Muscle Helps Fight Diabetes
 
Muscle plays a key role in regulating the blood concentration of glucose (blood sugar) as well as the amino acids.
 
Under normal conditions, the brain relies entirely on glucose from the blood for energy. A drop in blood glucose concentration can cause loss of consciousness and even death. In contrast, an increase in glucose concentration in the blood is responsible for many of the adverse effects of diabetes.
 
It is important to understand..
 
All carbohydrates are ultimately converted to glucose in order to be metabolized in the body. 
 
After you eat carbs, your blood glucose level increases. the hormone insulin works to moderated this increase by stimulating the uptake of glucose, mostly by the muscle. Once in the muscle cell, the glucose is converted to a chemical form of energy or stored as glycogen for later use.
 
Muscle is not only important in blunting the magnitude of increases in blood glucose after meals, it also helps prevent decreases in the blood glucose level between meals that could impair brain function. This is because the liver can produce new glucose from amino acids when your are not absorbing dietary carbohydrates.
 
What that means to you is this:
 
Maintaining healthy muscles is crucial for keep your blood glucose levels in the normal range. Keeping your muscles healthy is vital for prevention of diabetes as well as other healthy problems caused by hypoglycemia (low blood glucose level).
 
Muscle Helps Fight Obesity
 
Muscle plays a major role in energy balance and prevention of obesity. The process of continuous synthesis and breakdown of muscle can be calculated .. Here is the equation
 
 10kg of lean muscle = 100kcal/d
 
That means a person who has 30kg more muscle mass than another person will burn approximately 300 kcal more energy every single day at rest... and even more during exercise.
 
The results:
 
The person with more muscle mass can burn off as much as 30lbs of fat in a year, all without TRYING!
 
Muscle burns fat because muscle is always burning, even while you are sleeping. this is another powerful reason for working to increase your muscle mass!
 
The dangerous consequences of muscle loss and fat gain most obvious among the elderly, making muscle health especially important after middle age. Aging presents a perfect storm that greatly accelerates the rate of sarcopenia. As people get older, they generally stop exercising (if they ever did), and spend more time sitting still. But muscle, unfortunately, is a use-it-or-lose-it kind of tissue. For one thing, it takes a lot of energy to maintain, so if you want to keep it around, you have to use it regularly to show your body that it’s still worth the effort. Since an elderly person’s body already has enough to do without maintaining muscles for no reason, it breaks down the muscle proteins to spare energy and keep the heart and other organs functioning.
 
The result is a steady decrease in muscle size that really takes off around age 50 and accelerates with time. And it’s not only the amount of muscle tissue that’s affected; muscle quality also declines. Scans of elderly people’s muscles reveal much more intramuscular fat, or fat tissue that has penetrated into the muscle. Basically, the elderly are at a much greater risk of being “skinny-fat:” they aren’t noticeably underweight or under-muscled to the naked eye, but look a little closer and that “muscle mass” isn’t all muscle.
 
All of these factors make old age an enormous risk factor for losing fat and gaining muscle, and as you might expect, the vast majority of sarcopenic obese patients are over 60. The consequences are severe. Sarcopenic elderly patients are more vulnerable to falls, and less able to recover from illness or hospitalization. Add obesity, and the story gets even worse; in one study, sarcopenic obese elderly patients fared dramatically worse than sarcopenic non-obese or obese nonsarcopenic patients in a test of their ability to carry out everyday activities (for example, bathing, dressing themselves, and cleaning the house). The extreme consequences of sarcopenic obesity in the elderly really highlight the crucial importance of muscle mass for maintaining a healthy spectrum of human activity
 
So as you work to strengthen your body and increase your muscle size, knowing that you are simultaneously fighting, diabetes, bone loss, cancer, heart issues and obesity is very encouraging..

Strong muscles are perhaps the greatest defense against weight gain, sickness and aging.
 
Building the muscle mass and strength you want is also incredibly healthy!!
 
 #HealthyMusclesMatter