Episode 55: Transcript

"How's it hanging?"

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Okay, so we've been talking for 40, almost 45 minutes before we even started recording. Oh, God, Doug.

Doug French: Well, thank God we have the time to devote to this.

Magda: I mean, oh, tell me about it.

Doug: This is part of it, though. I need to warm up now. And we're going to talk about health today. And it's like being warmed up by a comedian in the crowd before the show starts. I need to ramp up to be able to talk like this, as is part of my morning routine, which we'll talk about.

Magda: I think it's interesting that you say that, because the topic of this is health, general health, things that push your boundaries now as a 50-something-year-old that didn't push your boundaries before. And your contention when we talked about recording this episode was that none of that is happening to you, that you're just the same as you were before.

Doug: Let's just see what we talk about first.

Magda: Now you're like, “I got to warm up.”

Doug: Yeah. But you're talking about afflictions. I'm just talking about what it takes to function during the day to get my dopamine going.

Magda: That's what I'm talking about. I mean, there's a very thin line between “warming up for the day” and “afflictions,” right? Like there was a time in your life when you didn't have to warm up for the day.

Doug: Oh, God, yes.

Magda: You could go out drinking, come home, write a five page paper, go to sleep at four, wake up at seven, go to class, play rugby with people and then like go out drinking again. And it was no problem. And now that doesn't happen. You need to warm up. And that is because of your advancing age.

Doug: I miss being bulletproof.

Magda: I kind of miss being bulletproof, too. So the reason I suggested this topic is because I have been absolutely dying this summer with the heat and the humidity in a way that it just didn't bother me like this when I was in my late 30s, early 40s. And it seems like it's just... getting progressively worse.

Doug: Well, as we established, you can get a cold cap. You know, those are available for retail sale.

Magda: Right. The cold cap would only help the top of my head. It's my entire body. So I discovered that there is an ancient Greek word for this, and I don't know how to pronounce ancient Greek, so I don't know if I'm going to say it the right way. It's kakoteres. I don't know. It's K-A-K-O-T-H-E-R-E with a line over it, S. And it means “fares poorly in the summer heat.” Or, like, “unprepared to deal with the summer heat” or something like that. And so apparently this isn't something new, like it's not directly related to climate change, because this is an ancient Greek word for it. It may be related to genetics. You know, I mean, my people are from Scandinavia and Hungary and Germany. 

Doug: Right. 

Magda: So, areas that didn't traditionally get super-hot summers. Also, I think, just advancing age. And I'm not saying that everyone, as we get older and as things start breaking down in our bodies, have problems with heat. I'm saying we have problems with the extremes. And I remember being a kid and everybody's grandparents were moving to Florida because they didn't want to be around the snow. And I was like, “Why would you not want to be around the snow? The snow is fun.” Even as an adult, I would still rather deal with the snow than with the heat. But I think there are people who just hit a certain point. And now thinking back, those grandparents would have been in their 60s. So they probably just lived through their 50s, like grinning and suffering through the effects of the cold to the point that when they were 65, they were just like, all right, I can't do this anymore. I'm out.

Doug: Yeah, my grandparents moved to Florida, but that's because my grandfather had debilitating arthritis and he needed the warmth.

Magda: Yes, and the cold is bad for the arthritis, which is why I think that you think that you're not having any effects as you get older. But I have noticed that during the winter when it's cold, you do have much more joint pain than you ever had before.

Doug: And that's not based on physical activity? Because that's what I've noticed. I just need to recover longer from workouts. And bike rides.

Magda: Right. Why did you need to recover more from workouts, right? It's because there's something that's changed in your body as you get older.

Doug: Because I'm an older gentleman. Yes. I don't attribute that to anything apart from just the chassis getting a little creaky. And so it needs time to recover a little longer. And again, I'm not even sure as I get back into more workouts per week. Right now I'm on the fitness upswing. You know, I gain weight and then I lose it. And then I gained it and I lose it. And I'm in a losing phase now. And who's to say that when my body gets better used to working out more often, that I won't be a creaky mess wandering around wondering where I left my glasses.

Magda: Okay. So I do believe that anybody can get back fitness. I don't know that you can necessarily get back to where you were if you were a fit, like, 25-year-old. Right. But I don't believe that if you've just been sitting around for whatever reason, you can't start moving and get your body strong again to be at an appropriate level of fitness. But I do think it's, I don't want to say disingenuous. I think it's kind of funny to say, “Oh, I'm just getting creaky now” as if that's not related to some sort of physical process that's happening inside your body as a result of getting older. Do you get what I mean? Every human being as they get older starts to get creaky unless they're taking active steps to prevent getting creaky. And that means that there's some physical process happening inside our bodies.

