Aging Backwards by Miranda Esmonde-White

Author:Miranda Esmonde-White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Get Moving

The Connection Between Fitness and Disease Prevention

We’ve talked about how ESSENTRICS protects against muscle loss and how our muscles keep us young. Now let’s talk about how powerfully muscles can care for the rest of the body.

Another myth of aging that people blithely accept is that we’re all going to get sick at some point—that disease goes hand in hand with aging. Not true. Many diet and lifestyle factors can help you prevent the onset of disease, and one of the most powerful is the ability of exercise to build muscle. Fitness can not only help you lose weight and have more energy but also keep you disease-free. We’ll look at how the strength of your muscles affects the other systems in your body—such as the cardiovascular, digestive, and neurological systems. These can get weaker with age, but don’t have to if you commit to exercise.

The body is like a complex car that has different systems; all have to be in good working order or the car won’t run. The wheels are like the muscles, the engine is like the cardiovascular system, the transmission and brakes are like the nervous system, and the burning of gas is like the digestive system. If one of those parts isn’t working the car won’t go. Or if the parts are rusted and worn out, then the car might run, but badly.

This is where healthy strong flexible muscles come in. The role of the muscles is to keep the systems healthy; to assist the cardiovascular system in the distribution of blood into every cell of the body; to cleanse out toxins that damage the organs; to assist the digestive system in flushing out waste products; and much more. Without strong active healthy muscles working in harmony with them, the systems become exhausted and break down prematurely. When this happens we feel and look unhealthy, we become prone to getting sick, and we take much longer than necessary to recover.

Strong flexible muscles keep you healthy, and when you do get sick, they help you to recover rapidly and fully! With regard to your desire to remain young and vibrant the muscular system is the most important system in your body. When you let your muscular system become weak, all the other systems that keep you alive are directly affected. Without strong flexible muscles all the other systems will age rapidly through overuse and decay. One Danish study looked at the impact of smoking tobacco, high alcohol consumption, physical inactivity, and overweight on expected lifetime. The researchers combined life tables and disease prevalence data from over 14,000 participants in the Danish Health Interview Survey. They found that, on average, physically inactive people will have a life span that is 5 to 8 years shorter than that of physically active people.44

We know that if we don’t exercise all 620 muscles, they will atrophy. When this happens, we will find it much more difficult to maintain our health because with atrophy comes a deterioration of the systems of the body required to keep us healthy.

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