Making the Most of Our Golden Years My Boaz and I grunted, One-two-THREE!” as we team lifted a rolled stretch of sod and dumped it into our garden wagon. It was a lot of work, but after two-and-a-half hours, we had a bare strip of dirt behind our pool cage to plant podocarpus bushes and false bird-of-paradise plants. Many of our neighbors hire landscapers, but not us. We’ve never shied away from hard work, but we’ve also realized that we must adjust how we work hard—and how much. I just had a cardiac event, probably a coronary artery spasm, just a few days before Christmas, and I manage fibrom ..read more

As the holiday season approaches, we battle through the grocery to snag the ingredients for our Thanksgiving feasts. Ruminating in the backs of our minds: I’m going to gain ten pounds again. Ugh! Why does Char have to bring up our WEIGHT right now? Well, I don’t, I suppose, but I have a question: When was the last time you got your checkup at your doctor’s office? I mean, the whole workup? Certainly, adding another appointment to your stressed-out life might cause you to pass out, but it might save your life. The Numbers on the Scale Indicate More Than Your Weight Those little glowing numbers ..read more

5 Ways to Measure Weight Loss Success (Other Than the Scale) Encore post from 2019 I once posted a meme that said, “If you’ve become obsessed about weighing yourself often to see if you’ve lost weight, then put the scale away.” That meme seemed to put some of my friends and followers off. Please, allow me to clarify that statement. I was anorexic in my last year of high school and the beginning of college. In my pre-teen years, I was labeled chubby and pudgy. I wanted so much to be pretty and accepted. Where I lived, that meant losing some weight. So I began dieting. To make a long story short ..read more

6 Ways to Improve Your Hair, Skin, and Nail Health In the early 2000s, when I worked at a YMCA, my complexion was horrible. I had what appeared to be cystic acne that left huge scars on my face, shoulders, and chest. Since I worked in a swimsuit teaching water exercise and swimming, I was embarrassed by how I looked. All I could think was, “I thought acne was for teenagers!” At that time, I was in my late 30’s and early 40’s. I thought I was doing well with my healthy living plan, but I discovered later what was feeding the problem. My doctor’s visit for abdominal pain, bloating, and gastric i ..read more

We are currently living in our camper as our house in Florida nears completion. Everything is jumbled in our tiny pop-up Trail Manor. It’s tiny, cramped, and overwhelming with all of what we need, not having a designated place. Ugh! I hate being in a limbo state. Sitting in our transitional state is exhausting. Some of you had asked why we were building another home when we finished our Michigan home about three years ago. It’s actually simple: our health conditions make maintaining five acres of property, doing twenty to thirty floors of steps per day, and the frigid winters too much for our ..read more

As many of you know, I’ve been blogging about health and fitness since 2013. I wrote a blog post that year entitled, “Judge Not: A Story About Every Body” which you can click the link to read, about a woman who wanted to lose weight badly judged me about having her idea of the “perfect body”. She discovered in our discussion about her misconceptions of me. Today, I’d like to revisit that topic from a different perspective—midlife with health issues while living a healthy lifestyle. The judgment fingers have been pointed at me lately, including my own. We become our own harshest critic when oth ..read more

Get Back to Basics Whew! How did we get so bogged down that we don’t have time for exercise, rest, Bible study, or couple time? My Boaz and I have been reeling in overwhelm this year. Preparing for retirement was more work than we anticipated.  On top of it all, our retirement house is being built, we are downsizing to move, I’m dealing with my mother’s estate while closing her conservatorship case, and trying to keep up with my writing. We feel drained of every ounce of energy and time. All of these are necessary, but all of them happening at the same time is too much! I thought about mo ..read more

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