Beth Urban

@MelindaHoward4 I hope all goes smoothly

MFH and I will be in Jackson, Mississippi all day tomorrow. MFH will be having more testing in regard to his stroke.

#Bundtcakemonday chocolate rum

@MelindaHoward4 My favorite tree! It’s the little things lol

@burbanrd Wonderful run, Beth!!! Very cool tree☺️

Beautiful weather for a 10k around the neighborhood.

@MelindaHoward4 Salad burger

I’d eat the cucumber and the tomato☺️ We all know the pineapple is a hard pass!

It’s way too easy to sign up for races. I had been considering this, but price going up soon so decided to go for it

@MelindaHoward4 I think fabulous should Ferris Beuller

Happy Sunday ☺️ #duckmom

@MelindaHoward4 I’m so sorry for your loss

My cousin suffered an aneurism after falling and hitting his head. They took him off life support late yesterday. He’s one of my favorite cousins (if you’re allowed to have favorites). This makes me very sad.

@MelindaHoward4 Oh no!

*Drained my water bottle today, came home and peed blood. I think my kidneys are getting worse.

Happy #PinkWednesday☺️ Post run sweaty selfie but 7.25 miles on a breezy Mississippi morning! Started a little late because…heat accumulation 🥰🔥 Bumped into my friend and we had fun chatting the miles away! #IRun4Aiden #MSCoffeeRunners #runningafter60 @Orangemud

#Bundtcakemonday Mango Jalapeño. Came out great

Don’t let your life "narrow." I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The thing I watch happen to people — more than any injury or surgery — is what I call the narrowing. Most of my patients have no idea it’s happening. They think it’s just aging. It’s not. The narrowing is the slow shrinking of what your body allows you to do — or what you assume your body can or should be doing at your age. You used to carry four grocery bags. Now you take two. You used to sit on the floor with the grandkids. Now you sit on the couch. The overhead bin in the airplane? Not anymore. But... Nobody intentionally decides to narrow their life. Your body quietly loses some capacity, your daily choices adjust to the loss, and within a few years, the smaller version is your new normal. And many of us just normalize these changes. Patients tell me about the narrowing every single day. They just don’t use that word. They say, “I can’t do what I used to do.” They say, “That’s just what happens at my age.” And they say it as if it’s a fundamental law of physics. Yes — some decline is real. VO2 max drops. Max heart rate drops. Strength drops. Power drops faster than strength. Proprioception drops. But the unavoidable decline is only a small fraction of what most people are actually losing. The rest, the part that turns a sixty-year-old into a frail seventy-year-old, is not aging. It is disuse. The cruelest part is that people normalize it. They don’t question it. They talk about capacities they’ve lost as if losing them was scheduled. Once the narrowing starts, it slowly accelerates on its own. You stop lifting heavy things. Your muscles lose fast-twitch fibers. You get weaker. You lift even less. You lose more. The loss feels like aging. You accept it. The loop tightens, and your world narrows. VO2 max declines about 10% per decade in sedentary adults. Strength declines slowly starting in the forties. Power declines about twice as fast as strength after fifty. Bone density drops. Balance degrades. Get over it — you still have agency over all of these. The slope and severity of each of those declines are profoundly modifiable with training. The sedentary decline curves are not the same as the natural human decline curves. They are the untrained decline curves. Trained adults in their seventies routinely outperform untrained adults in their fifties. The body remains responsive to training well into the seventies and eighties. This is one of the best-established findings in the aging literature. But how many doctors tell their patients about this? The patients who reverse the narrowing are not the ones with the best genetics, the best knees, or the best circumstances. They are the ones who decided to do something. Something made them stop accepting the losses as inevitable, and they started doing things differently. What have you already stopped doing? Not what you can’t do, exactly. I'm not talking about old injuries that have ruined a joint, or those of you who have disabilities... For the rest... the sedentary.... What have you quietly stopped doing over the last five or ten years, without ever making a real decision about it? And more importantly, did your body actually tell you to stop, or did you assume you needed to? Much of the narrowing in your life right now is reversible. I have watched it happen in thousands of patients. It is not a miracle. It is just the body doing what the body does when you start asking it to do something again. The door you thought had closed is usually still open. I am not a one-off. I am a sixty-two-year-old who decided not to let my life narrow, and who did the specific work to back up the decision, for long enough that the work is now visible from the outside. You can do this too. At any age, I am likely to be talking to. Start where you are. In a relatively long post on SubSt, I discussed how my observations shape my training regimen below. This training is largely based on observing thousands of people over the last 25 years. Link in reply...

Nothing to be proud of…! This is the type of deception that good doctors must challenge and stop! 🛑

So many keyboard warriors hiding behind usernames, shaming people for needing medical treatment… But let’s be honest, you wouldn’t have the guts to say that to someone’s face. Not to someone with cancer. Not to someone with a genetic condition. Not to someone who did everything “right” and still got sick. It’s easy to judge from behind a screen. It’s a lot harder to look someone in the eye and tell them they should’ve just “tried harder.”

Your muscles and your brain are in constant conversation. Most people have no idea this conversation is happening — or what's at stake when it goes quiet. Many of you fear dementia far more than a heart attack or a diabetes diagnosis... so this post matters. New post on the muscle-brain axis. A thread. 🧵

Miss these 2 stinkers. Tessa-dog just passed 2/11 and Barnabas passed in 2021

@MelindaHoward4 Omg! I am so sorry to hear this. Sending positive energy for recovery

MFH collapsed tonight during dinner and was airlifted to a Jackson, Mississippi hospital. He’s had a stroke. I’m at the hospital now and waiting to learn more.

✨ Weight loss is exciting because the scale moves. But Weight Loss Maintenance can be just as motivating—if we redefine the win. 💪⚖️ 5 ways to help your patients move from the Weight Loss Phase to the Weightless Phase: 1️⃣ Call it something more fun Not "Maintenance" → Mastery / Optimization / Fine-Tuning 2️⃣ Change the scoreboard It's less about pounds and more about Function / Comfort: 🏃‍♀️ Stairs without stopping 😴 Better sleep 👖 Clothes fitting comfortably 👧 Keeping up with kids/grandkids 3️⃣ Create weight-independent goals 🎯 1-rep max 🚶‍♂️ Daily walk streak ✈️ Vacation without overthinking 4️⃣ Redefine success and setbacks A 5 lbs. fluctuation is data, not failure 📈 Success = Awareness that we (and our biology) change with time, Accept change as normal, and Adjust your strategy 5️⃣ Anchor identity differently "I'm regaining weight" → "I'm someone who prioritizes and protects my health.” ❤️ #ObesityMedicine #WeightLossMaintenance

In a world where you can be anything, be a number 50

Baby Octopus Emerging from Eggs 🐙✨