Doug: Right. And the same can be said for cranky, but that's a whole other.

Magda: Yes. Yes.

Doug: Although they are related, I'm sure the creakier you get, the crankier you get and vice versa. So. I have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday. We're going to have this whole discussion. I get to see my doctor once a year, maybe. He's now down to like three hours a month of office hours. So I've got his full attention next week. So we'll have a talk about that, about blood work and making sure I'm not pre-diabetic and all the other stuff.

Magda: There was published on Tuesday, I guess, a review article called “The Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause.” And like, whoa. OK, so The Menoposse, which is the Internet, all of the people who are working in menopause care, somebody nicknamed them The Menoposse. That's just the shortcut for talking about all of the people who on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, are talking about menopause and they're mostly doctors. Some of them are nurse practitioners. Some of them are other healing modalities, but a lot of them are just dissecting every study that comes out so we can figure out what to take from it. And everybody just went nuts over this Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause.

Doug: Pardon me, what is the source on this? Is it an academic paper? Is it the Mayo Clinic?

Magda: It's an academic paper. We can link to it. I don't know what the name of the journal is, but it's actually free. So you don't have to, you know, usually there's like a scientific study and you got to get one of your friends who works at a university to get it for you. This one, anybody can download the PDF of. So, previously, we have talked a little bit about the genitourinary syndrome of menopause, which means as you go through menopause, perimenopause and menopause, you lose estrogen in your body and it causes all kinds of problems.

Doug: You are bringing the syllables. Oh, my God.

Magda: It causes all kinds of problems in your genital and urinary system, which is why when women are going through perimenopause and menopause and then postmenopause, we tend to get UTIs a lot more frequently. And that was how I discovered I had it. And the treatment is to up your estrogen level down there, which you do by a very cheap and easy cream. And it changes your life. But all kinds of other stuff goes wrong down there because it's a syndrome of menopause that has been discovered. 

Magda: So nobody else was looking at patterns of things that were happening until Dr. Vonda J. Wright and her friends just like shot across the bow with this paper. So what they discovered by crunching all of these studies is that there is this actual musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause, and it manifests in five ways that just fall apart when you start going through perimenopause. And they said, “During perimenopause, women have an average reduction of 10% in bone mineral density.” That's pretty significant, right? So anyway, the five areas, it's a table that says “Musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause processes and signs.” So the first one is inflammation. It increases inflammation, which gives you arthralgia, joint pain, joint discomfort, and frozen shoulder. The second one is sarcopenia.

Doug: Frozen shoulder.

Magda: Uh-huh. Frozen shoulder. A lot of women, as they get toward 50, get frozen shoulder and have no idea why.

Doug: That sounds like something you buy before a big barbecue.

Magda: Right. I know. Frozen shoulder, roasted in the oven for six hours. It's great.

Doug: You know, low and slow, 14 hours, a little heat, a little sweet.

Magda: Right. So the second one is sarcopenia. And the signs of that are poor balance, falls, decreased muscle mass, loss of stamina and walking slowly. And a lot of us have noticed that it's just hard to just walk around on the daily. “Low registration” means you don't really know where your limbs are in space. And so if you're the kind of person who's always just sort of like banged into the wall when you walk or like going through doorways is always a little bit dicey or like you walk past the counter and crack your hip on it every single time. I didn't know that this didn't happen to other people. I just thought being located in space was always kind of a crapshoot. And it turns out it's a thing called low registration, and it's part of ADHD.

Doug: Well, you had that when you were pregnant, and we established that that was a common pregnancy symptom, right?

Magda: Yes, because hormonal changes in pregnancy can increase other issues that are underlying with ADHD, right? As menopause increases those issues. But the sarcopenia thing is all about that. And so it's loss of estrogen and it happens to a lot of people. 

Magda: Decreased satellite cell proliferation. So satellite cells are what help you recover, right? So if you fall, if you exercise a lot, if whatever, there's a recovery thing. So with decrease of estrogen, you decrease those satellite cells. So it causes decreased muscle mass and inability to gain muscle and also just like not recovering well from things.

