Own Every Year

I’m over 50 now, old enough to know that wellness isn’t a finish line but a daily negotiation with the body you’ve earned. The secret isn’t glamour or grit. It’s the quiet, relentless consistency of showing up, even when no one’s watching and nothing feels cinematic. And through it all, I try to stay mindful, paying attention to the small moments that remind me I’m still here, still fighting, still becoming.

[owneveryyear]

I started a new personal training business: Own Every Year: A Midlife Fitness Philosophy for Men Who Weren’t Born in the Gym

I’m talking to certain kind of man here.

Not the former college linebacker who “just needs to drop 30 pounds and get back to fighting weight.”

Not the guy who peaked at 19 and has been chasing ghosts ever since.

I’m talking to the rest of us, the regular men. The ones who spent their twenties and thirties building careers, raising families, paying mortgages, and waking up one day in a body that feels a little foreign.

Maybe you were never athletic.

Maybe you never cared.

But now, something inside you is whispering that it’s time to make a change.

This is where the Own Every Year philosophy begins.

Not with shame. Not with nostalgia. Not with some fantasy of who you “should” have been. But with who you are, right now, in this moment.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Older

Aging isn’t a failure. It’s the most democratic thing in the world; everyone does it, whether they like it or not. The trick isn’t to fight it like some doomed rebellion. The trick is to meet it with a little dignity, a little humor, and a willingness to do the work.

You don’t need to rewind the clock. You don’t need to “get back” to anything. You’re not going backward. You’re going forward. And the only question that matters is:

What kind of man do you want to be for the years you still have?

Be Here Now

Forget the mythical version of yourself who would’ve started training at 25 “if only life hadn’t gotten in the way.” That guy doesn’t exist. The only version of you that matters is the one reading this sentence.

So we focus on today.

This hour.

This rep.

This meal.

This walk around the block.

Small, unglamorous steps. The kind that don’t get applause but change your life anyway.

That’s the heart of the Own Every Year method: Showing up for yourself in the present tense.

Consistency Beats Excitement

Anyone can get fired up for a week. Anyone can buy the shoes, download the app, and swear this time will be different. But excitement burns out fast. Consistency is the quiet, stubborn engine that actually moves you forward.

You don’t need heroic workouts. You don’t need to train like a Navy SEAL. You need habits you can repeat on a Tuesday night after a long day at work. You need routines that survive stress, travel, kids’ schedules, and the general chaos of midlife.

Consistency is the real flex.

The Five Pillars of Wellness

Your health isn’t one thing, it’s a system.

A structure. A house with five load‑bearing pillars.

Ignore one, and the whole thing leans. Build all five, and you become resilient in a way that feels almost unfair.

1. Nutrition

You can’t out-train a bad diet. You can’t outrun it, out-lift it, or out-sweat it. Food is fuel, but it’s also identity, culture, comfort, and habit. We don’t chase perfection, we chase awareness and better choices, one meal at a time.

2. Rest and Recovery

Sleep is the most underrated performance enhancer on earth. Recovery isn’t laziness; it’s construction time. Your body repairs itself in the quiet hours. Respect that, and everything else gets easier.

3. Cardiorespiratory Fitness

Cardio isn’t punishment. It’s maintenance for the machine. You don’t need to love running. You just need to move in a way that keeps your heart honest: walking, rowing, cycling, dancing, whatever keeps you coming back.

4. Strength Building

Muscle is the armor of midlife.

It protects your joints, your bones, your posture, your metabolism, your confidence. You don’t need to become a bodybuilder. You just need to get stronger than you were last month.

5. Mental and Emotional Well‑Being

If your mind is a mess, your body doesn’t stand a chance. Stress, anxiety, burnout, shame; these things sabotage progress faster than any skipped workout. Mental health is not optional. It’s a pillar, not an accessory.

No Shame in Modern Tools

Let’s be blunt: We live in a world with extraordinary medical advancements. Why pretend we’re still in the Stone Age?

