Have you ever heard of cross-addiction? It’s when you give up one thing but pick up another. It’s also called addiction transfer or Addiction Interaction Disorder.

For example, people give up alcohol but start taking drugs. Then they realize they need to stop smoking weed but start gambling instead. Their bank account screams, so they stop gambling but start overeating. Frustrated, they go on a diet but start watching porn, or scroll on their phones until dawn, or buy tons of supplements to get better (guilty).

You get the picture.

An estimated 1.5 million fractures occur annually in the US in women over 50 years old. (1)

Resistance exercise helps protect our bones far more than calcium tablets or buckets of yogurt. As women age, our bodies stop secreting estrogen, which can lead to low bone mass and increased susceptibility to fractures, mostly of the hip, spine, and wrist.

We girls had this thing called the Super-Suck-In-Belly-Club, and every single time we’d stand up from our beach loungers, we would simultaneously suck in our guts. We were TWELVE, and we’d already learned that we needed to do this to be acceptable.

Yesterday, a friend and I were discussing our plans to get fit in 2022. We have starkly different approaches.

She’s jumpstarting the year with a diet program consisting of less than five hundred calories a day, supposedly to restart her metabolism. The company calls it fasting without fasting, and in her words, she will suffer five long days of horrid soup packets, dry wafers, and a special drink mix to keep her from passing out. Hmm.

I’m taking another route. I’m creating a better body by going for more — a lot more.

When I was a little girl, I was reprimanded for expressing my anger.

“Nice girls” don’t yell like that. “Good girls” don’t talk back. “Nice girls” don’t rock the boat. “Good girls” do what they’re told.

When I tried to stick up for myself, I was shamed, shunned, and shut down. The males in my life would smirk smugly on seeing me put in my place. Uppity little brat. Who does she think she is to speak like that?

In May this year, the last woman accused of witchcraft in Salem was exonerated. It took 329 years to clear her name, which piqued my curiosity about witch hunts. In Europe, between the years 1500-1600, an estimated 80,000 suspected witches were executed. 80% of them were women. I imagine the number is far greater than reported, but this is what history tells us.

How would modern women fare back then?

Ladies, most of us would have burned.