Is My Metabolism Broken?
Let’s start at the beginning and connect the dots. Your metabolism is not “broken” but things do change as we age, experience illness, trauma, oscillate between erratic eating patterns of deprivation or binge eating, have children, take on tons of stress and try to function with a lack of sleep. And if you are comparing your metabolism to someone else - please walk away from that game - you will never win. Your body type, physiology and experiences are not comparing apples to apples when you think of someone else.
What we do have in common are muscles. Simple biology is the body mass consists of many elements including muscle tissue and connective tissue (fat.) And fat is not the bad guy. In fact, our bodies do require it for every single operation in the body and women need and require a higher percentage. We just tend to get a little discombobulated when we have more fat than we need and not enough muscle.
Which leads me to introduce: Sarcopenia. This word came into existence only in 1988 by Irwin Rosenberg. It laid out the facts of what happens as we age through his studies in vivid statistical detail: declines in metabolism, lung function, heart function, mental function, kidney function- not to mention a declining ability to climb stairs, get up from a chair, even walk.
These findings inspired Rosenberg to figure out what was going on: Was deterioration of abilities and function inevitable or were there measures that could be taken to slow it, halt it or perhaps even reverse it? And through his findings a common pattern emerged with the age-related losses which was a reduction in muscle mass.
It was a moment of epiphany for Rosenberg : “I noted that no decline with age is as dramatic or potentially more significant than the decline in lean body mass.” Through his discovery he coined the “loss” sarcopenia. It’s a composite of two Greek roots: sarx which means “flesh,” and penia, which means “loss.”
Rosenberg used sarcopenia to refer to a decline in muscle mass with aging, but studies have shown that, with respect to staying healthy, muscle strength is more important. The definition of sarcopenia has evolved and now it refers to a “decrease of muscle strength, reduced muscle mass, and impaired physical performance.”
In the updated definition of sarcopenia, the role muscle strength plays has been promoted from an accessory player that mainly moves us around to a major guardian of our metabolic health and life. In essence if your body has a board of directors it would be a top executive with one of its many main roles as CEO of your metabolism. The facts are simple your muscles are built with the intention of taking care of you for the rest of your life.
Now you might be thinking, “what’s the big deal if I lose muscle mass and strength? As long as my numbers don’t change on the scale I’m good.”
Well here’s the lowdown: on average we start losing muscle at around the age of 30 at a rate of half a pound a year. That amounts to a loss of five pounds of lean muscle mass in a decade. By the age of 50, the rate increases to an average annual loss of almost one pound.
If your 30th birthday was some time ago and you still weigh about the same as you did then, you might think you are beating the odds. It’s possible, but research shows that as muscle disappears, fat tends to accumulate in its place. Unfortunately, your bathroom scale doesn’t register the difference between a pound of fat and a pound of muscle. BUT YOUR METABOLISM DOES! And it starts to slow down. The fact that we accept the loss of muscle with age as natural has the effect of robbing us of choice. When it’s what we see around us, it’s what we come to expect and accept for ourselves.
In truth, the wasting of muscle isn’t made inevitable by aging; it is, however, made highly probable by our culture and the way we live our lives. We virtually never squat in the course of the day and spend much of it sitting in chairs; we are shuttled through the world by automobiles and are carried between floors by elevators and moving staircases. We tend to really feel the body ONLY when it starts complaining.
At any point in time you can take your fate back into your hands and decide what moves you want to make that would guarantee you live a life full of vitality, free from many diseases, accidents, depression and independent of external care. Make a commitment to yourself. Though sarcopenia will occur with advancing age, along with decrease in strength, ease of movement it is not the destiny. High intensity strength training can slow down the adverse effects and in many cases reverse it.