Most people really are low in vitamin D. The reasons have nothing to do with moral failure or weak willpower. The “right amount” depends on age, body fat, sun exposure, health status, and how broken your metabolism already is. Vitamin D can be helpful, boring, or harmful depending on how casually you treat it. As with most things in health, the danger lies not in deficiency or supplementation. The danger is oversimplification.

Vitamin D is technically a hormone, not a vitamin in the classic sense. Your body produces it when ultraviolet B light hits your skin, converting cholesterol into vitamin D3. That alone should tell you something important. This is not kale dust. This is a system that evolved when humans spent most of their time outdoors, half-naked by modern standards, not under fluorescent lights and SPF 50.

A sexually abusive stepfather warps your sense of safety early. Not in a dramatic Lifetime-movie way, but in a constant background hum of vigilance. You learn that home is not neutral ground. You learn that adults are not automatically protectors. You learn to read rooms the way other kids read comic books. Who’s walking how. What that tone means. Whether tonight is a hide or endure night. That skill sticks around. As an adult, it can look like anxiety, hyper-awareness, or being “great in a crisis.” People will compliment that without realizing it came from surviving one.

Progressive overload isn’t some gym-bro mantra screamed over pre-workout fumes. It’s the grown-up truth that your body only gets stronger when you give it a reason. Lift the same weight for the same reps forever and congratulations, you’ve mastered standing still. Push just a bit harder, keep two reps in the tank, and your Type II fibers start waking up like somebody finally flipped the breaker back on. That’s how you grow muscle after sixty, not by wishing, not by nostalgia, but by applying pressure that your body has to answer. Strength is freedom, and this is how you reclaim it.

Most people your age don’t need more supplements. They need more muscle. The kind that protects your bones, sharpens your brain, and keeps you out of the waiting room with the sad magazines. Time to lift something heavier than your excuses.

Change isn’t easy, especially when you’ve been doing things a certain way for sixty years. But staying the same is harder in the long run. The truth is, comfort will kill you faster than effort ever will. Behavioral change after sixty isn’t about becoming someone new—it’s about reclaiming the person you were meant to be before life, habits, and convenience got in the way. It’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, and absolutely necessary if you want to keep moving, thinking, and living like you still have something left to do.