How to Make a Complete Mess of Your Life | Healthy Aging Series: S11 E6
My mom was mostly healthy up until a few weeks before she died. She had hypertension. It was managed with Meds. She had a-fib, and it was mostly managed with meds. I think that’s all. But she was prone to fall.
The older she got the less stable she was. She had the senior wobble. I would watch her walk in the Mexican Restaurant parking lot and she seemed to sway. She loved to walk down the street from her apartment to the Hardees to spend the morning with her friends. She fell once while she was there. Flat on her face. Injured her shoulder and her face was black and blue. She lost her balance and, unable to correct herself, she fell. I wanted to hire a personal trainer to strengthen her legs because of these falls, but then she died. I’m not sure if you know this, but if a person over 65 falls and needs hospitalization, there is a 30% chance that they will die in the next year. Pretty serious.
I think our physical balance is important, but I also think having a balanced life is important too. Losing our balance psychologically can create lots of distress and jeopardize our well-being as well.
Fitness Revolutionaries
I’ve been reading about fitness revolutionaries, those men and women who helped lay the foundation for the modern health and fitness culture.
Bernarr McFadden
I want to share the life of the self-proclaimed Father of the Fitness Culture, Bernarr McFadden. The difficulty, in sharing his life as a fitness revolutionary, is that he was a complete failure, and honestly his life ended as a complete mess.
I doubt if any of you have ever heard of BM (he liked to be called BM). Think about Arnold Schwarzenegger 100 years ago. There are some stark differences, but clearly some similarities as well, not to mention he ran for, but lost, a campaign for Governor of Florida and at one point in his life was a multimillionaire.
Here is how one biography described him:
One of a long line of health reformers, not above exaggerating, his importance, BM affected the social fabric of 20th century America. He was a muscular muckraker who not only championed sexuality and sex education, he promoted the display of beautiful bodies. He condemned the wearing of restrictive garments (women’s corsets), and fostered the physical culture. In his crusade for health, he was derided by traditional physicians as an ignorant and dangerous quack, but was gratefully remembered by many whom he had helped by his prescription of exercise, diet, and natural healing. To some observers, he was simply an amusing eccentric who would do anything to win publicity; yet such feats as parachute jumping in his 80s serve not merely to feed his ego, but to prove that the body, if properly cared for, retained its youthful fitness. McFadden set trends in journalism as a publisher of mass magazines and newspapers that exploited romance, sex, and crime. To business men, he embodied the old-fashioned virtues and stubborn self-assurance of free enterprise promoters. An incarnation of rags to riches theme, a little strong man from Missouri, who became a millionaire New Yorker naïvely dreamed of restoring the rugged qualities of early American pioneers, and never tired of preaching that his country men had to be physically strong if the United States were to survive a violent world
BM the Influencer
He was an influencer in today’s language. He played a role in establishing Charles Atlas as a famous bodybuilder. McFadden was a publisher and writer.
“Publishing enabled McFadden to carry his health message across the land and beyond,” writes Robert Ernst in his book “Weakness is a Crime.” The title of that book was a motto that McFadden used throughout his life.
So, if he was so famous 100 years ago, why haven’t most people heard of him today? I asked several people throughout the past couple weeks if they’ve heard of Bernarr McFadden. Out of about 20 people only one reported that they had heard of him, but knew almost nothing about him. I can’t imagine asking people 100 years from now if they have ever heard of Arnold and I dare say, most would know who he was. BTW: BM also made movies!!
All those books and magazines. Seriously, he wrote 50 books. He has an eight volume encyclopedia of health and fitness. I was able to purchase one of them, but they haven’t been printed for 100 years.
Prior to doing this season I had never heard of Bernarr McFadden. Why is that?
As a fitness revolutionary, McFadden failed. Go back and read the recent episode on Joseph Pilates.
As I read his biography, I concluded that he failed because his personal life was a complete disaster. His life was so out of balance that in the end he died alone, estranged from his children, and penniless.
What do I mean by out of balance? I mean that he was an extremist who refused to listen to anyone.
What does Being out of Balance look like?
BM was out of balance in his belief and behaviors toward the medical community. It wasn’t that he mistrusted the medical community or was skeptical about doctors or medicine. Being skeptical is not being out of balance.
And it wasn’t his view that a healthy lifestyle prevented illness. He believed that a whole food diet, exercise, and fasting would reduce the need for doctors and medicine. That seems pretty modern and probably would be accepted by most physicians today. If people exercise and eat well it will probably prevent most of our chronic illnesses.
He didn’t just believe these things prevented the disease. He believed that they were also treatments that would cure illness. He refused to take an infant child for medical treatment as well as an adolescent daughter. He was wrong and his beliefs caused the death of two of these children. His wives never forgave him.
