Have you ever thought about why your muscles atrophy or waste away when you get a cast on your arm? Well, I hadn’t really thought about why until I read an article in the newspaper quoting Dr. Henry S. Lodge author of Younger Next Year. Dr. Lodge points out that when you don’t move something on your body whether it’s your arm or leg or whatever, the muscles let out a steady trickle of chemicals that tell the cells to decay, day after day after day. Then I got to thinking, if this applies to not moving the muscles at all, would this also apply if you just didn’t move them as much — like a couch potato? What Dr. Lodge reported fascinated me because it’s all tied up in our evolution.

We replace about 1 percent of our cells every day which means that 1 percent of your body is brand-new today and tomorrow we’ll get another 1 percent. So, in or around about every three months, we get a whole new body. I had heard this before, but what was so interesting about what Dr. Lodge states is that we are responsible for whether we instruct our cells to decay or not — otherwise called aging. How are we responsible? — by deciding what instructions we are going to give our cells. If we exercise and move around a lot, we are instructing our cells not to decay but to get stronger and bigger.

Well, it appears that evolution has had its hand in this instruction. According to Dr. Lodge, if you look back on how our body has evolved, billions of years ago animals had two cellular challenges. The first was to grow strong, fast, and fit in the spring when food was abundant and there are calories to fuel hungry muscles, bones and brain. The second is to decay as fast as possible reducing the need for calories in the winter when calories are sparse and surviving starvation is the key to life. Food is not the key in the controlling signal for this. Motion controls your system. That’s why you can decrease your calories (to an extent) and exercise and still maintain some muscles. However, if you reduce your calories and reduce your motion or exercise, your muscles will waste.




If our ancestors wanted to eat, they had to hunt or forage for food every single day. That movement generated signals to their body to get stronger and bigger. Our bodies are still operating based on these essential signals. So, today when you exercise, you are giving your cells the same signals to release specific substances that travel throughout your bloodstream, telling your cells to grow. Sedentary muscles, on the other hand, let out a steady stream of chemicals that signal to each cell to decay.

The difference today as compared to our ancestors is that they did not stay sedentary all year long. When Spring rolled around they were ready to roll. However, with our televisions and passive lifestyles where we can simply drive to the supermarket to get our food, we have remained sedentary all year, and year after year. And, with this type of lifestyle our evolutionary programming will kick in and set off some very serious consequences which start with aging then progress to disease such as heart attacks.

Here are some amazing statistics. According to Dr. Lodge, when men go from sedentary to fit, they cut their risk of dying from a heart attack by 75 percent over five years. Women cut their risk by 80 percent. Both men and women can double their leg strength with only three months of exercise and most of us can double it again in another three months and this is true whether you’re in your 30s or 90s. I find that amazing. What this tells me is that deep down at the cellular level we are “wired” to exercise. So, see ‘ya…I’m going to work out now.