How to Unfuck 50!: A Guide

I am not a doctor. Please consult your doctor related to any lifestyle changes you are considering. What follows is my opinion based on independent research that guides my personal decisions.

You’re 50ish and you want to Unfuck yourself. Where do you start? There are really only three rules: 1) do what you enjoy; 2) don’t try to do it all at once; and 3) be consistent. Those are the Unfuck 50! design principles.

If you’re the “average” 50-year-old, you have focused on career and family for the last two decades. As a result, regular exercise fell off your priority list years ago, and playing sports transitioned to watching sports, often with beer and chips. Most of your food comes in packages and take-out bags, and you sip drinks from disposable bottles and cans. Statistics say you’re out of shape and eat like shit, at least some of the time (which adds up). Now’s the time to take back control.

Below is a simple construct to help Unfuck yourself. It’s not rocket science, but like most things, success comes down to consistency. Play the long game. Focus on form and consistency. Inconsistent intensity compromises results and leaves you disappointed. People who are already a little fit and eat pretty well can progress faster, but it’s not a race. Please share what works for you in the comments, we learn and are inspired by others. Let’s go!

Phase 1: The Ramp

Start by moving— do something you enjoy every day, anything is better than nothing, and ideally, work up to 40+ mins. Don’t have time? The average American adult spends more than 40 minutes a day on Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok… you have time! Take a walk, ride a bike, play pickleball, etc. If you haven’t moved regularly in a while, ease into it. Strike the balance between not overdoing it and moving with intention. Moving with intention means elevating your heart rate so you feel the effort but you can still chat with a friend (often called Zone 2). There is no maximum time limit here, so if you want to pop in a 90-minute podcast or binge Netflix on a walk or stationary bike, go for it!

WARNING! Don’t just go out and start jogging long distances and be careful with your pace. You are under-muscled. That is a polite way of saying you’re weak. It’s easy to go out too hard, too long, and or too fast, pop a tendon or pull a muscle (especially your calves which are almost universally weak among a sedentary population), and then be sedentary again as you recover. People think they pull muscles because of inflexibility, but it’s usually because your muscles can’t handle the new demands you put on them. Go slow and lift to strengthen your leg muscles before you add distance and speed.

Remove one thing from your diet. Pick one thing you know you should not eat or drink. For me, it was sweet tea. I gave up soda in my 20s but rationalized that sweet iced GREEN tea was okay. A total lie — I was drinking a meal in calories a day. So, pick one thing you know fucks you AND you know you can give up. At this point, it’s more important to prove to yourself you can modify your eating behavior than try to radically change your eating habits, which is destined for failure.

That’s the ramp. Do those two things until they’re locked in. Research says habits take 18 to 254 days to form, with an average of 66 days. Try moving every day and not eating your one thing for 60 days, then move on! If you feel confident you can handle more change without overwhelming your willpower, move on sooner. But remember, this is a long game — don’t rush. It is better to be consistently slow than inconsistently intense.

Phase 2: Get strong

Our sedentary culture is creating a muscle crisis. If you don’t move it (muscle), you lose it.

The good news is the muscle crisis is easily solved. Just move! Muscles are a unique organ (yes, muscles are an organ) — you can directly increase their size (muscle mass) and improve their function (strength and endurance).

You have two types of muscle fibers. (There is a third, Type IIx, but they are rare in humans). Type I, or slow twitch muscle fibers, are your endurance fibers, designed for long, slow activities like distance running, and keeping your back upright all day. Type 1 fibers use aerobic metabolism for energy, using oxygen to burn fat. Type IIa, or fast twitch muscles, are for explosive, powerful movements, like lifting weights, sprinting, etc. Type IIa muscles use anaerobic metabolism for energy, burning glucose as energy (without oxygen).

Here’s your problem. Many aging people choose lower-intensity activities, like walking and gardening, to “stay in shape,” which is good (see “Start by Moving” above), however, it’s not enough. If you are not using your Type IIa fibers by lifting heavy things, sprinting, etc., they transition to Type I, slow twitch fiber. This means you lose your strength. With loss of strength comes loss of stability, falls, broken bones, and sedentariness. Too much sedentariness leads to Type I muscles wasting away altogether.