Magda: Then osteoporosis, which gives you loss of height, back pain, stooped posture, low impact fracture. “That didn't happen to me.” People will say that. That's osteoporosis. And then arthritis, which is arthralgia, joint pain, joint stiffness, all that kind of stuff. This article goes through it. Basically what they're recommending as treatment is menopausal hormone treatment, AKA hormone replacement treatment to get the estrogen levels back up, weight-bearing exercise, increasing vitamin D and magnesium and protein intake. But they're also looking at populations that are taking MHT versus the ones that haven't. So this is a really, really interesting article. I think everybody should read it. What I also think is that nobody's looking at men right now.

Doug: Nobody.

Magda: And we're looking at women and are discovering that women's estrogen levels go down and our testosterone levels go down, too. We need to supplement a lot to get our estrogen levels back up and we need to supplement with a little bit of testosterone to get our testosterone levels back up. I think it would make sense, since men have more testosterone and less estrogen, but still some estrogen, that what if you guys are losing both of those as you age? And what if men should be supplementing with a lot of testosterone and a little bit of estrogen? Like what if men need more estrogen to help them with their joints and just nobody's looking at that yet?

Doug: Yeah. And it's not unknown that the gender longevity gap is widening and people are still perplexed why we're dying off. Men have a greater risk of death than women at every age between birth and 75. From a wide range of causes, including obesity, workplace accidents, and heart attacks.  

We have a 37% higher mortality rate from cancer than women. 75% of all premature deaths from cardiovascular disease are among men. And there's a whole list of reasons why men cross over sooner than women do, and it's widening. So it would be good to know if there were studies out there that could talk about, as you recommended many times, if some kind of hormone replacement theory, apart from buying boner pills from Doug Flutie, would be there to kind of help us regulate our own systems.

Magda: Right, well, like boner pills are just temporary. All of those causes of death are things that estrogen therapy treats in women, right? Like the reasons I went on estrogen were to prevent dementia principally, but also cardiovascular and bone health, right? And so if heart attacks and heart problems are a problem for men, what if going on estrogen would help ease those? Also, we know that as we age and our estrogen levels go down, the fat turns into that like gross fat that we hold instead of the fat that we need. I don’t remember which one is white and which one is brown. But tt’s why when people are young and have a lot of muscles the fat that we carry just sort of rounds us out and makes us look healthy, but as we get older the fat goes in weird places. It’s like beer gut. That's loss of estrogen. So what if supplementing with estrogen for men, and I mean, not supplementing with estrogen so that your voices change or anything like that, like, we don't need to be extreme about this. What if just a little bit of estrogen supplementation would help with the fat distribution and the way your body processes things? What if it would help with muscle strength? A lot of those things you mentioned are things that we prescribe estrogen to treat in women. So I think it would be interesting to see if it would help men.

Doug: Well, there's got to be something more than just being socialized not to see the doctor, which we've also long established that men just rub dirt on it and walk it off.

Magda: Right. What I think it is, is that when women's levels plummet, we are in crisis because it affects our emotions. It increases depression and anxiety. I mean, like people are itching. We itch all month. At a certain point, you're going to see a doctor about that. And for years, doctors have just been like, “oh, it's the change of life. You know, rub some dirt on it. Ha ha ha ha ha.” But women have been in big crisis about it. Whereas I think men, the symptoms that you can perceive are not as strong. So it wouldn't occur to you to go to the doctor about these milder symptoms, but that doesn't mean that the underlying things in the body aren't as serious as they are for women. Does that make sense? 

Doug: Oh, I'm sure. No, just men are just not socialized to pay attention to their bodies.

Magda: Exactly.

Doug: As much as women are, because women have to start doing it at 12 and 13 years old.

Magda: Yeah. You know, if you wake up and every morning your back hurts, you're not going to think, huh, I wonder if this is just decrease in hormones and there could be some treatment for it, right? 

Doug: “This is just my new normal.”

Magda: Yes, exactly.

Doug: “This is what happens now.”

Magda: It's not crisis level for men. So I don't think anybody's been looking at it.

Doug: Well, you're not supposed to admit that you're in pain anyway.

Magda: Yeah, I have a lot of men in my life who are around the age of 50 or 60 years old. And I noticed that you guys just don't feel as hale and hearty as you used to 20 years ago. And as I have gone through this hormonal “journey,” right, of losing the hormones and then the supplementation.

Doug: Oh, God.

Magda: Yeah. And supplementing with hormones has made me feel so much better. Like I know I don't look it on the outside, but I feel on the inside on a daily basis 10 years younger than I did three years ago before I started the hormones, right?

Doug: Of course you look young. You've always looked young for your age.

Magda: Well, I mean, that's true. But I wonder if that could happen for men.

