It was the summer of 1981, we were celebrating my best friend Cheryl's birthday with a party in the backyard of her home. I stepped inside the house, most likely to fetch another bottle of Tab from the refrigerator, when all of the sudden I was cornered by Raymond, the boyfriend of Cheryl's older sister who told me that he thought I had nice legs as he moved in closer. After letting him know in no uncertain terms that if he took a step closer the police would be sketching around his body with chalk, I hightailed it back to the party to tell Cheryl what had happened.
At sixteen, I took for granted that my body was lean. I could afford to be offended, not flattered, by comments about my anatomy from obnoxious teenage boys. Nowadays, I would kill to have the legs I had in my teens. All the lean muscle, none of the fat, I took my healthy body for granted when I was young. George Bernard Shaw said it best, "Youth is wasted on the young."
It's easy to look back and conclude that my younger self did nothing to earn those legs. After all, teenagers have the metabolism of a hummingbird. They eat chips, drink copious amounts of soda and never exercise, right? That may be true of some teens today, but if I'm honest with myself, that wasn't the case for me. My typical summer day as a 16 year-old might look something like this:
Get up/shower/dress/eat
Head out for 2 hours of cheerleading practice.
Return home for lunch
Ride bike to pool to meet friends for an afternoon of swimming
Ride home for dinner
Spend evening babysitting neighbor's three children.
While my 16 year old self didn't do any formal exercise outside of mandatory gym class at school, there was a good deal of incidental activity included in my ordinary day. Two hours of practicing cheerleading routines is comparable to taking back-to-back group fitness classes. Without a car, cycling to and from my social activities was a must. Socializing with friends often involved activities like skating, hiking the trails at a local park, swimming, skate boarding and playing tennis. Even babysitting required playing tag or swinging on the swing set with my charges. All of these activities contributed to developing my healthy, lean body. The wonderful part about that period in my life was that all of those activities made me happy; I was having fun.
After starting college, I bought my first car. My bike was left to collect dust in my parent's garage. Two part time jobs and a full load of classes left little time for swimming or hiking with friends. Socializing in college was more likely to mean pizza and beer (in my case, wine coolers!) and conversation enjoyed at a tavern near campus than anything that included physical exertion. While I was busy running from school to jobs, my meals were often nothing more than a pack of peanut butter crackers washed down with a can of diet soda. I didn't gain the dreaded Freshman 15, but I did start to see some cellulite developing on my once flawless thighs.
The responsibilities of marriage, career and household duties ate up most of my time after college. With the birth of my first child, afternoons spent participating in fun, yet physical activities were nonexistent. The 50 lbs I gained with that first pregnancy required actual exercise. Losing that weight meant working out 7 days a week. Notice I used the word "working", not playing. I had lost that sense of fun that I'd known in my youth.
I realized that while my metabolism may have slowed down with age, so had the sense of fun that came with participating in activities for the sheer joy that they bring. Often, it is our perception of things that make them less palatable. When I started seeing once fun activities as exercise, they lost their appeal and I lost some of my muscle tone.
Maybe George Bernard Shaw had it wrong, maybe youth isn't wasted on the young after all.
