Starting Again: How Pilates and Ballroom Dancing Are Shaping My Strongest Years Yet

In almost all fitness and wellness environments, the body is viewed as either a problem to resolve or a mechanical device to sustain. Movement is typically seen as an obligation, a target to attain, or a justification for expenditure. In those models, the body serves as a cost center — reactive management occurs when some form of breakdown has occurred.

I started tracking my muscle mass, body fat, and more with InBody and LifeBase. Here's how using real data, not guesswork, is empowering my health and longevity journey at 73.

Most people have been taught to think about health the wrong way. Health is treated as a cost — something to manage, minimize, insure against, or postpone dealing with until something breaks. In that framing, wellness becomes episodic: a class here, a program there, a burst of effort followed by drift. Even the most well-intentioned people end up cycling between urgency and neglect. That framing error quietly determines everything that follows. Because if health is a cost, the goal becomes spending as little as possible — of time, attention, money, and effort. And costs, by definition, are something we try to reduce.