If your hormones are low, testosterone therapy is a legitimate tool. If your metabolism is fighting you, GLP‑1 medications are a legitimate tool. If your doctor recommends something that helps you live longer, feel better, or function at a higher level, why wouldn’t you use it?

There is no moral purity test for getting healthy. There is only what works.

Own Every Year

This isn’t about chasing youth. It’s about owning your life; every year of it, from here on out. It’s about building a body and mind that can carry you through the second half of your story with strength, clarity, and purpose.

You don’t need to be perfect.

You don’t need to be an athlete.

You just need to start.

And if you’re ready, I’m here to help you do exactly that.

[g698]

[su-mikas]

RIP

[dafancyuhinspiration]

[owneveryyear]

Slow Grind, Real Gains: Why Sustainable Weight Loss Beats the Quick Fix

I dropped almost 40 pounds this past year.

On paper, that looks impressive. It feels impressive.

But it also sent me down a rabbit hole.

We’re all told the same thing: dial in your nutrition, train consistently, get your sleep, and you can lose two pounds a week. Easy math, right? Except when I looked at my own graph, the thought hit me like a brick: if that were true, I should’ve lost 104 pounds. Which is absurd. I didn’t even have 104 pounds to lose. I needed to lose maybe 50, maybe 60 at the absolute outside. And I’m almost there. But the old mindset still lingered, whispering that I should’ve done it faster.

So I dug in to the research. Turns out that “two pounds a week” is not a target; it’s a ceiling.

A maximum.

Push past it and your body starts throwing biological flare guns into the sky. Rapid weight loss is a stress signal, not a badge of honor.

Looking back at the year, I hit two pounds a week here and there. Once I somehow dropped three. But the real, unsexy truth is that I averaged 0.76 pounds a week. Some weeks I lost nothing. Some weeks I gained. I hit plateaus.

I’m in one right now, hovering between 169 and 171 for five straight weeks.

And yet … this is exactly what sustainable progress looks like. Keep that two pounds as your maximum, not your expectation. Aim instead for the slow, steady grind, half a pound to a pound a week.

Do that for a year and you’re down 50 pounds.

Do it for two and you’ve changed your life.

This whole thing, fitness, health, aging well … it’s a marathon.

A long, slow, stubborn march.

Not a sprint with a finish line taped to some arbitrary date on the calendar.

[owneveryyear]

Embracing a Sustainable Fitness Rhythm

There’s a special kind of stupidity that hits you in your fifties: the ghost of your thirty‑five‑year‑old self whispering bad ideas in your ear. Mine keeps telling me the same thing: you’re stalling because you’re not working hard enough. More weight. More miles. More grind. The old lie dressed up like ambition.

But the last month has felt like waking up inside a borrowed body. Legs stiff as rebar. Hips creaking like an old fishing boat. Back and shoulders filing formal complaints every morning before coffee. Pain with a capital P, the kind that doesn’t feel noble or earned, just dumb.

So I’m trying something different. Something that would’ve sounded like heresy to the younger me:

Day 1: Weights Day 2: Run Day 3: Rest Repeat. Forever

A three‑day rhythm that doesn’t care about Mondays or weekends or the neat little boxes on a calendar. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t fit into a color‑coded spreadsheet. But it fits into the long game, the only game that matters when you’re old enough to know better.

Today is the second rest day in this new cycle. I’m sitting in it, letting the engine cool, noticing that maybe the machine feels a little less angry. Tomorrow’s weight session will tell the truth. It always does.

But for the first time in a while, I’m not trying to outrun time. I’m trying to work with it. And that feels like progress.

Resting cat tax:

[coffeecatsandhealth]

Reblog this if you're a fitblr, healthblr, runblr, health or fitness blog in 2024. I'm trying to max out my dash with healthy and inspiring stuff and I always need more people to follow

[coffeecatsandhealth]

Reblogging this again for 2026!

Who's active in 2026???

[m0tiv8me]

Present!

