The Human Body
The human body operates a use-it-or-lose-it system. It’s a side-effect of the way it was designed. Think of a half full bucket of water. Over time, the water level will reduce naturally due to environmental factors such as evaporation and chemical reactions of water molecules with the bucket - depending on what material it’s made of. There is no way to regulate, reduce or increase the water level in that bucket. This is not how the human body operates.
Now think of a bucket with a small hole at the bottom sitting under a tap, with the water level at the halfway point. Now consider the different factors keeping the water at that level point. The obvious ones are the size of the hole and and the volume of water pouring in from tap. If these two are the same, the water will remain at the halfway point. Well, over time, not really. We still have to consider the aforementioned environmental factors like evaporation. The water pounding in from the tap would have to be ever so slightly more than the volume dripping out through the hole in order to compensate for the environmental factors.
Over time, as changes occur, such as the enlargement of the hole, or perhaps the pressure, and hence the volume, of the tap, tweaks have to be made to maintain the halfway point of the water. These tweaks are regulated by a myriad of feedback loops to keep things in balance.
Over more time, some of these regulatory feedback looks and tweaking mechanisms begin to fail one by one, eventually culminating in a general failure of the process. At which point the water either empties out of the bucket totally, or overflow.
The human body is similar to the second bucket, but is thousands of times more complex.
Tell you what, I’ve started feeling some of the effects of disuse of some of my body parts. I walk a lot, so my lower limbs are strong as rocks. I don’t do the pull-up action much, hardly ever even, so my late and some of my lower back and core muscles are not as strong compared to my legs. As such when I did some housekeeping, which involved lifting heavy things overhead, I really felt it during and after the fact.
This is partly why I’ve started doing more of those actions to tell my body that I do need those muscles - not to tweak the system or repurposing the resources to other functions. A lot of injuries that elderly people encounter are caused by the disuse, hence the atrophy, of muscle groups over time. My great grandma, who lived to be over a century old, was pretty fit and mobile till the very last few years of her life when she finally died of old age. She walked a lot too - a lot more that I. She would clocked roughly 10 miles daily on average, sometimes doing as much as 25 miles in one single day. A lot of time she did this bearing some kind of heavy weight; farm produce, stuff she bought at the market, while also carrying a child or grand child on her back. Remarkable people from the olden days.
The environment was different back then too. They didn’t have some of the devastating factors we are exposed to these days, high fructose corn syrup for instance, which further impede those mechanisms that try to keep us strong and healthy.
I’ll leave HFCS for another post. That sweet molecule that’s responsible for nearly 50% of the weight issues we have in the west today.
Peace & Love,
Adé