“If you want to lose weight, burn fat and build muscle FAST you have to read this first”
To understand how muscle, exercise and food drives metabolism and why it’s affects are so important it helps to grasp these three concepts.
1. Glucose becomes toxic to the body and too much remains in the bloodstream for too long. (That is more than two hours.) We called this disease diabetes.
2. Insulin is the bodies main mechanism for removing glucose from the bloodstream
3. The root cause of these related diseases, including type diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, impaired fertility, PCOS, among other conditions is decreased insulin sensitivity also known as insulin resistance.
No, here’s where exercise comes in- muscle contraction during both aerobic and resistance training stimulates uptake of glucose without any need for insulin assistance. The insulin independent uptake offers an additional effective mechanism for removing excess glucose from the blood. And check out this bonus: in response to resistance training, specifically your body, reaps the benefits of contraction driven glucose uptake from up to two days after your workout because exercise improves insulin stimulated glucose uptake. During the post workout window the increased density of glucose transporters present in muscle cell membranes continue their work of getting rid of excess blood glucose still with less insulin required.
Here’s another benefit the glucose that gets stored in your muscle tissue as glycogen fuels both short intense exercise and longer endurance -training in other words with proper nutrition the glycogen resynthesized after your workout is the energy you need to keep training. As you can see the system works on feedback loop. Exercise / resistance training not only helps manage proper blood sugar and insulin levels but it also primes the muscle. As exercise burns glycogen glucose leaves the post exercise muscle tissue primed for glucose uptake. Proper nutritional refueling, then replenishes glycogen helping your body meet it’s ongoing training needs thereby powering this healthy energy cycle over the long-haul. Understanding the interplay of these dynamics offers a lifelong solution.
Now let’s look at what happens in the opposite scenario where the muscle is not sufficiently worked hindering all the positive effects exercise can have on the whole system.
Think of muscle as a suitcase and when you continue to eat the wrong foods in the wrong quantity, you overstuff your suitcase, until the excess contents spill out. In this case, what spills out is glucose,fatty acids or amino acids, and all that substrate overflows back into the bloodstream. Somehow the body must dispose of all these extras. That’s when the initial disease processes begin. Whether the trouble starts as obesity, diabetes, or other conditions the underlying pathology remains the same. When muscle, your main metabolic organ gets flooded and overwhelmed you gain fat. This fat goes onto create low-grade inflammation. When you have unhealthy muscle poor diet choices can create inflammation every time you eat, hurting muscles, metabolic regulation and causing a whole host of other problems.
Skeletal muscle health issues, often begin early in life. When we are young and seem healthy enough, we think we can get away with less than optimal choices -even being sedentary -because we don’t see a change of clothing size. In reality there’s no such thing as “healthy” inactive What we commonly think of diseases of aging are really diseases of impaired muscle.
* Forever Strong by DR. GABRIELLE LYON
