Taking Care of Yourself After 50: Before Someone Has To Do It For You
I have spent a significant portion of my adult life taking care of other people.
My husband’s grandmother came to live with us in 2003. She passed in 2013 in her 90s. Before the dust settled on that chapter, my parents began to decline, and I spent the better part of a decade traveling back and forth to North Carolina, watching them navigate illness, helping manage their care, and eventually being present when my dad passed. Mom passed away unexpectedly 3 years later. By the time my mother died in 2019, I had been in some version of a caregiving role for sixteen years.
I am not telling you this to invite sympathy. I am telling you this because those sixteen years taught me something I could not have learned any other way. I watched up close what aging looks like when you have done the inner work and when you haven’t. When you have taken care of your body and when you haven’t. When the filters of our life and how we interact with others are still intact and when they are gone.
And what is left when the filters go is not a mystery. It is simply whatever has been living inside you all along.
What I Saw That I Did Not Want to Become
My mother was a complicated woman for most of her life. Difficult in ways I have written about elsewhere on this site, and in ways I spent decades learning to navigate. But nothing quite prepared me for who she became when illness stripped away the last of her self-regulation.
After her open heart surgery, she spent time in a nursing home for physical therapy. She did not understand why we had put her there. She was angry about it, and that anger landed on everyone within reach. She was rude to the woman she shared a room with. She was critical of every nurse, every medication, every person who came through the door. She had become, in the most honest terms I can find, a little devil. And she was determined to make it as awful as possible for everyone around her, no matter how carefully anyone explained what was happening or why.
My sister and I took turns coming up to North Carolina so neither of us had to be away from home for too long at a stretch. I would do a week, then she would come for the next week. On the day my week ended, I walked through the nursing home lobby on my way out and stopped to find the woman in charge. I apologized for my mother’s behavior. I tried not to make excuses for it, just to explain that she wasn’t thinking clearly and was lashing out at everyone around her. Then I got to my car.
And I made a decision.
I decided I would not allow her to hurt me anymore. Not the dramatic kind of decision that gets announced. Just a quiet one made alone in a parking lot. I decided how much of myself I would share with her going forward. I decided which of her attacks would simply bounce off me and which I would not dignify with a response. I stopped taking anything she said personally, not because I stopped caring, but because I understood by then that her anger had nothing to do with me and never really had.
Even years later, when she was home and recovered and better, she would still try to pick fights. I did not participate. I told her directly that I would not engage in the game.
She told me I wasn’t fun anymore.
Yup. I’m not.
The Question I Couldn’t Stop Asking
Somewhere in the middle of all those caregiving years, the question started living in the back of my mind. Not loudly, not as a panic, just as a quiet and persistent awareness.
Who is going to do this for me?
My husband and I married when I was 39 and he was 29. We made peace early on with the likelihood that we would not have children. I was nearly 40, the risks of a later pregnancy were real, and the honest question of whether it was fair to bring a child into a family with an older mother who might not be there when they needed her most. That question had an answer we both understood.
So there are no children to call. No built-in next generation. I joke that my cats are going to have their hands full when I need assisted living, and I mean it more than I’m joking.
My husband is ten years younger than me, which helps the math somewhat. But I am not willing to simply hand that responsibility to him and call it a plan. That is not love. That is a burden. And the idea of becoming a burden to the person I love most is one of the things that motivates me most right now.
June 16, 2025
Nothing special about that date, It was just two weeks before I turned 65, I decided to stop waiting.
I wasn’t happy with how I felt physically. I had known for years that I needed to make changes if I wanted to be able to walk on my own past 70, to still be present for my husband, to not end up like the people I had spent sixteen years caring for. I knew it. And I kept not doing it.
On June 16, 2025, I started intermittent fasting.
I eased into it slowly. Started with a 12/12 window, then moved to 14/10, then settled into 16/8. Sixteen hours of fasting, eight hours to eat. Nothing until noon, then eating from noon to 8pm. No complicated meal plans, no foods I wasn’t allowed to have. I ate what I wanted and what I was craving, and I focused on eating more real food and less processed food. More cooking at home, less eating out, which naturally cut my soda intake from five a day down to two.