Today, he would have been accused and convicted of negligent homicide. His views were extreme and out of balance. The American Medical Association condemned him. Listen to the level of outrage that one doctor had for him in a letter:
My dear Mr. McFadden, I hope you never get syphilis. If you do, I hope God will be kind enough not to have you bothered with doctors, so that you will have the pleasure of suffering the tortures of hell, tortures that others are certain to have that might be simple enough to read your magazine and believe it.
His Attack on Prudery
He was extreme and out of balance with his view of human sexuality. “The six great curses of the age,” he writes, “were corsets that weaken women’s bodies, sexual ignorance, that degraded humanity, muscular inactivity that caused people to droop and weather before their time, overeating, drugs, and alcohol, that robbed men of their reason, and tobacco, the vehicle of the great demon Nicotine.”
Again, considering the cultural setting he lived in, it’s possible to sympathize with these views. His mission to abolish the use of corsets was admirable, as well as his views that it weakened women’s core muscles. Not only were corsets demonstrably patriarchal and dehumanizing, they left women physically weakened. And most of what he was advocating regarding the human body was very mild in today’s standards. He promoted the human body by using nearly nude photos in his publications and received unwanted attention from elected officials that did not share his views.
BM was arrested in March 20, 1907 and convicted of federal obscenity law. Mind you, what had been published had no nude pictures. A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to two years hard labor in a federal prison and fined him $2000. After several failed appeals, he was eventually pardoned by president Taft.
McFadden pushed culture in society maybe be in the same way that Larry Flint did. I’m not judging McFadden in those efforts. I think he wanted people to see the human body as good and to treat it respectfully. It was, however, his personal behavior that illustrated his lack of balance and his extreme lifestyle. Early in his life as promoter of the physical culture, he condemned prostitution as degrading, demoralizing, and disease producing, and denounced people advocating free love.
“Marriage,” he believed, “was a human necessity and the fullest physical perfection could never be achieved unless one married before one’s sexual power waned. ‘Successful men nearly always married,’ he affirmed. “The responsibility of home life, which strengthens the willpower of persistence was usually one of the first steps to fame and fortune.”
OK, again a little misogynistic and patriarchal, but he was not a promoter of sex outside marriage.
But McFadden violated most of his own guidelines on sexuality. He had a difficult time managing himself in his sexual expression. Throughout his life, he was a womanizer, and he ruined at least three marriages because of his extra marital affairs. In the Tiger Woods era that we live in, he would probably be diagnosed with a sexual addiction. All of his marriages ended because of these affairs. He also abused his position with women that worked for him by what would be considered sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape in our modern era. This form of extreme was criminal, ugly, and dehumanized women. So much for respecting the human body.
McFadden failed as a Revolutionary because He Failed at Home
The last thing I want to highlight is the extremes that he espoused with his family. BM wanted to have a Physical Culture Family, and in the process of promoting that culture, he lost all nine of his children. None of them embrace the physical culture. None of them embraced him as a father. Based on what I’ve read, they loath him, partly due to his neglect and lack of effort, and partly due to the lengthy fast that he would impose, as well as due to his stinginess towards them and their mothers. McFadden lavished his friends and business associates, as well as his political ventures, with money, but failed to show the same generosity to his family. I was taught that if you fail at home, you fail. McFadden failed at home.
I haven’t mentioned McFadden’s publishing empire. He became wealthy and then lost everything due mostly to his financial exploitation of his own company. He died penniless. McFadden is a difficult person to understand. He brought health and fitness to the forefront of our collective unconscious in a time that it was rarely discussed. And he was a complete failure with it because no one, and I mean almost no one, knows him.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been retired for the past 15 to 20 years and is mostly held in high esteem, mostly. Maybe being an action hero helped. By the way, the movies that McFadden starred in flopped.
One take-away from studying his life is: avoid extremes and learn balance. McFadden had several people in his life that whispered to him on occasions. One of them was his wife. He refused to listen to anyone.
I think we avoid imbalance by opening our ears and listening to others and not just to that still small voice with us.
I believe we avoid extremes by not solely believing what we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s pride that leads to extremes and humility that leads to balance. Throughout this book, there’s a lot of truth, and a lot of important information. I was reading through the encyclopedia that I bought that was written by him and was seriously impressed by the level of fitness education that it contained. It’s never been reprinted.
He failed as a revolutionary because he failed as a person. He failed as a fitness revolutionary because he was at heart, merely a promoter.
I’ve shared and will continue to share other fitness revolutionaries in this season. It’s interesting because many that created a revolution didn’t even know they were revolutionaries. They simply had a passion for fitness.
Nobody is looking for an example to follow for making a mess of your life. I’m sure McFadden never set out to be that example. But he is. Maybe his slogan should have been, “Your Strength Will Become Your Weakness,” or, “Pride Comes Before the Fall,” or, maybe something simple like the Golden Rule.