Doug: Well, if Instagram is any proof, I mean, there's plenty of dudes out there. I'm sure if I just keep up this regimen, I'm going to drop 40 pounds and all my hair will grow back and I'll get my top knot going and I'll eat vegan. It'll be awesome. As it is, I have been eating as close to vegan as possible, maybe vegetarian, you know, eat less, mostly plants, et cetera. And as you know, I've known about this since my friend's wedding way back in the day when I ate all your protein and went into a coma for three days. Remember that?

Magda: I know. I remember that. That was really funny. You know, the meal was like filet or something. And so you ate yours and you ate mine.

Doug: Yes. And like a cubic foot of cheese at the cocktail hour.

Magda: All I ate was a whole lot of shrimp and mussels, I think. And I felt great the next day. And you ate all beef and all that kind of other stuff, and kind of couldn't move for three days. 

Doug: Yes, I was like, you know, I could just crawl into a hole for a while and I believe this would be great. But then I went vegetarian for a month. You remember that, right? We go out to restaurants and I became that guy. “Excuse me, how is this prepared?” But I recommend anybody who's never been vegetarian. Be vegetarian for a month just to see what the life is like because it's a whole different set of rules. But you get a sense of what vegetarians go through to maintain the integrity of their diets and to figure out even something as basic as finding out that McDonald's french fries are fried in beef tallow. Less so now because vegetarianism has become a much more normalized lifestyle and there's fake meat and everything else.

Magda: Right.

Doug: But that was an eye-opening thing for me. I mean, I miss the taste of meat, which is why I'm not a vegetarian now, although I'm mostly. Because more importantly, after that month, I felt fantastic. That's what keeps me going now. I think remembering that month 30 years ago when I was like, you know what? Let's eat like an adult and see what happens.

Magda: Well, you know, this is my recommendation. I think I've made it before on this podcast. I've definitely made it to you in person. If you would like the taste of meat in a vegan situation, Meijer, the Michigan-based grocery store, they have a kettle chip that is grilled beef and onion flavor. You eat those chips and you're like, wait a minute, were they sitting under the beef grilling to take on the flavor? But then you read the ingredients. The whole thing is vegan. It's a delight.

Doug: You are a fire brand for the Meijer brand.

Magda: I am. Well, they were a little bit of a step-down for me when I stopped eating mammals.

Doug: But it is amazing what's happened in 30 years because it was a real difficulty in the ‘90s. 

Magda: Oh, yeah. 

Doug: Because you'd look at a menu and say like, nope, I can't eat that. I can't eat that. I mean, it's different now, especially in Ann Arbor, for heaven's sake. I mean, every restaurant has gluten-free options and vegetarian and vegan options and options where there's no food at all. They just bring you an empty plate and you can just stare at it and visualize what it must be like to eat something. 

Magda: Right. Well, I also think a lot of that is just that like the culture isn't forcing people to be dicks in the service of, hey, just buck up. Like I remember when I was I had graduated college and I was working a gig waiting tables at a country club and we would do events, you know, it was like weddings and stuff. And so there would always be the coffee service. There was some dude who was like, “we just put the same kind of coffee in both pots.” So like,

Doug: It's the power of suggestion.

Magda: Yeah. Right. I was like, if people think they're drinking decaf and they're actually drinking caffeinated coffee, that could give somebody a heart attack. And he was like, “Oh, you're right. Okay, let's put decaf in both pots.” Which, oh my God was a much better solution, right? Like much better.

Doug: Much better marginally, yes.

Magda: To have people just all drinking decaf, than people who thought they were drinking decaf getting caffeine in their system. But still like why? I have opinions about restaurant targeting, but–

Doug: You do? I don't think I have that in my Rolodex of your opinions. Let me see here.

Magda: Well, I mean, basically, I think you should either be a huge diner that can make anything for anybody, or you should be really targeted. And I think there are absolutely situations in which it's okay to not offer decaf coffee. But if you're a coffee shop, I think you need to offer decaf coffee.

Doug: Oh, yeah. Well, you could be, like, there's this new egg place that came to Ann Arbor. It came from Detroit. And they're like, you know, we sell eggs. We're open from 9 to 2. Deal with it.

Magda: Yeah. There is absolutely no reason to think that if you open a restaurant, it should last forever. It's completely and utterly a success if you open a restaurant for two years, three years, five years, and then shut it down, as long as people enjoyed the food that you made while it was open.

Doug: It's a grind. I think people eventually just, they close it because they can't deal with the grind anymore. I mean, you saw the best restaurant in the world, right? You remember what their best restaurant in the world was always designated as?

Magda: Ken’s Steakhouse of Framingham, Mass?