Five sodas a day. I’m telling you that number because I think it’s important to be honest about where you’re actually starting from, not where you wish you had been starting from.
For exercise, I started walking. I hate walking as exercise because I do not enjoy being hot, and walking outside in Florida is miserable at almost any hour of any day. So I did not walk outside. I put on my Apple Watch, opened the fitness app, and walked laps around the inside of my house. One mile a day. I held my phone and watched a YouTube video or whatever show I was into. When I hit a mile, I sat down.
That is not a glamorous fitness routine. But it is a real one, and it is the one I actually did.
What the Doctor Offered and What I Said No To
Before I get to the annual physical, I need to tell you about the dentist.
For months leading up to my decision to make changes, I had been scheduling and rescheduling dental appointments because every time I showed up, my blood pressure was too high for them to proceed. I have what is sometimes called white coat syndrome, which is exactly what it sounds like. Doctors and dentists and anything clinical makes me anxious, which makes my blood pressure spike, which creates its own problem on top of the actual blood pressure problem. My doctor had already increased my lisinopril from 20mg to 30mg, which helped some but not enough, and I kept showing up to the dentist and being sent home.
There is something particularly defeating about that cycle. You are already anxious about being there, and then you are told you cannot even have your teeth cleaned because your body is too stressed out to safely proceed.
So when I finally sat down with my doctor to talk about it, I told her clearly what I wanted. I wanted to get my blood pressure under control and I wanted to do it by losing weight and making changes, not by adding more medications. She heard me. She offered Metformin and a further increase in my blood pressure medication. I tried both for a time. I did not feel better and I did not believe I was going to improve by stacking more prescriptions on top of the ones I already had. So shortly after starting Metformin, I had some side effects and took myself off of it after 30 days. Then I started researching what else might help.
She also offered Ozempic.
I never even considered it. The gaunt look I was seeing on people using it purely for weight loss was not what I wanted. I wanted to still look like a person and just be lighter along the way. Quick disclaimer, if you are taking Ozempic type meds, that is you and your doctor’s decision to make. I’m sharing what is working for me. I told her I knew I could stick to the fasting. I had tried it before over the years and knew it worked for me when I committed to it. She understood and we agreed to track my numbers over the following three months and see what happened.
After three months my A1C had improved slightly and my other numbers were moving in the right direction. I told her I wanted to keep going. She agreed.
The next three months took me through the fall and into the holidays. I lost one of my cats in October, which hit hard in the way that losing a beloved pet always does, and then came Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the family gatherings and food that comes with them. I did not follow my plan perfectly through any of that. Some days I missed my eating window. Some days I had an extra soda. I did not beat myself up about any of it. I just got back on the path at 8pm that evening and kept going.
That turned out to be the most important thing I did the whole year. Not the days I was perfect. The days I just got back on the path.
When my bloodwork came back in January I had continued to lose weight and my numbers had improved again.
Over time I also added supplements, introducing each one individually and waiting a few weeks to make sure I tolerated it before adding the next. I want to be clear that I did this in conversation with my doctor and I am not suggesting anyone start a supplement routine without checking with their own. Everyone’s situation is different and what works for one person can interact badly with medications another person is taking. With that said, here is what I am currently taking and why.
For blood pressure I take trimethylglycine, fish oil, and magnesium glycinate. For blood glucose I take trimethylglycine, magnesium glycinate, and berberine, alongside the fasting. For cholesterol I take citrus bergamot and berberine. I take my blood pressure regularly and track it in a health app. I weigh myself every day, and if I am up a pound or two I know it is water and I do not spiral about it. I just keep going.
Since June 2025 I have lost 17 pounds. My blood pressure is coming down. My A1C is improving. My next bloodwork is in May and I am genuinely looking forward to it, which is a sentence I would not have believed I would ever write about a doctor’s appointment. And you know what? If any of my numbers are higher, that’s ok, it’s just a snapshot of that moment, I’m not stressing, I’m just going to keep going.