📡 Signal boost

[owneveryyear]

When Soul Meets Scale: The Slow Death of Meaning in Work

A particular kind of fatigue settles in after three decades in the same line of work. Not the good kind; that type of earned exhaustion after a long day doing something that still matters but the slow, creeping rot that comes from watching a place you once believed in drift into something unrecognizable.

I’ve worn a lot of hats in my field.

Practitioner, consultant, trainer, lobbyist, sales exec, and now, full circle back to lobbying again.

I’ve seen the sausage made from every angle. I’ve seen the idealism, the grit, the quiet heroism of people who actually give a fuck. And I’ve seen the other side too: the ego, the politics, the slow corporate calcification that turns good ideas into quarterly talking points.

The organization I work for still has a mission statement I believe in.

Deeply.

Hell, I’ve built a career on believing in it. But somewhere along the way, maybe in the last year, maybe earlier, the tone at the top shifted.

Growth became the altar, and everything else became the sacrifice.

Ethics, values, the stuff we used to brag about in interviews and onboarding sessions . . . all suddenly negotiable if they got in the way of another percentage point on a slide deck.

Worse, a few of the folks in the big chairs have gone full red‑pill philosopher‑king. The kind of guys who read one too many hustle‑bro manifestos and decided empathy is for the weak.

Criticism? “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Collaboration? “Do it my way or get out of the way.”

It’s the corporate equivalent of a bar fight started by someone who’s never actually been punched.

And the culture? Holy Fuck, the culture. When I joined, we were 500 people trying to do something meaningful. Now we’re over 6,000, and it feels like we’ve traded soul for scale.

It’s a familiar story in tech: grow fast, lose the plot, pretend it’s all part of the plan. I’ve watched enough companies go down this road to know the ending isn’t pretty.

The part that stings is how little fight I have left for it.

I’m 56. I’ve got maybe three and a half years before I can retire without sweating the math. I’m not quite there yet, but close enough to see the finish line shimmering in the distance like a mirage. And every day it gets harder to muster the energy to keep pushing the boulder uphill for people who seem hell‑bent on rolling it back down.

Maybe that’s just age talking.

Maybe it’s wisdom.

Maybe it’s the realization that loyalty is a two‑way street, and I’ve been driving it solo for too long.

But I know this: I’m tired. Not defeated, not broken, just tired in that bone-deep way that tells you something has to change. And maybe the change isn’t dramatic. Maybe it’s just holding on, doing the work with integrity, and walking out on my own terms when the clock finally hits zero.

Until then, I’ll keep showing up. But I won’t pretend I don’t see what’s happening.

And I won’t pretend it doesn’t hurt to watch something you once loved lose its way.

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️

[coffeecatsandhealth]

[389]

[owneveryyear]

Modern Exploration and Every Day Discovery

There’s a kind of exploration that doesn’t require crampons, sherpas, or a summit selfie. No oxygen tanks. No flags planted in the snow. Just a willingness to step outside the soft, padded cell of your daily routine and let the world, our messy, loud, unfiltered world, touch you.

In an age where everything is optimized, filtered, and pre‑reviewed by strangers you’ll never meet, choosing to wander without a script feels almost rebellious.

A small act of civil disobedience against the algorithm.

You don’t need a passport stamp to feel that jolt of discovery. Sometimes it’s as simple as walking into a bookstore you’ve never noticed before, the kind with crooked shelves and a cat that looks like it’s judging your taste. You pick up a novel you’ve never heard of, written by someone whose name you can’t pronounce, and suddenly you’re somewhere else. You’re inside another mind, another life.

That’s exploration.

That’s travel.

No TSA line required.

Or maybe it’s a movie you watch on a whim.

Something foreign, subtitled, slow. The kind of film that doesn’t care if you’re bored. You sit there, letting it wash over you, and realize you’ve been living on a steady diet of the same three genres for years. You’ve been eating the cinematic equivalent of chicken and rice. Safe. Predictable. Then this strange little film cracks your skull open just enough to remind you that art is supposed to make you feel something other than comfortable.