Doug: No, they were number three. Noma in Copenhagen. 

Magda: Oh, yeah. 

Doug: And they moved to this spot where they grew everything that they served within 100 yards. The laurels were there. And he was like, “that was great. But man, I can't keep this lifestyle up.” So he closed it.

Magda: Well, I think there's value in creating a project knowing it's not going to last for a long time, too. I think it's totally fine to say, hey, I want to float this project and then shut it down. It's completely fine.

Doug: That's why we love the English interpretation of how TV should be made. You know, one season of shows in Britain is six episodes. And in America, for the longest time, it was 22. You know, there are 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers. 

Magda: Okay, so back to your bodily health. I think that a lot of what this comes down to is inflammation. And now this new paper is saying that lack of estrogen for women is the source of inflammation. 

Doug: Yeah. I'll tell you, part of my morning ritual, I have a scoop of ginger paste.

Magda: Applied externally or do you consume it?

Doug: I consume it.

Magda: Oh, okay. A scoop of ginger paste. Do you just lick it off the spoon? What? How? 

Doug: Yeah. Take a spoon and just gulp.

Magda: Wow. Okay.

Doug: Because everyone thought turmeric was the real source of mitigating inflammation. And I put turmeric in my coffee every morning. But more people that I talked to said, you should probably lean on the ginger a bit more. And I have been, which is good because it tastes better, number one. I would never have a spoonful of turmeric. I got to say, my arthritis feels better. I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to sit here and say, go out and eat yourself some ginger every morning. But I found this great Asian market down the street has these little jars of ginger paste. I'm so glad to have Asian food markets near me because they have a lot of stuff that I have incorporated in my diet and I feel a lot better for it. 

Magda: Yeah. The other thing I want to talk about is exercise and how exercise seems to kind of be changing as we get older. Like when you're younger, it's just like, “hey, go out and run really fast for an hour. That's good for you.” And now it seems like the things we're really supposed to concentrate on are muscle training, like weight training, resistance training, and stretching. And that cardiovascular stuff is, well, maybe necessary, but definitely not sufficient anymore.

Doug: Right. Well, men are supposed to do old man chair yoga.

Magda: Old man chair yoga? Tell me more.

Doug: I've done it a couple of times just because it's part of my morning, as I've said. Every morning now, I have to wake up and be like, oh, right, this.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: That's an interesting mindset because I love being asleep. And if I've had a good night's sleep, I still have to rev up for the day. I got to do exercises. I got to reach for the ceiling. I got to do a full spectrum of those. I'll do a conical plank for about, you know, 10 seconds. But like Sarah was saying, when she's talking about how exercising in that way, just with stretching yourself, not in a taxing way, but in a way that still challenges your body. And in her case, her way of clearing her head is to do a plank, which she could probably do, you know, for a good five, six months.

Doug: But I tell you, even a hapless plank for an older gentleman like me is, especially because it reinforces your progress because every time you can hold that plank a little more. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: It's really encouraging, but just 

Magda: Because it's measurable. 

Doug: Right. And I love measuring things. Oh my God. I love graphs.

Magda: Yeah. Yeah. And so even if you get like an extra two seconds out of it, it's like, Ooh, the vindication.

Doug: Yes. And, and there's a positive slope. So chair yoga is exactly that. You just sit down and you, you touch your toes or you lift up like Flashdance. You know, you do all kinds of stuff that makes your body do everything except what I do most of the day, which is sit.

Magda: So I live with somebody who just naturally does all this stuff and likes doing it. Like he just hops out of bed in the morning–

Doug: Bastard.

Magda: –does a bunch of pushups and planks, all this kind of stuff. Then he goes for a walk, even when it's like 95 degrees.

Doug: He does pushups first thing in the morning?

Magda: Yes.

Doug: Is he a Marine?

Magda: Pushups, and he does planks and, okay, so he was having–

Doug: Does he make the bed every morning and bounce a quarter off it?

Magda: His side, yes. He was having knee problems and went to the physical therapist. This physical therapist was working with him like once or twice a week and gave him exercises to do in between. He actually did the exercises every day in between! And he still sometimes does those exercises. 

Doug: Well, of course.

Magda: Okay, but I don't think most people do the exercises in between! Certainly not every day.

Doug: I'm trying to emulate that. I'm about 30% of that right now. But I'm noticing the effect of it.

Magda: He also has a standing desk.

Doug: Yes.

