Why does your body feel older than you are?

Most of us, when asked whether we would rather be healthy or unhealthy, will give the obvious answer. We would all rather be healthy. Being sick or unhealthy is a drag. It steals your energy and motivation, and it robs you of a better life. A life where you can move without pain, attend the events you love, and support the groups you choose to support.

It is interesting that most of us get the idea of basic maintenance. We change our oil every 3,000 miles, or so. We regularly switch out the furnace filter. We only store leftovers for about 5 to 7 days. Some of us go the extra mile and drain the sediment from the water heater once a year, or clean the washing machine filter, yes, it’s there. But when it comes to taking care of ourselves, we often miss the mark.

If you are the type of person who understands that things that are used must be maintained to prevent them from breaking, then you should also understand that the human body requires maintenance too. In fact, prevention is the best medicine for your body, just like maintenance is the best preventative activity to expand your equipment’s lifespan.

It seems that, when it comes to the body, we are confused about what to do. Can we just go for a walk? Do we need to jog? What about strength training? It’s a confusing mess of information out there, and marketers do not help much.

Perhaps the best place to start is with Sir Isaac Newton and his laws of motion. The first law, actually. It states that a body at rest will remain at rest, but a body in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Let’s look at this from a human health standpoint. A body in motion will stay in motion. A person who exercises will stay independent and healthy. But a body that rests, like an unmaintained car or an undrained water tank, will have a shorter lifespan.

So the question is, how will you maintain and improve your own health? In case you were wondering, there are two things you need to do. Yep, just two. Eat healthy food and exercise.

But it can’t be that simple, can it?

Well, the underlying cause of all disease is inactivity and inflammation; we professionals call it metabolic dysfunction. It starts with the food you put into your body and then translates to how your body uses that food, how it essentially transfers food energy into energy for your cells.

Since it starts with food, let’s begin there. It is a fact that 71% of food sold at a grocery store is processed food. It is a fact that 75% of the population is obese or overweight, and it is a fact that 80% of the population does not exercise on a regular basis. I am asking you right now to connect the dots, not the algorithms on your social media page.

So how do we live longer?

I will sum it up for you: eat whole foods and deny your body seed oils, sugar, and processed carbs. These are the root foods that cause inflammation and chronically elevated blood sugar levels.

Why is lowering blood sugar important? Simply stated, to burn fat or lose weight, you have to mobilize the fat into an energy source rather than keeping it as a storage source. Since sugar is immediate energy, it will always be taken ahead of fat. If your diet is processed carbohydrates and sugar, you will never use fat as an energy source because sugar is there, pushing in front of the line.

Next, you need to move more. The reason you need to do that is because contracting muscle undergoes a completely different physiology than a body that moves once a day, or not at all.

It’s complicated, but let’s first start with the lymphatic system. Your lymphatic system removes toxins from your cells and organs and deposits them in your colon for disposal. The lymphatic system, however, relies on the muscles to make it work. Yes, contracting muscle massages the lymphatic system and allows it to work. A body at rest cannot properly detoxify itself.

Second, it is muscle that allows you to maintain your independence. Muscle allows you to move, lift things, stand, walk, run, and jump. Muscle is also the main area where fat is burned as a fuel. That’s right, contracting muscle will use fat or sugar as a fuel to make energy so it can continue to contract. If you want to think of it differently, think about your metabolism as the engine that drives energy production for living. The main engine for that comes from muscle. Muscle is the metabolism. Muscle burns the fat, the fuel, when you exercise, and it establishes your ability to function and thrive.

A body in motion.

But it’s so much more than that. Think of what happens when your muscles contract. At a very basic level, they receive energy from the blood or the fat cells, and they use that energy to make something called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Now, ATP is life. Every cell needs it, and if you run out of it, you will die. When you contract a muscle, calcium is pumped into the muscle, which then imports ATP to cause muscle contraction. The increase in calcium and decrease in ATP set off a bunch of signals in the cell that force the cell to use glucose or fat to make energy, and in turn, more ATP. Central to this process is magnesium, which allows the muscle to relax, and a protein called adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), which acts as a sensor, monitoring the changes in ATP. As the ATP is used up, AMPK is activated and stimulates a slew of different processes. It stimulates peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1-alpha (PGC-1a) and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which increase fat burning and glucose uptake in the muscle, and stimulates the release of a hormone called irisin, which tells the muscle to burn fat over glucose. The whole process then stimulates the production of more mitochondria in the muscle, which is where we make ATP.

