Johnson: Middle age weighs on us all

For most, it happens slowly over the years, a pound here and there to match the pigment-free hairs that sprout randomly, and then one day it’s there and there’s no going back.

It’s lovingly referred to as middle age, a clever term derived to describe the fact that you’re halfway to your destination (theoretically anyway since the “destination” isn’t usually predictable).

link Sharna Johnson

In search of ponies

Either way — glass half-empty or glass half-full — experiencing the middle of life is one of the many stages people pass through during the great journey.

Humans are not alone, however, and even if they don’t have clever terms to identify the stages, all species are bound to experience a beginning, middle and end, respectively.

Logically, the middle of any creature’s life is marked as a point equally positioned between the start and the finish of life, which means if you’re a 2-week-old housefly, it’s time to start thinking seriously about retirement.

A Greenland shark, on the other hand, and it’s 100 years before you start wondering where all that time went.

Beyond the chronological inevitability of it all, the middle years are also a time when all those years (or days in the case of the short-lived) of eating with wanton disregard start to catch up, often quickly and with a vengeance.

For humans, the middle-aged weight gain takes on shapes we affectionately refer to as spare tires and pears, but for the four-legged, it is a little different.

In the dog’s case, it’s more likely that one day you notice a barrel is working its way forward from the tail, threatening to overtake the pooch’s ever-shrinking head.

The cat, on the other hand, starts to look like its undercarriage is reaching for the floor, or worse yet, the once frisky feline appears to be on a mission to be sure not so much as an inch of its fleece-lined bed ever sees the light of day again.

Though it may seem to happen overnight, in reality the physical changes to middle-aged pets (and humans, no doubt) take place gradually and at an almost unnoticeable rate, starting long before they are obvious.

Labrador retrievers, a British study found, begin gaining weight at a rate of approximately 2 pounds annually between the ages of 1 and 4, which means they continue to pack on the pounds long after reaching adulthood at 18 months.

By the time they have reached 4 — about middle age for a Labrador — they have been steadily increasing their size and are facing an increased risk of obesity in their later years.

Genetics do play a role, and research has shown Labrador retrievers as a breed are particularly inclined to becoming overweight with age, but blaming genetics doesn’t quite cut it all the time.

Though genetics factor into things, researchers also found that often there were lifestyle issues that are known to impact weight gain present in the more than 4,000 dogs they studied.

Even though food intake was often reduced as dogs aged, those dogs whose activities were restricted because of where they lived and dogs living in homes with children were found to exercise less and weigh more than others, particularly in comparison to working dogs that exercised regularly.

Regardless of the species, the passage of time is inevitable, there simply is no way around the stages of life and the clock only stops moving, well, when it stops.

Like labradors, some will find age brings the challenge of a lifetime, but, genetics or not, it also comes with a convincing reason to walk the dog a whole lot more often.

Sharna Johnson is a writer who is always searching for ponies. You can reach her at:

insearchofponies

@gmail.com