One of my dear friends told her husband several years ago that she had noticed he was now making, ‘old man noises’ upon standing up from couches & chairs. She told him that must simply stop. She pointed out that he was only 50 and that she neither could nor would listen to that for another 40 years!
He stopped!
But aging and old (wo)man noises are coming for all of us, right? And by the time we’re making those noises or excusing ourselves from certain activities due to sore, dodgy or NQR [insert joint or body part], we’ve spent several decades unknowingly right on course to get here! We don’t generally pay any attention to our ECM (extracellular matrix) which suffers in silence, slowly but surely losing its structural & functional integrity from the age of 18 on, until we reach the tipping point: joint degeneration, repetitive soft tissue injuries etc, and a problem that will never be silent again! Cue your choice of anti-inflammatories it seems – til death do us part!
The Ageing Matrix is a thing.
And no I haven’t seen the movie – I don’t need to – I’m living it.
When I was pregnant I thought I wanted to specialise in pre-conception & pregnancy care. Then my babies arrived and I took a fancy to paediatrics. Sound familiar to anyone? Now, unsurprisingly, I have a real thirst for knowledge expressly aimed at bettering this whole ageing-thing! So in preparation for this Update in Under 30 episode, I’ve relished the opportunity to put the Ponds Institute & all similar cosmetic companies on notice! Scrutinising their claims that every woman on the planet would do better with more Collagen, more Elastin, more Hyaluronic Acid, just more of every key ECM component really. Ok, but in accordance with my bias and my business, my lit review pertained to oral supplements, not outrageously priced magical middle-life-crisis rubs and the therapeutic action I had in mind was the integrity of our ECM, and the roughly 2kg of collagen, we rely on, for functions a lot less frivolous than stopping sag. I have to say, I started out as non-believer but the research was quite the awakening…still there’s a lot to unpack here in order to repack our ECM and prevent against the erosion of its integrity and everything we build, and rely on, upon it – to live well!