In addition to all this, the active muscle stimulates something called autophagy, where the cell is able to clear old, dysfunctional, or diseased cells to make room for healthier ones. But inactivity has the opposite effect. It reduces mitochondria, allows the buildup of toxins, and eventually, with bad food choices, allows the buildup of free radicals that damage the remaining cells and mitochondria.

But it gets worse. With every decade of life after 35 years of age, and without exercise, specifically strength training, we will lose 5-7 pounds of muscle, dramatically affecting our physical capacity, appearance, and ability. Over time, it also lowers the metabolism and makes it harder to lose weight and stay healthy.

Know what else happens as you lose muscle? You lose independence, the physical capacity to accomplish tasks. That loss usually equates to doing less because you’re too tired, too weak, or in too much pain. Doing less accelerates lean tissue loss, and now you are stuck in a vicious cycle that chips away at your health and shortens your lifespan.

Don’t let that be you.

Just moving changes everything, even a short 10-minute walk. You see, movement stimulates that PGC-1a, which happens to promote several natural antioxidant genes. Those antioxidants have an anti-inflammatory effect and, of course, lower the damage caused by oxidation. Did you know that muscle is now considered an organ that needs exercise in order for it to secrete anti-inflammatory hormones? It’s true. They are called myokines, which are immune-modulating proteins that stop cytokines from causing inflammation. That means the more you exercise, the less oxidative stress and inflammation your body has. Over time, that accumulates and has an even bigger protective effect on your body.

But you have to move.

Strength training is important too. Strength training helps your body stop that loss of muscle as we age, something we medically call sarcopenia. Muscle contraction is also vital to your metabolic health because it forces the muscle to absorb excess glucose from the blood. Did you know this can happen without insulin too? Studies actually find that people who have type 2 diabetes can clear glucose from their blood at close to the same efficiency as a person without diabetes, even if they are insulin resistant.

How amazing is that?

Studies also find that even a short 10-minute walk after you eat can lower glucose spikes by 30%, even if you eat a high-carb meal. Don’t read that as a ticket to do that, though. It is still unwise to eat too many carbohydrates.

So, muscle contraction activates your body’s internal systems to detox you naturally, stimulate the metabolism, lower blood sugars, and, over time, with exercise, increase your body’s ability to remove dead or diseased cells before they affect other healthy cells. Muscular contraction is the key to healthy cells and a longer life, and the extra energy burned can stop your body from storing excess fat, helping you lose weight.

But there’s more.

Those tiny mitochondria that make energy for you to live, yeah, those tiny metabolic cells get fewer with inactivity and sarcopenia, but exercise builds their size and number and also helps remove the bad ones that are inefficient. We call that mitophagy.

Think of it this way. The mitochondria make energy, called ATP, and send that energy to every cell and every organ in your body so you can live, laugh, walk, sit, and exercise. If you are inactive and losing 5-7 pounds of muscle as you age per decade, you are losing muscle and mitochondria.

That means you become less efficient at making ATP. Less goes to the organs and cells that need it to survive. Less mitochondria means you have lower protection against oxidation and free radicals too. Over time, the free radicals damage cells, which you cannot remove from your body efficiently because you do not move enough.

Less mitochondria make less ATP.

Eventually, you reach a point where there is too much free radical damage and too much inflammation to stay healthy, so you get sick and move less. Less movement produces fewer antioxidants and anti-inflammatory myokines, so you have more pain, so you move less.

Are you beginning to see a picture unfold?

Eventually, the loss of mitochondria cannot make enough ATP to keep every cell properly fueled and healthy. At this point in the aging cycle, your body makes an executive decision, a decision that determines which organs get the priority of ATP and which organs and cells get less. The cells getting less energy eventually begin to falter and dysfunction, and then so do you.

You now know that moving is better than sitting, but by what degree? Let’s start with your back. Too much sitting shortens the hip flexors that pull on the back and hips, causing pain, and although we do not yet understand the connection, the risk of anxiety and depression increases the more we sit.

It appears that too much sitting also increases the risk of heart disease and cancer. Researchers analyzed 13 different studies of sitting time and activity levels and found that those who sat for more than 8 hours had the same risk of dying as a smoker or an obese person. In fact, one study found the risk for men who watched more than 23 hours of television a week had a 64% higher risk of cardiovascular disease and a 147% increased risk of stroke.

But all you have to do is move to reduce that risk.

The less you sit and rest, the better your body functions. Sure, exercise is important. It builds strength, endurance, provides energy, and cleanses the cells with anti-oxidating chemicals that also flush away inflammation. However, a one-hour exercise plan three times a week is only the foundation of movement. You need to do more, and that means moving throughout the day, not sitting.

If you need help changing these risks, losing weight, feeling better, sleeping better, and having more energy, give ReVibe a try. We have your back and your heart.