Magda: He has a desk that he can lower to sitting. He can lower it to sitting level and to high. And it's mechanized, so he's just set the two levels that he wants. So when he wants to sit, he presses the button and it goes rrrrrrrrrr.

Doug: Yeah, I'm saying, tell me it's a remote control.

Magda: No.

Doug: Is that a remote control standing desk? That would be sexy.

Magda: No, he told me that one year he wanted to splurge on himself. And so he bought the standing desk. I was like, wow, that's not a thing I would consider a splurge.

Doug: No, that's on brand. That's totally on brand. And it's working. I mean, that's the best part. It's a good investment. 

Magda: It's absolutely on brand. And, you know, he's a really productive person and being productive brings him a ton of joy.

Doug: Well, he's a big fan of the positive feedback loop. And part of that is having zero interest in social media. God bless him.

Magda: No, that's not true. He's on Facebook. He just, he's a consumer. He's not a producer of social media content. But he has said to me, “Well, don't you just feel great when you go through your whole to do list and you get a lot of stuff done?” And I'm like, “No, I feel traumatized by having done it.” And he’s like, what? And I think this is like a fundamental difference in the way he and I interact with the world. Like he will do something that is genuinely horrible for the joy of having done it. And I don't ever get to that joy point. I'm stuck in the trauma of having, even when I have done it, the trauma of doing it is still there. And I don't get to that joy point.

Doug: And I can totally get if the answer is no to this. But is there any prospect that, given the two very disparate ways that you approach this, is any way going to rub off on the other?

Magda: I wish that his way would rub off on me, but so far it has not. And I desperately hope that my way does not rub off on him.

Doug: Well, and what are you prepared to do? Is there even the prospect of getting outside your comfort zone?

Magda: I am outside my comfort zone almost all the time.

Doug: Okay.

Magda: And that is what I believe prevents me from feeling joy. So yeah. You know, and I'm joking here. I'm not saying that I don't ever feel joy. I just don't feel joy from doing a to do list.

Doug: No one knows better how to romanticize marriage than you. Man, sign me up for another go around. Look at this. You are just setting the example.

Magda: Being married to Mike Zarin is an absolute joy, however, and a delight. However, it is definitely putting me outside of my comfort zone, right? Like, and I think some of that is just that I had been single for so long and living by myself for so long that like, you know, I had reached stasis in a lot of things that he...

Doug: But hasn't that been upended at this point? How long have you been out there? You've been married to him since October, which I always have a tough time remembering, you know, a number of months now. So that's... Ten months ago.

Magda: Yeah. At the time of this recording, I've been out here for 11 months and a little bit.

Doug: You're not keeping tally marks on the wall anymore?

Magda: I was single for 15 years.

Doug: Well, that's why you hear so many stories about people who marry a second time later in life. They have separate bedrooms. They have separate houses. Remember that great line from Carol Burnett? She's like, if I were to marry again, he'd have to live in the house next door.

Magda: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Well, once again, we have strayed off the main tributary.

Magda: What I really just want to say is if you're a person who's approaching 50 or is on the other side of 50, does just staying alive feel more difficult to you on a daily basis? Do extremes of temperature or other weather conditions feel like they're stretching you more than you want to be stretched? Like I really just wow, the heat just really sucks it out of me and I don't have any control over it. And even if I'm in a lot of significant air conditioning, I can still feel it. It's sort of like underlying. It's like out there waiting to get me. And I think that that's how people feel about cold. I have also realized that I get seasonal affective disorder in the summertime. People say that they feel in the fall, they start feeling a feeling of dread because winter is coming. In May, I start feeling a feeling of dread because I know July and that heat is coming. And I didn't used to be like that. And I would like to find out if other people are identifying that in themselves. And, you can't be the only one who just feels like you have to work your way up to getting up in the morning.

Doug: I think we're all coping with some level of that. I think the bigger story is the diversity of our experiences in terms of how much effort it takes. Because in my case, as I say, it's like I got to warm up the car now. Existence is work for me, much more so than it was. Definitely true. In my case, I make coffee dates. I make lunch dates. And I'm very proactive about that because even talking with you like this, this is what my energy comes from. That's the mood elevator for me that I'm excited about life now because I've had an hour and a half long conversation with you. There are definite guardrails I have to put in place in order for me to function. And I was never aware of that when I was younger. And the only way to sustain them is to create that positive feedback loop. To recognize I'm doing this and I feel better for it.

