KEY POINTS:
According to epidemiologists, a woman who reaches the age of 50, free of cancer and heart disease can expect to live to 92. Experts keep telling us we have to exercise more. Is it just me? Shopping isn't enough? Sex isn't enough? Singing in the choir isn't enough? Ironing isn't enough?
We now know that too much exercise is extremely bad for you. It takes away from more important activities such as eating, cooking, drinking and flirting. It leads to anorexia, death, or worse, encourages competition with inanimate machines and fosters self-righteousness. And who needs to lose two hours from their day getting to a gym, changing, pumping, reaffirming that everyone else and their dog looks better than you, showering, getting back? And who needs to sweat - aren't power surges bad enough? And who needs to pay for this torture? Structured exercise is like structured religion - it's all so joyless and guilty-making unless you are a genuinely sporty type and enjoy it anyway. The terrifying term "no pain no gain" was lifted from the Catholic priest's handbook - only suffering will bring redemption. You are being asked to actually turn against your own body.
The thing with exercise is to make it incidental - don't take the lift or the escalator - walk up all stairs; walk or bicycle to work if you can; don't take the car if the restaurant is within walking distance; if you're near a beach - don't sit on it, take your shoes off and walk on it; if you're in the water - don't float like a dolphin, walk in it; go for a walk in the evening or in the morning. The thing that really puts me off is the ugly, unflattering outfit you have to wear for exercise - only triathletes look good in spandex. So wear what you feel like wearing - comfortable but stylish shoes, a skirt if you want, and dark glasses so no one knows who the nutcase is, walking purposefully around the neighbourhood in Marni pants.
The true secret to staying young, beautiful and healthy forever is boringly simple - diet. Fruit and vegetables, fruit and vegetables, fruit and vegetables. The risk of heart disease and cancer, especially of the colon and the breast, can be cut by as much as 40 per cent if you eat lots of fruit and veggies. This small change in your lifestyle reaps big rewards. It's also a good idea to drink one or two glasses of red wine daily (white wine is best for removing stains and disinfecting); eat at least two squares of dark chocolate a day; drink as much coffee as you like; have as much sex as you can; and eat lots of fish for your brain.
Women's magazines scream out at us from every second page that eternal youth is within our grasp. It isn't called eternal youth - it's called skin care and has pseudoscientific names like cellular-active-
youth-complex, but it means eternal youth. They say when a woman buys a tiny pot of $450 La Prairie, she is not buying face cream, she is buying hope. Collagen, elastin, Botafirm and liposomes are the big players but I happen to know that Elizabeth Arden capsules do not prevent wrinkles because guess what? I have a mirror. The advertising works on you subliminally. You find yourself buying expensive face creams against your will merely by walking across the ground floor of any department store. Personally, I can't get from the front door to the escalator without thinking - but what if they do work, what if Ralph Nader is wrong and Estee Lauder is right? For months afterwards, having spent the equivalent of some small African republic's GDP on a pot of eternal youth and a bottle of perfume, I walk around wondering why my friends are not gasping at my rejuvenated, dramatically improved skin texture.
It used to be just creams, now it is invasive surgical procedures involving needles ("This needle is very, very fine, Peta." So why does it feel like a bread knife?), electric shocks, burning, cutting, filling and tucking. Chunks of female flesh are being thrown out wholesale. Nowadays you don't just get "work" done when you're falling apart and even your goddamn knees are going south; now you consider "preventative" cosmetic procedures. Hollywood actresses are losing work because they are so botoxed, they can no longer show emotion. In my experience, everything is fine until you're 45, then it quickly becomes reality TV - you look in the mirror and ask, how did this happen? I'm only 27.
We now live in a frighteningly youth-oriented society. I was an idiot when I was young and passably pretty - who convinced us we all want to revisit that? Part of it is that our life expectancy has increased and a teenage girl today can expect to live to 83. The last time a girl stops wanting to be older and more grown up is when she turns 20. From then on in we become younger - 30 is 20, 50 is 40, and so on. And the thing is, it's not just physical - we are supposed to act younger than we are, seem younger, perform younger. People are supposed to say, isn't she amazing - still out there, still achieving, still having adventures, still having love affairs with younger men. I go into this younger man/older woman thing in more detail in my chapter on sex, but from my observations, younger men make the first moves on older women, it's not usually the other way around.
* Illustration and text extracted from Can We Help It If We're Fabulous? by Peta Mathias (Penguin, $35).
Out from August 4.