The beautiful thing about muscle is it responds to stress. If you work a muscle, it grows and gets stronger. So yes, you have to “lift.” Start by lifting yourself — doing body weight exercises. Push-ups, sit-ups, and eventually pull-ups. And yoga. I naively thought yoga was about flexibility until I tried hot yoga and didn’t have the strength to do the moves — turns out flexibility starts with strength. I strongly encourage you to get over any angst or self-confidence issues you have with lifting weights. If you really want to Unfuck yourself, you will need to lift weights. There are a lot of online workouts and apps you can use, do your homework, and don’t try to do too much too fast. If you have the luxury to work with a trainer, do it.

WARNING! It is easy to injure yourself and that is the worst thing you can do because it forces you to be sedentary — the evil we are trying to overcome. Focus on form and get that right before you increase weight and intensity. In the beginning, strength comes back fast, even with body weight, celebrate that! You will plateau and need to increase weight and intensity (and you should) to get stronger but do it thoughtfully.

Up your protein. Yep, you successfully removed one thing from your diet (maybe a few?!), but now you need to add to your diet — more protein. The science is pretty clear here — as you age, your body does not synthesize protein as well as in the past. Your body naturally breaks down and resynthesizes protein as it repairs itself (protein turnover). Because you can’t synthesize protein as well, you lose more protein during the turnover process. So you have to add more protein into the system to maintain and grow muscle or experience muscle wasting. The Recommended Daily Allowance for protein is 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight (0.8 grams per kilogram). Many experts think this is low, especially for under-muscled people trying to gain muscle mass and recommend 0.8 or 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Eating 1g per pound can be difficult at first. Focus on lean, clean protein and use protein shakes, if necessary.

Phase 3: Raise the Intensity (a bit)

At this point, you are deep into your journey. You are feeling stronger, moving longer, and feeling the mental benefits of moving every day. Life is better. It’s time to take it up a notch. Don’t go crazy, blow it out, and injure yourself, but start pushing past your comfort level a little.

Develop a portfolio of exercises. A couple of days of long, low-intensity endurance walks, jogs, or bike rides. A few days of resistance training (e.g., upper body day, leg day, all body day). Maybe you’re ready for a day of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Increase your intensity by GRADUALLY increasing your volume and or weight. When you feel like you can do a little more with good form, go for it!

Phase 4: Lose some fat

We’ve gone this whole time without talking about your weight, specifically your fat weight. There is a reason for that. Losing fat is really fucking hard. The only way to lose fat is to intake less energy than your body needs, increasing the body’s fat turnover (the amount of fat it pulls from adipose tissue versus the amount of new fat it stores in adipose tissue), resulting in fat loss. If it were as easy as that, we’d all look like superheroes.

Let’s go back to you before Phase 1. Your muscles were trash. Your mitochondria were unhealthy. Your Type IIa muscle fibers were transitioning to Type I muscle fibers and atrophying in general. Your cortisol and stress levels were high, and you didn’t have any wins to give you confidence in the face of adversity. There was no way in hell you were losing fat in those conditions.

You have to be in shape, mentally and physically, to lose fat because you’re going up against the most powerful computer the world has ever seen — your subconscious brain. While you think you’re fat, your subconscious brain doesn’t think you're fat enough because it “knows” the days of abundance will end and all that fat will save your life once scarcity inevitably returns.

That is why you don’t start your Unfuck 50! journey with fat loss!

The key to fat loss is designing an environment that makes eating bad food very hard (time and energy-intensive). In the chance you are faced with a poor eating opportunity, you have the willpower and confidence to say “no,” even when tired, in a bad mood, depressed, etc. (Or say “yes,” knowing it’s a one-off decision.) After months of working out, successfully removing a few bad foods from your diet, and sleeping well, you likely lost some fat already. You are more primed than ever to make sustained changes to your diet that lead to fat loss and keep it off.

There is no one miracle calorie-restricting, fat loss diet (despite all the influencer claims). Find the one that you will follow. It will likely involve whole foods, lean protein, and not eating highly processed foods. In my humble opinion, the trick to fat loss is avoiding foods that drive cravings and the rapid, repetitive eating cycle that our current food system is designed to drive.

So what’s stopping you from starting your Unfuck 50! journey?

Thank you for reading! If this post was helpful, please add a comment, give it some “claps,” follow Unfuck 50, and share it with a fellow 50-something-year-old that may need a little help getting/staying unfucked. You can also follow Unfuck 50 on Instagram, Threads, and X.