I Don’t Want to Live Longer If My Body Can’t Keep Up

We are obsessed with longevity right now.

How to live to 100. What to eat. What supplements to take. How much to sleep. What to track. How to optimize every possible marker of our health.

I’m interested in all of it.

But lately I’ve been thinking about a different question: What exactly am I trying to live longer for?

Because I don’t just want more years. I want years where I can still move.

I want to carry my own suitcase through an airport. I want to walk around a city all day. I want to get down on the floor and get back up without thinking about it. I want to travel, work, exercise, dance, and live in a body that lets me keep participating in my own life.

That became very real to me during a recent conversation with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Jason Snibbe.

We talked about something most of us probably don't spend much time thinking about until it becomes a problem: our joints.

Dr. Snibbe told me he’s seeing joint replacements in people from their 30s through their 60s. We talked about women reaching perimenopause and menopause and suddenly noticing aching joints, stiffness, frozen shoulder, inflammation, and a body that doesn’t recover the way it once did.

And it made me realize that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I’m going to age without spending nearly enough time thinking about how I want to move through those years.

At 55, that question feels increasingly important.

For so many years, I thought about exercise through the lens a lot of women were given: What will make me thinner? What will burn the most calories? What will change how my body looks?

Now I’m thinking about whether my legs are strong enough to support me at 75.

Whether I’m protecting my bones.

Whether I have the balance to prevent a fall.

Whether I’m maintaining enough muscle to keep doing things for myself.

That is a completely different relationship with exercise.

One of the things Dr. Snibbe kept coming back to was muscle. Our muscles support our joints, and maintaining them becomes increasingly important as we get older. He talked about resistance training, balance, walking, weighted vests, kettlebells and even something as basic as maintaining our ability to get ourselves up from the ground.

None of that sounds particularly glamorous.

But independence is glamorous to me now.

Being 80 and able to get out of a chair without help sounds glamorous.

Being able to take the trip sounds glamorous.

Having the strength to keep living on my own terms sounds glamorous.

Maybe that’s the part of the longevity conversation we need to talk about more.

I don’t only want to add years to my life. I want my body to still let me live them.

That’s what my latest conversation with Dr. Jason Snibbe on The Tamsen Show is really about. We get into joint pain, menopause, muscle, bone health, frozen shoulder, injury, surgery, and what we can start doing now for the bodies we want to have decades from now.

Listen to the full episode here or watch it here.

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