Food is the easiest passport of all.

A bowl of noodles in a strip‑mall joint where the menu is laminated and the staff barely looks up. A taco truck parked behind a gas station. A dish you can’t identify, served by someone who doesn’t speak your language but understands hunger better than any Michelin inspector. You take a bite, and for a moment you’re connected to a place you’ve never been, to people you’ll never meet.

That’s the magic.

That’s the whole point.

And then there are the cities; the real ones, not the sanitized downtowns built for conventions and Instagram. The cities where you get lost on purpose. Where you follow the sound of music down an alley or step into a bar because the neon sign looks like it’s survived three decades of bad decisions. You sit, you listen, you watch. You learn more about humanity in an hour of eavesdropping than you ever will from a think piece.

The truth is, most of us live inside bubbles so thick we forget they’re there.

We curate our feeds, our friends, our routines. We mistake familiarity for safety, sameness for wisdom. But the big, unruly, and contradictory world doesn’t care about your bubble. It’s out there, humming, bustling, arguing, laughing, burning, rebuilding. And it’s begging you to come take a look.

Exploration in the modern age isn’t about conquering anything. It’s about surrender. Surrendering to curiosity, to discomfort, to the possibility that you might be wrong about how things work. It’s about letting the world surprise you again. And if you’re lucky, if you’re open, you might just find that the most unexpected discovery is yourself:

Stripped of certainty.

Wide‑eyed.

Awake.

[owneveryyear]

Do you have an Onlyfans?

Seriously?

No.

[majestictortoise]

puttering around the house is an underrated form a self-care. make some tea or coffee. put on a podcast. sort the mail. tidy some pillows and fold some blankets. start the laundry. thaw some soup. just casually wander around aimlessly doing little things to make your space and life a little nicer. who cares if you get distracted or only do a little. you aren't being productive. you're puttering.

[owneveryyear]

Puttering is literally one of my favorite activities.

[hippie-janessa-deactivated20190]

[angelsenvy55]

[owneveryyear]

I found the "glimmer" post again that I referenced in my previous post.

[7pmest]

Work chapstick. Car chapstick. Nightstand chapstick. Bathroom chapstick. Jacket pocket chapstick.Bag chapstick. You have to be prepared.

[owneveryyear]

Finding Joy in the Mundane

I saw a post earlier today (now lost to the algorithm and infinite scroll) that has been resonating with me for hours. The details of it are gone, but the soul of it is this: There’s a certain kind of person; maybe you know them, maybe you are them, who builds their whole identity out of being an intellectual. The deep thinker. The one who reads the heavy books, dissects the human condition, marinates in self‑improvement like it’s a full‑time job.

And sure, that stuff matters.

It sharpens you. It keeps you awake.

But if you’re not careful, it also eats your head alive. Too much time in the echo chamber of your own mind and you start mistaking the noise for truth. You forget that life isn’t meant to be solved. It’s meant to be lived.

So step outside. Touch the damn world. Watch a trashy reality show without apologizing for it. Blast the kind of music critics sneer at (Motley Crue still slaps, and I’m done pretending otherwise). Eat something messy. Laugh at something stupid. Let yourself be a person instead of a dissertation.

And today I stumbled across another post, now lost, and a word that feels like a lifeline in the grim chaos of today's reality: glimmer.

The opposite of a trigger.

A glimmer is one of those tiny, almost throwaway moments that hits you with a flash of joy, peace, gratitude; whatever flavor of good your nervous system still recognizes. The trick is training yourself to notice them. Once you start looking, they multiply.

A warm cup in your hands. A stranger holding a door. Sunlight hitting the kitchen counter just right. The way a cat's whiskers twitch as they sleep.

Small, quiet reminders that the world isn’t all sharp edges.

Maybe that’s the real work. Not becoming some enlightened monk of the mind, but learning to spot the little sparks that make the whole mess worth it.

The mundane.

The ordinary.

The human.