Arlyce was 69 years old when she heard the clock.
Not a loud one. She describes it as a little clock in her head, ticking while her daughter’s wedding was approaching and her own 70th birthday sat just behind it. She had been plant based since 2013, so food was not new territory for her. But she had never, in her entire life, done strength training. Not once. And standing at the edge of a new decade, she started thinking less about how she would look in the wedding photos and more about the next 20 or 30 years of her life, and whether her body would be strong enough to actually live them.
She could have taken the fast road. She looked into a GLP1. She thought about a crash diet to get the pounds off by a deadline. Then she said the sentence that changed everything for her: “I don’t have time to be going back and forth.” At 69, the yo yo was not just frustrating, it was expensive, paid in the only currency that does not refill. So she chose the slow road on purpose. She wanted bone health, muscle health, flexibility, and balance. She wanted habits that would still be standing at 80, not a result that evaporated by summer.
That is the first thing I hope you take from her. The right time to do this properly is whatever age you are when you finally decide the quick fix is not a fix at all.
The second thing is what happened to her identity along the way, because it did not arrive through motivation. It arrived through repetition. One ordinary day, running errands, a thought crossed her mind out of nowhere: “Oh my gosh, I need to get home to do my workout.”
She laughed when she told me, because she had to ask herself, who is this person? That had never happened to her before. She had simply kept showing up, awkwardly at first, watching the exercise videos on her phone and thinking her body did not move that way, until one day her body did. The bridges she once had to talk herself through, engage your core, step by step, became movements she no longer has to think about. Identity does not come before the action. It is the receipt the action leaves behind.
From there, her whole life started reorganizing itself around the person she was becoming. She travels often, and travel used to be where good intentions went to be postponed.
Now she packs her plant protein, tucks resistance bands into her bag, and reads the restaurant menu before she ever sits down, hunting for the baked potato hiding in the steak dinner and the sauce that would work beautifully on her salad.
When she stays in someone else’s home and eats food she would never choose, she no longer declares the whole thing ruined and quits. She told me she has full confidence now that she can simply come home and get back on track, because a detour is not a dead end.
Her Mavy Wellness coach taught her that early, and she has carried it like a compass ever since: a missed workout or an off plan meal is not a failure.
It is just data. You ask what happened, you learn from it, and you keep going, without spending one minute beating yourself up.
And then there are the moments that tell you what strength is actually for. This summer she swam out to a floating platform on a lake, the one with no ladder, just handholds, and she almost did not try it because she did not want to be embarrassed in front of everyone if she could not get up.
She grabbed hold and pulled herself up easily, at 70 years old, and felt how great it was.
Last month she carried heavy boxes at her daughter’s event while younger people kept trying to take them out of her arms, and she kept telling them, no, I got it. Her daughter hugged her recently and said, “Mom, you’re so little.” Her husband, who walks eight to ten miles a day, rain or shine, tells her constantly how proud he is.
For her 70th birthday she did not choose a restaurant. She chose a trail, seven rocky miles to the highest point in Minnesota, hiked with her family.
On the way out she told them, “It’s my 70th birthday, and I feel so alive today.” She is already coming for the highest point in North Dakota, and she is dreaming about what 75 might look like. Eleven months. Twenty three pounds. That is all it took to go from a woman who had never lifted a weight to a woman planning which mountain comes next.
Her advice to anyone listening was simple, and I will give it to you the way she gave it to me. You are worth the investment, of time and of help. Get a coach, she said, the way you would get help with anything that matters, because trying to figure it all out alone is the longest road there is.
And get going. Do not wait for a birthday with a zero in it to give yourself permission.
If Arlyce’s story sounds like the chapter you are standing in, I want to invite you to come learn with us live. On Saturday, October 24 at 9 am Pacific, 12 pm Eastern, Ivy and I are teaching our next live masterclass, How to Structure a Full Day of Eating to Improve Your Body Composition and Get Stronger After 50.
We will be in our kitchen, building a full day of whole food plant based eating in real time, the calories, the protein, and the simple recipes we actually use. It is live only, there is no replay, and it is built for exactly where you are right now.
Reserve your seat here: https://mavywellness.com/live
Or if you can’t wait to get started on your transformation you can get more info here
Arlyce heard a clock at 69 and decided it was not counting down. It was calling her up. Yours can too.
You can watch Arlyce’s Success Story podcast episode I did with her here:
