If your strength isn’t as good as it could be you aren’t going to like this blog update, we’re not even adding pictues to this one…it’s kinda preachy.

A little known fact is if you have lost muscle or strength over time you should have reduced food intake to suit. Why? Straightforward explanation – It is your muscle and strength that burn the bulk of your calories. If your strength reduces so do your requirements for calories. The amount you output is the amount you can absorb (rather than store as fat or excrete).

The same story goes for sleep. If you don’t drain your system you don’t need physical rest and your mental/emotional recovery suffers as a result. You can burn off some nervous energy with low strength/high repetition activity but you won’t create an actual natural need for deep physical body rest*. And the real kicker – as you miss sleep you get hungrier while your body looks for a way to find nutrient energy to make up for lack of rest and repair time.

Here is the cycle:

[as soon as you stop growing your hormones level off then decline as need declines]

You weaken with age > your ability to output energy declines > you need less calories and less physical rest = You lack mental and emotional (nervous system rest) and gain fat. 

No amount of activity can help if you lack the ability to output because your body engines can’t produce enough force. You can run, cycle or swim til the cows come home but unless you are naturally thin to begin with (and really super tight on nutrition) no way it does anything more than a bit of stress relief and a way to pass time.

Example: Not picking on females but they start out with less strength than male and the fact is the average woman we meet in her mid thirties to mid forties will store fat eating more than a thousand calories a day. Their ability to output energy is so low they can do spin class 5 days a week and still be out of shape. You can be weak and scrawny but in no way healthy and energetic on a starvation diet of less than a 1000 calories a day. It’s a catch 22 – starve yourself to be thin and end up even weaker with even less need for calories or physical sleep.

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You grew up as a child to be energetic and strong then you didn’t need to use this strength so you lost it. Certainly you should be active, and yes you can’t possibly be at reasonable body fat level if you eat poorly but first things first…get strong again.

Regards,

Andrew and Tierney

* By physical body rest we mean the raw prime movers of your body (muscles, major organs, bones and connective tissue) once exhausted will hormonally speaking bring you down into the deep continuous sleep level you need to achieve to begin recovery of the central nervous system.