Magda: I think that's the nature of life, right? You know, I mean, I think you can be upset about the fact that you can't sit there and meditate for 10 minutes perfectly. Or you can say, oh, the beauty of meditation is not being in that place. It's the drawing your mind back to it. I see the physical condition of my body is the same way. Like the, it's not that I am just as fit and the size and shape that makes my body feel best all the time. The beauty of it is I keep going back to that, right? Like I keep making the effort. 

Doug: And I think the other big part of the work from an emotional side is I know when I was younger, I didn't see beauty unless there were results. And now the beauty is in the attempt. Knowing you did your best in anything is all that matters, regardless of whether it succeeds. Putting the art there, regardless of whether it hits. That's the mood enhancer. And once your mood's in a better place, everything else follows, I think. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: But we still got to have Mike on again to talk about his damn morning routine, for heaven's sake, and what's wrong in his brain.

Magda: There's nothing wrong in his brain.

Doug: And how he can bottle it somehow.

Magda: He is a person who... 

Doug: No, but you know what I mean. If there's some kind of electrical impulse that he has that makes him get up and do pushups.

Magda: Yeah, I think it's true. I mean, I remember having this realization when the kids were like seven and four, maybe, that I no longer had to have an emotion about everything I did. I guess when I was younger, I thought that I had to have feelings about what I was doing. Either I was enjoying it or I wasn't enjoying it or it was worth it or I didn't see any value in it or something like that. And then sometime in the process of like waking up a zillion times a night to feed somebody else or, you know, whatever, like I just realized, oh, I can do it. And I don't have to feel like it's good or bad. I don't have to have any emotion about it. Mike is a person who I think was born just knowing that he didn't have to have an emotion about things. He could just do them.

Doug: That's a great thing. That is.

Magda: It really is. You know, one time I was asking him, like, how do you, how, how, how? And he just said, “It's a practice.” And I was like, oh, wow. Okay, that's hot, A. But B, like, it had never occurred to me. It's a practice. Okay.

Doug: So he doesn't meditate, right? It's kind of his whole existence is meditative.

Magda: His existence is meditation. Yeah, his existence is absolutely meditation.

Doug: Sitting down to meditate would be redundant.

Magda: Yeah, I think it would.

Doug: I have tried meditation and I have enjoyed it. I think it does clear my thoughts a bit. I, as I've mentioned before, I think it's really interesting how many comedians practice transcendental meditation. I don't know what the difference is between garden variety meditation and TM, but it's interesting to see how a comedian's mind works.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And how they rely on meditation to kind of steady the boat. I would love to know more about that. I think that might be something I would want to try if I were ever confident enough that I could do it right.

Magda: I think the point of it is that you have to be transcendental with it. You've got to really transcend.

Doug: I don't feel transcendental. Yeah, I don't feel – I'm not a transcendent person in that way, I don't think. Yeah. I don't see myself, but maybe I need to get outside my comfort zone and be more transcendent than, but you got to pay somebody. And even then paying somebody to teach me TM triggers my bullshitometer. It's a rough existence, you know?

Magda: I know. You are so suspicious.

Doug: So what other health stuff did you want to talk about before we end season one?

Magda: Understanding that just because you're not having symptoms doesn't mean that things can't be happening in the background that eventually will hit a critical mass. You really need to go to the doctor and get inspected and have tests run, whatever, every year, every six months, whatever they recommend, because there's stuff that's happening that you are not having symptoms of. And it would be nice if you could catch it so you could intervene before it's too far gone.

Doug: Well, that's really heavy on our minds. As you know, my cousin Tim, who's only three years older than I am, just dropped dead of a pulmonary embolism.

Magda: Wow. Wow.

Doug: I mean, it's the kind of thing that they could have caught if he were in the care of a doctor. But I think the initial symptoms were just he felt a little achier and out of breath and stuff, but didn't think of anything of it. And woke up and his wife looked over and he was gone.

Magda: Didn't that happen to someone in your high school class also?

Doug: Yeah. Yeah. My neighbor, because we were alphabetical buddies, he was in my homeroom and we was three lockers down. And he was in his early 40s. And his wife woke up next to a corpse.

Magda: Wow.

Doug: I mean, it's fucked up. But I've told you also, there's another guy and he was a neighbor of mine. I saw him for our high school reunion. And within three months, he was dead. He had kids late in life. His daughters are like in middle school now, even though he's the same age as me. So there's constant reminders of life's impermanence all around. And that's why I'm looking forward to this break. I mean, we're going to be off for three weeks. And I'm so looking forward to this. It's going to be a mental break because I'm going to go back and see my family. I'm going to see my closest friends. I'm going to drop our son off at college after a big road trip. I mean, there's a lot to look forward to. I'm going to go to the beach and maybe not move for several hours once I get there. And I showed you too, like another aspect of my age, I got a 90-day prescription for the statin I'm on since my heart event. And it's as big as a can of White Claw.

