back to 235.

    Years later I repeated the feat.

    Back to 205.

    Back to 235.

    In 2017 I met a remarkably fit celebrity chef whose daughters attended school with mine. His example inspired me to cut calories again. By August of 2018 I weighed a lean 200 pounds.

    Victory.

    Temporary victory.

    The weight quietly returned, as faithful to me as an old friend who never forgets my address.

    The last photograph of myself that I genuinely admire was taken in Yosemite in 2019.

    My daughters and I are standing beneath El Capitan. I’m wearing a black T-shirt and a Seiko Monster with its coral-blue dial mounted on a hulking Super Engineer bracelet. My arms are muscular. My face is lean. My expression carries a quiet confidence that only hindsight fully appreciates.

    Now I look at that photograph the way one studies an old passport.

    Proof that I once lived there.

    Then came COVID.

    For eighteen months I shuffled around the house in pajamas, taught college classes online, and discovered that home workouts were no match for comfort eating. My weight drifted back toward 240.

    As I write this in August 2026, I weigh 230 pounds.

    It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t seen the 220s since 2019.

    Seven years.

    Seven years hovering above 230, occasionally visiting 240 whenever vacation invited me to overstay my welcome at the buffet.

    Last week my family returned from Carlsbad.

    I came home weighing 236.

    Three disciplined days later I was back to 230.

    I now eat roughly 2,400 calories and about 140 grams of protein each day. Three times a week I spend sixty-five minutes in my garage swinging kettlebells. Twice a week I climb aboard my Schwinn Airdyne and pedal as if someone were chasing me with bad bloodwork.

    I have little doubt that I will soon break below 230.

    The problem is that I have already celebrated this victory several times before.

    I suffer from what I call Resurrection Fatigue: the exhaustion that arises from repeatedly rebuilding oneself after failure while knowing that every previous resurrection eventually gave way to another collapse. Each new beginning carries not only hope but memory.

    Memory can be a cruel training partner.

    It whispers:

    “You’ve been here before.”

    On difficult days I hear another voice.

    “What’s the point? You’ll gain it back anyway. You’re almost sixty-five. Eat the pizza. Order the carrot cake. You’ve had a good run.”

    Ironically, many of my eighteen-year-old students agree with that sentiment.

    Recently I asked them whether they would rather live to sixty-five eating whatever they pleased or live to one hundred on an austere diet.

    Every single one chose sixty-five.

    I understood their answer.

    At eighteen, death is an abstraction.

    At sixty-five, it has a calendar.

    You no longer think in terms of someday.

    You think in terms of seasons remaining.

    You become strangely willing to fight for another episode.

    No one wants his television series cancelled.

    So I’m still fighting.

    I know every trap.

    I know every rationalization.

    I know exactly how easily discipline dissolves into complacency.

    But I also know what waits on the other side of twenty lost pounds.

    Less sleep apnea.

    Healthier cholesterol.

    Less pain in my ankles.

    More years with my wife.

    More years watching my daughters become the women they are meant to be.

    Getting down to 210 is no longer about vanity.

    It is about longevity.

    It is about mental health.

    It is about refusing to surrender while the fight is still mine to wage.

    The older I become, the less interested I am in looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    I would settle for looking like a man who refused to quit.

  • When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    At sixty-five, with retirement approaching, I have aged out of five-thousand-dollar watches.

    Not because I can’t appreciate them.

    Not because they aren’t beautiful.

    Because I no longer have the wrist time.

    Twenty more years—if fortune is generous—is not enough to justify rotating my current collection alongside two additional grail pieces that would spend most of their lives quietly aging in a watch box. I call this Chronological Misalignment: the condition in which a person’s remaining lifetime no longer justifies acquiring possessions intended to be enjoyed over a much longer horizon.

    Time eventually becomes the harshest accountant.

    But time is only half the problem.

    The other half is geography.

    Or, more accurately, lifestyle.

    I still admire the Grand Seiko GMT. I still admire the Tudor Pelagos. They remain magnificent objects.

    I simply struggle to imagine wearing one while binge-watching Hulu, pushing a shopping cart through Target, or taking my daughters to YogurtLand for frozen yogurt.

    The watch would be dressed for an expedition to Antarctica.

    I would be buying gummy bears by the ounce.

    The mismatch is almost comic.

    I call this Environmental Misalignment: the condition in which one owns or desires objects whose elegance exceeds the ordinary circumstances of one’s daily life.

    Recognizing these two forms of misalignment is not depressing.

    It is liberating.

    Reality has performed the difficult task of setting my priorities for me.

    The question is no longer whether I can justify another grail watch.

    The question is what deserves that energy instead.

    For decades, watches occupied an astonishing amount of mental real estate. They required research, comparison, speculation, buying, selling, photographing, discussing, and occasionally irrational justification.

