Everyone seems to know that exercise makes us healthier but I think it is still an abstract concept to most people. It is still being associated with aesthetic value – looking lean, and there are more important things in life than to look lean. Not everybody is interested to test the limits of their body, to know where it can go. The idea of running being able to run 5km without huffing and puffing is not appealing to everyone. Maybe most of us just want to be able to walk. To complete our day’s tasks. To be present to our loved ones. Spending a few precious hours each week to improve our body seems like a vain thing to do. Developing the capacity to run seems nice to have, but frivolous.
But I’ve learnt: the point of exercise is not to “improve” the body. It essentially maintains it. When we are young everything is fine and dandy. Our body is kept in almost perfect homeostasis. The natural effects of ageing however, puts us in a chronic negative loop. The more we age the more errors start happening in our body, the less we are able to recover, and hence more of our biological resources get depleted, resulting in a chronic diminishing capacity to cope with stress and energy demands.
The right amount of exercise creates a positive feedback loop: it is stressful for the body, so the body responds by growing more mitochondria to cope with it:
Conversely, without enough stimuli, our strength and energy capacity start to shrink. Negative stress like illnesses and stressful events coupled with the effects of ageing will dwindle them down if we don’t do anything about it.
The amount of energy we can use each day is finite. If our aerobic capacity is compromised, just walking around is enough to deplete us. Imagine if we are able to run 5km and not feel tired. On the days we are not running we are barely dipping into our energy capacity.
This applies to strength as well. When we are able to lift say 20kg without breaking a sweat, this means that the daily mundane chores of carrying things around will not tire us much. Previously, even carrying 1kg on my back for 30 minutes would tire me significantly. Since lifting a significant amount of weight doesn’t feel too strenuous to me now, I can walk around with a much heavier load without feeling too depleted. There is just more capacity to work with, and it takes a lot more to reach breaking point.
Somehow we tend to associate energy as though it is part of our character, or that we can simply will energy to flow from our body. People with very little energy are perceived as lazy or weak. It is very much a physiological state, and a lot of it can be determined from birth. We can’t expect someone with very little muscle to lift 20kg of weight no matter how much will power they have. It is the same with our aerobic energy, which fuels most of what we do. If we have very little mitochondria left, we cannot make them generate more energy than they are capable of no matter how much positive thinking we can have.
People with chronic illness is stuck in that negative energy loop. Which is why traditionally the recommendation is to exercise. The process that makes more mitochondria is not the exercise itself, but recovery. But people who are chronically ill lack the ability to recover, which is precisely why they are chronically ill. The more they attempt to exercise, the more mitochondria they are damaging, the less and less capacity they will have. The body is essentially stuck in a vicious cycle when chronically ill. Till today, medical professionals don’t have a good idea on how to reverse this negative loop.
I was able to get myself out of this negative loop with the support of traditional chinese medicine (tcm), which philosophy is to get the body back to homeostasis, not just addressing the symptoms. Yet most people think tcm is hogwash.
I was someone who lived with chronic fatigue for a very long time. I lived an extremely sedentary lifestyle with an extremely bad diet in my 20s. Coupled with chronic stress I became chronically ill in my 30s. It took me almost a decade to get better. Being on the other side I am now experiencing what it is like to be fitter, to have that extra reserve capacity to deal with the energy demands of life. I was never this healthy before even when I was much younger, because I was never taught how fragile is health, and what being healthy truly means. It is not just about avoiding illnesses and pursuing longevity, but it is about being able to cope with what life throws at us. If we are always feeling tired it is difficult to handle any form of stress. And life is extremely stressful, even if one loves their job and social life there is still stress. Our body doesn’t care if we like or enjoy the stress. Stress is stress to the body, and if we don’t do anything to circumvent it we will eventually pay for it.
Stress kills mitochondria and since everything is stressful – even eating is a form of stress – we have to actively grow our mitochondria so that if our daily life and ageing kills some of them, we still have some left over. If not, the threshold to burnout is very low – a single unfortunate event can push us over the brink.
This is also why I don’t like to get sick. Illnesses are extremely stressful for the body, even mere colds.
Hypoxia, infections, inflammation, mutations – all can alter flux patterns through the Krebs cycle, with a knock-on effect that switches on or off hundreds or thousands of genes, changing the stable (epigenetic) state of cells and tissues. Tissue function eventually becomes strained, biosynthetic pathways falter, ATP synthesis declines and the delicate web of symbiosis between tissues begins to fray. And so we age. – Nick Lane, Transformer
Viruses like covid send us into a chronic negative loop. If we are unlucky we may not be able to break out of it. We can’t take for granted that the body is always able to recover. It is not just about stopping the negative symptoms, but to be able to go back to the state we were in before the illness. It is not that easy to grow mitochondria, and a single bout of illness can set us back permanently. Sometimes the negative loops are invisible, and the effects take years to manifest. People who were infected with HIV or the Epstein-barr virus didn’t suffer their consequences until many years later. Viruses are a leading cause of various cancers. But we don’t know these things.
We only know this abstract concept named, health. We don’t know what it actually takes to truly possess it, or we would cherish it way more.