OverSixty January 2023 Issue

8 OPINION ISSUE 3 | JANUARY 2023 | OVERSIXTY.COM.AU • Food, Home and Garden • Health • Advice & True Stories • Culture • Travel • Podcasts • Games, Puzzles and Jokes A U S T R A L I A Visit the Reader’s Digest website at for unique and engaging content www.readersdigest.com.au it can do and not dwell on what it can’t.” Pragmatic views of the body have also come from some others. Journalist Cat Ro- die, for example, pointed out that “your body isn’t who you are. It’s just a vehicle that allows you to move around the world.” For those people who are trying, nonetheless, to come to terms with their changing ap- pearance, psychotherapist Vivian Diller, co- author of Face It: What Women Really Feel as their Looks Change , has this advice: “Our goal needs to be to achieve a balance as we try to look the best we can for our age. It’s not about trying to look like our former selves.” According to sciencewriter Temma Ehren- feld, however, the ideal is to achieve “body- peace”. In a Psychology Today article in 2012, she defined this as the successful entry “into a nurturing relationship with our body, our mind and our whole being. This takes a lot of kindness, patience, gentleness, honesty and vulnerability.” In her 60s, journalist Adele Horin wrote graphically about how she attained this, DR ANNE RING OPINION A t the age of 59, the much-missed Carrie Fisher was being criticised by disaffect- ed fans for displaying her then-ageing body as an older Princess Leia in Star Wars: Epi- sode VII – The Force Awaken s. Her assertive helped by her memories of being surround- ed, in her 50s, by naked women in a Hungar- ian bath house. All these women, she wrote in her Coming of Age blog, were in their 70s and displayed their “jiggly, saggy, crinkly, dancing flesh with sheer nonchalance”, car- ing not a jot “what the world thought”. And it was thememory of these women that helped her – more than ten years later – to overcome her embarrassment at displaying her naked body to a masseur. “And then,” she wrote, “I thought of the women in Budapest. The spir- it! The confidence! I’ll try some of that. A lot’s written on my body. It’s the record of what I’ve survived. I’m learning to like it.” At the same time, there is nothing wrong with doing the best for our bodies. And health writer Paula Goodyer highlighted, in The Sydney Morning Herald , the benefits at any age, in exercising for fitness and strength, with the bonus that “how good you look on the outside can depend a lot on what’s going on under your skin with flexibility, posture and muscle tone.” response to that was an absolute refusal to be defined by her physical appearance. Instead, she was fully accepting of a body that she de- scribed, simply, as “my brain bag, it hauls me around to those places and in front of faces where there’s something to say or see”. She gilded that lily by adding that “youth and beauty are not accomplishments; they’re the temporary happy by-products of time and/or DNA. Don’t hold your breath for either.” Comedian Judith Lucy got there at a somewhat younger age, saying – during her highly informative Overwhelmed and Dy- ing podcast – that “at 51 ... I have actually reached a point of loving my body for what Health sociologist Dr Anne Ring examines how to gain acceptance of our bodies as we age Body peace is ... a nurturing relationship with our body, our mind and our whole being Attaining older-body peace OPINION Edited from Dr Anne Ring’s new book Engaging with Ageing: What Matters as We Grow Older , released October 2022 Photo: Getty Images