    Now that enthusiasm has become available for reassignment.

    It belongs elsewhere.

    It belongs in writing.

    It belongs at the piano.

    It belongs in my kettlebell-filled garage.

    Most of all, it belongs to my health.

    I am still about twenty pounds overweight.

    My physician periodically reminds me that it is time for fasting bloodwork—cholesterol, blood sugar, and the rest of the annual report card. I already know roughly what the results will say. At 230 pounds, everything will probably look respectable except my LDL cholesterol, which has an annoying habit of hovering around the borderline.

    So the mission is obvious.

    Reach 210 pounds.

    Then endure the ritual: skip breakfast, forgo the morning coffee, wait patiently while someone extracts several vials of blood, drive home slightly lightheaded, and receive laboratory numbers worthy of the inconvenience.

    At thirty-five, my grail was a Tudor Pelagos.

    At sixty-five, my grail is different. It’s a total cholesterol below 200 and a blood pressure reading of 120 over 80.

    That is not surrender.

    That is maturity.

    There comes a point in life when we stop negotiating with Father Time.

    He begins issuing instructions.

    He says:

    “You’re not wearing a Grand Seiko to Trader Joe’s.

    You’re not timing your afternoon nap with a luxury GMT.

    Your assignment now is different.

    Become as healthy as possible.

    Remain mentally sharp.

    Write your books.

    Play your piano.

    Stay strong enough that your family never has to carry you through the final chapters of your life.”

    For once, I find myself with no desire to argue.

    His orders make perfect sense.

    The remarkable thing is that they do not diminish my life.

    They simplify it.

    The pursuit of watches has quietly given way to the pursuit of longevity, creativity, and strength. Those ambitions promise far greater returns than another polished titanium case ever could.

    I wrote this little manifesto wearing a G-Shock Frogman.

    It told time just as faithfully as any luxury watch.

    More importantly, it reminded me that I have finally found a grail worthy of the time I have left.

  • The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    My middle school P.E. coach and Olympic weightlifting instructor, Lou Kruk, was not merely a teacher. He was a force of nature. Standing well over six feet, barrel-chested beneath tight T-shirts or black turtlenecks, sporting a Tom Selleck mustache, wavy brown hair, perpetually tanned legs protruding from gym shorts, and a voice that rumbled like Wolfman Jack after three cups of espresso, Kruk looked less like a school employee than the star of an action movie who had wandered onto campus by mistake.

    The mythology surrounding him only enlarged the legend.

    He drove a bronze Porsche. Rumor had it he spent weekends sailing with impossibly beautiful blonde women who, in our adolescent imaginations, might as well have been Scandinavian supermodels. Whether any of it was true hardly mattered. At thirteen, facts were powerless against charisma.

    To us, Lou Kruk embodied manhood itself.

    Naturally, we craved his approval with the desperation of medieval squires hoping to earn a knight’s blessing.

    So we lifted.

    Not casually. Fanatically.

    Kruk demanded perfect technique. He regarded sloppy form as a moral failure disguised as athletic incompetence. A wandering knee or rounded back earned immediate correction, usually delivered with enough volume for the entire class to hear. Public embarrassment was simply another teaching aid. If you couldn’t discipline your body, he reasoned, you probably couldn’t discipline your life.

    He preached through barbells rather than sermons.

    Discipline.

    Precision.

    Toughness.

    Master yourself before the world masters you.

    Oddly enough, Kruk possessed another passion that seemed entirely at odds with Olympic lifting.

    Henry Mancini.

    Instead of blaring hard rock through battered speakers, our weight room echoed with Mancini’s lush orchestrations. As we practiced snatches, clean-and-jerks, and deep squats, elegant movie themes drifted through the air. Kruk had assembled a respectable stereo system, transforming what should have resembled a dungeon into something closer to a strangely sophisticated temple of iron.

    We trained with style.

    Some of us trained with obsession.

    I belonged to the second category.

    Soon I wasn’t content to squat only during workouts. I squatted beside my locker. I squatted while inching forward in the cafeteria lunch line. I squatted during P.E. while playing goalkeeper as soccer balls sailed harmlessly overhead. If there was an idle moment lasting more than five seconds, I considered it wasted unless my knees were bent and my thighs were burning.

    Eventually my classmates stopped calling me Jeff McMahon.

    I became “Squats.”

    At the time, I regarded the nickname as a badge of honor. I was no longer merely a skinny kid trying to become stronger. I had become an exercise, a living advertisement for relentless self-improvement.

    Only years later would I understand what was really happening.

    I wasn’t simply building legs.

    I was constructing an identity.

    The barbell had given me my first Great Mutation—not because it transformed my body overnight, but because it convinced me that reinvention was possible.

    And once a boy discovers the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else, he spends the rest of his life wondering whether one more transformation might finally make him whole.