Magda: That is very funny.

Doug: I'll put a picture of that in the show notes just as a massive, I have these little bitty pills on my dresser and then this huge thing that's bigger than this microphone.

Magda: Right.

Doug: It's a riot.

Magda: Well, I think it's kind of a miracle that you're on that statin. If we're talking about something that isn't giving you really distinct symptoms but is still happening underneath on the inside that could come and kill you, like that actually happened to you.

Doug: Well, what stays with me is not so much why I had it because it wasn't a lifestyle thing. It was all based upon inherited family history. But what really strikes me as something, as a real sign for me was that, I mean, you were living in Toledo at the time and you had come up, we were going to go to parent-teacher conferences that night.

Magda: Parent-teacher conferences, yeah.

Doug: Right. Not only were you up from Toledo, so you were in town for it, But you were here in my house watching the kids while I was off at the gym, which is where it happened. So I had this heart attack. And the thought of having that heart attack anywhere else, you know, around a bunch of health professionals who called me an ambulance in no time. It's hard to imagine how else the cosmic tumblers could have aligned better to make sure I was treated in time. so that my cardiologist could shove a stent through my groin up into my chest.

Magda: Right. I mean, I always think about that, about how good it was that you took your pain seriously, because you were running on the treadmill and you started feeling a ton of pain. And instead of just saying, “Oh God, I feel weird. Let me get on my bike and bike home.” And you know, you would have fallen off the bike by the side of the road and nobody would have found you for hours. You would have been dead, right? Instead of just saying, “Oh, let me ignore this,” you got off the treadmill and you walked up to the front desk and you were like, “I do not feel good.” And then they called you the ambulance. If you hadn't taken your pain seriously, you could have died. And I don't mean that to say to anybody, oh, anybody who doesn't take their pain seriously deserves it, right? What I'm saying is: Take your pain seriously.

Doug: Is there a better way to end season one than that? An uplifting story about my near-death experience with my widow-maker heart attack.

Magda: Before you were 50 even.

Doug: Yeah. And I wasn't even married. So how could I have a widow-maker heart attack?

Magda: Right. Exactly. I know a number of women whose ex-husbands have died. And one of the things that they talk about is that there's no word to describe what you are. Because it is important that the person you had been married to has died. But you aren't a widow. There's no word to describe it, right?

Doug: We need to invent that word, plan that for season two. Talking about health, I think is important just because I think we don't talk about it enough. At least dudes don't. I have been talking a lot about our health with male friends of mine, because of this, and it's helpful. I think it's one of the reasons I still do go to the doctor once a year. And, even though my doctor is several years younger than I am.

Magda: I think that happens at a certain point.

Doug: Well, you'd have to. Yeah. That's like, I'm still happy that when Kamala is president, she'll still be older than I am.

Magda: I'm not happy about that at all. I think it's time for a Gen Xer. And I mean, Kamala, I guess she's, you know, almost a Gen Xer, right? Much, much better than being 75 years old.

Doug: It is odd to think of Kamala as a Boomer, but unfortunately she is.

Magda: But she's a Boomer by like four months or something. I don't think it will be unfortunate when the president is younger than I am.

Doug: Oh, no, not at all. And it's going to happen sooner to me than it will to you.

Magda: Well, that's true because you're older than I am.

Doug: I mean, I don't even know how old Buttigieg is. 

Magda: Tim Walz is... 

Doug: Is a year older than Kamala, which I think is hilarious. 

Magda: Yeah. I don't know. Big Gretch is how old? She's like 52, 53, I think. She's not that much older than I am. She would be a fantastic president.

Doug: Yeah, she is 52. And let's see what Buttigieg... How old is he? 42

Magda: Yeah, he's too young.

Doug: He's barely old enough to be president, for heaven's sake.

Magda: He's a Millennial.

Doug: Well, don't skip Gen X entirely. Let’s get at least one Gen X chief executive before we... 

Magda: I know, that's the point. 

Doug: You know, it kind of makes sense that this is episode 55 and we're going to end our first season in our mid-50s.

Doug: So thank you for listening to episode 55 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been health. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter, Friday Flames, which comes out bi-weekly. We're off for the next three weeks. We've got a lot going on. It's going to be fantastic. We'll be back September 4th. Until then, enjoy the last bits of summer.

Doug: Take your pills, be well, and we will see you in September. Bye-bye.