Dr. Vonda Wright Wants You to Age Like You Mean It
At some point, most of us are confronted with the realities of aging. Maybe we feel a little stiffer when we get out of bed in the morning or start to notice it takes longer to recover from workouts. Perhaps we see a few more wrinkles when we look at pictures of ourselves, or realize we have a growing collection of reading glasses tucked into every corner of the house.
It can be tempting to take these as signs of decline. Dr. Vonda Wright wants us to change our mindset.
The orthopedic surgeon, researcher, and author believes aging isn’t about slowing down, but rather about stepping into a new season of strength, resilience, and renewed purpose. The Sunday Paper sat down with Dr. Wright to talk about her new book Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Aging with Power, and how we can reframe aging as an opportunity to live with more intention, power, confidence, and grace.
A CONVERSATION WITH VONDA WRIGHT, MD
What does it mean to be “unbreakable” as we age?
I’ll make a little joke here, but it’s the absolute truth: Growing old is not for sissies. Aging is the most natural things we do—but it’s also one of the hardest things we do. I titled the book Unbreakable as a nod to my work as an orthopedic surgeon, but this book is about so much more than bones. This is a book about preparing for the next 40 years of your life in a way that helps you avoid becoming frail. Unbreakable is about equipping women to age in a different way.
It’s also a mindset book. In the early chapters, I ask women to consider: What are your values? What do you want your life to look like? My answer: I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, and if I want help, I will ask for it—not be dependent on it. That takes a certain amount of lifelong planning.
Later in the book, we devote a long chapter to the concepts of building mental resilience—and this is the part I love the most. Our confidence going forward is based on our memory of success. And I think women often forget how successful we’ve been. It’s not easy to be a woman. We have second full-time jobs when we come home from our day job. It’s not easy to grow and birth a baby, if that’s what you chose to do. All the things we have figured out are successes that we can use to build confidence going forward.
For the woman who picks up Unbreakable and wants to take action now, what are three practical things she can do today?
Number one, we have to learn what’s ahead of us. Education is primary. It’s also motivational.
Number two, we need to educate ourselves about menopause hormone therapy so we can make an informed decision on that front.
Number three, we need to start incorporating some habits into our daily lives, including the following:
1. Take a walk after your biggest meal every day.
2. Pay attention to what you’re eating and make two changes: Stop eating sugar (which is inflammatory) and count your protein intake (to help you feel satiated and build muscle).
3. Add resistance training and impact exercise to your regimen—and start now, no matter your age or experience. There is never an age or skill level when your body will not respond to the strategic stress you put on it.
Talk more about mindset and why is it so critical to being unbreakable as we get older…
Our brains will do what we tell them. If we buy into the myth that aging is an inevitable decline from vitality to frailty and that it’s a hopeless cause, of course we’ll give up when it gets hard.
But part of mindset is recognizing that we have the agency to make decisions that can change the trajectory of our future. I talk in the book about the dog days of getting through a process. Every day is not going to be easy—but champions, even in the hot, dog days of summer, keep going, knowing that there’s a bigger prize. They know that even if it’s a small step, today matters.
Mindset is also about believing that we’re worth it. It’s a self-value proposition. I am worth taking care of.
Menopause is finally being talked about more openly. What’s still missing from our collective conversation on the topic?
We’re making progress, but too many women still walk into my office with no understanding of menopause. They’ve never even heard of it.
So, here’s what I’m trying to do: I’m trying to frame menopause not as one cataclysmic event, not as one day when you’re 52 when your periods dry up, but rather as the way women age. Menopause is part of our life cycle. We all anticipate puberty and adolescence, and we look forward to the rest of our lives. I think many of us get stopped at 52. Unbreakable is about the next 45 years. Because I intend to live until I’m 97 at least—to bug my kids.
I want women to ask, “How can I make the rest, the best?” I often hear women say, “I got through menopause, I did fine,” as if it’s not the rest of your life. Menopause is the rest of your life! It’s a new way to live—not just a time we’re going to muddle through.
What’s your number one piece of advice for women advocating for themselves in a medical system that often dismisses their concerns?
Become your own expert. If your child was sick, you would search to the end of the Earth to find the best treatment for them.
It is okay to fire your doctor. If you are not getting what you need, if you are not getting one on one conversations in an empathetic, meaningful way, you have to find somebody that will listen to you.
If readers do one thing reading Unbreakable, what should it be?
I think most people would say, “She wants you to go lift weights!” And I do! But this is a book about pivoting your mindset to the rest of your best of your life. I want readers to build a mindset that will allow them to age with power, not in frailty. I’m personally tired of meeting you in the emergency room as a broken woman when I know that if we would have started when you were 30, we probably could have prevented me meeting you there.
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