Why This Time Is Different
I have been aware my whole life that I was bigger than the people around me. That awareness followed me through every decade, through every attempt to do something about it, through the years of tamoxifen after breast cancer treatment that made weight loss feel nearly impossible, through menopause doing what menopause does to a body that is already fighting everything else.
The pattern was always the same. I would get excited about something, commit to it, stick with it for about a month, not see enough change, lose interest, and eventually just say forget it. Not dramatically. Just quietly set it down and go back to whatever I was doing before.
What is different this time is not the method. It is what I am running toward and what I am running away from.
I am running away from very specific things. I do not want to spend the last twenty-five years of my life, and I am hoping for more but I am trying to be realistic, fat and unhealthy and unable to move around freely. I do not want to be on oxygen. I do not want to be short of breath walking from the house to the car. I do not want to trip over oxygen hoses going from the kitchen to the bedroom. I do not want to need the motorized scooter at the grocery store the way my mother did. I watched her in that scooter. I watched what it cost her and what it said about where her health had taken her. I do not want that to be my story.
I also do not want to become the person whose whole identity is their ailments. The one who greets every conversation with a new symptom or complaint, who has narrowed down to nothing but their body’s failures. I watched that happen too. It is a particular kind of loss that is hard to explain unless you have witnessed it up close.
So what I am running toward is simpler than any of that. I want the freedom to walk into a doctor’s appointment and say, okay, we have made progress on the blood pressure and the weight, now let’s talk about my sleep schedule and the tinnitus that has been bothering me. I want to move through my health one problem at a time, on my own terms, with a doctor who is working with me rather than just managing my numbers with prescriptions.
I want to be the fun aunt who is up for anything. I want to still be surprising my husband. I want to be swimming at Aquatica in my 80s and floating in a lazy river with water drops on the camera lens and absolutely no interest in slowing down.
That is not a fantasy. That is a plan. And every pound, every soda I skip, every mile I walk around my living room is part of it.
The Part Nobody Can Plan For
Here is what I actually think about when I think about getting older.
I do not lie awake worrying about it. That is not how I am built and honestly it would be a waste of time. What I believe is this: when the time comes that I need help, my husband will figure out what is best. If I become more than he can manage at home, assisted living exists and there is no shame in using it. If I can stay home but need extra support, we can find a nurse to help. If my mind starts to go, I trust him to get me to the care I need. And if I am completely gone by then, I will still be happy that a handsome man like him is taking such good care of me. Who is that guy?
What I think gives me the most protection going into those years is something I cannot buy or prescribe. It is self awareness.
The people I cared for, my mother, my father, my husband’s grandmother, had all lost the ability to see clearly what their care was costing the people around them. They expected the help. They were sometimes angry when it did not meet their expectations. They could not step outside themselves enough to understand what was being asked of the people who loved them. That is not a criticism. It is what illness and age did to their perception. But it is something I think about.
So far, knock on wood, my mind is strong. I may have a hard time finding a word here and there, which I understand is normal, but I am also doing everything I can to keep my brain active and working. Knitting requires counting, pattern recognition, and problem solving. World of Warcraft, which I have been playing for over twenty years, demands hand-eye coordination, strategy, and learning new things constantly. I am building this blog, learning digital marketing, figuring out funnels and SEO and YouTube algorithms. I am not sitting still and I do not intend to.
But honestly the single biggest thing I want to hold onto is the simplest one. I want to be able to get up and move on my own. That is it. Not a dramatic goal. Not a complicated plan. Just the ability to walk from one room to another without help, to get myself to the car, to keep my own body under my own direction for as long as I possibly can.
Everything I am doing right now is in service of that one thing.
The waves can come. I just want to still be laughing when they do.
Want to read more about my experiences and the adventures I’ve been on? Check out why I Have Napped Everywhere and I Regret Nothing. Or how I asked myself
Is It Too Late to Start Something New after 50?
