A new phrase has struck a different cord in me lately if you don’t exercise your body will turn rancid. Exaggeration? Not as much as you might think. Much is known now about why there is a steady deterioration in tissue health if we don’t exercise. Sports and exercise are compatible.

Saying that exercise is healthy is too abstract a thought to be motivational. “Your body will go to hell if you don’t exercise.” is a phrase who’s motivational benefits has worn off a long time ago. But, knowing more about how we fall apart could help. And, also knowing how sports and diabetes fit together helps too.

Visceral fat is a term for the greasy globs of fat wrapped around your gut. And this mess is surrounded by greasy globs of fat just under your skin. Lack of exercise plays a roll in how it got there, but we need to know much more about visceral fat if we are to be shocked enough to gym up.

Many doctors believe the lack of exercise, more than the over indulgence is behind the growth of the bomb factory tied to your gut, the visceral fat.

Your suicide bomber can make a bomb you can’t see, systemic inflammation, it’s invisible. It’s already too late when you finally notice the damage. Memory loss, tumor growth, atherosclerosis, insulin resistance and on and on, all related to an inner inflammation.

Now, here’s a kick, you can’t see systemic inflammation. When it pops up out of the toaster, you’re charred. It smolders unnoticed until the damage shows up so late it’s hard to reverse it.

Myokines are enzymes, expediters, released by skeletal muscles during exercise. They can reverse the systemic inflammation generated by visceral fat. And, they do this apparently by acting more like a hormone.

Anti-inflammatory effects are continuos as long as there is continuous exercise. Why? Because each bout of exercise can only release a set amount of beneficial enzymes. Use it or loose it works the same here as it does in buffing up. The only difference is that loosing muscle tone is much less problematic than loosing an organ like a pancreas, as with diabetes. Sports and diabetes, exceedingly beneficial

Humans were not developed as blobs, we were constructed to move. To economize, some organs made themselves dependent upon organs of movement. Leg veins depend on leg muscles to squeeze blood back into general circulation. They do this because they omitted developing their own muscles during evolution, expecting they wouldn’t need them. Modern inactivity has wrecked their plans. Many of our systems are in the same fix. Nature set us up entirely for survival activities not endless inactivity. Use it or loose it is not just a saying, it’s a reality of life.

New to the thought of sports and diabetes, or pre-diabetes? To explore it in depth go to sports and diabetes here #1

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 5:55 am and is filed under Exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.