Older Bolder Life

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lean body mass

On Becoming More Resilient: Five Cornerstones

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During these most unusual days I’ve made it a goal over the past few weeks to spend at least part of my time interacting with family, friends, and coaching clients challenging them to think about how they can become more resilient.

Merriam-Webster’s defines resilient as tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change, as well as capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture.

Interpreted in light of this spring’s current events, the concept of being resilient implies much, much more than simply surviving life’s challenges (despite the media’s incessant droning on about survival). The world and her collected humanity have seen many a pandemic before, and will so again; the resiliency of the human race is damned impressive, and the historical record of such seems much under-appreciated these days.

So how might one become more resilient?

Becoming More Resilient: You Are What You Eat

The phrase “you are what you eat” is oft attributed to Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” (Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are).

Whether or not that attribution is correct, there’s no doubt at this point in time that the food we partake is the single most critical determinant of our long-term health and wellness.

My own story is a perfect example of this, and if you’ve not yet made the choice to eat to pursue optimal health, now’s the perfect time to jump in. The challenge of course if finding the right food plan for your unique physiology and circumstances; following some common-sense principles will lead you, more quickly than you might imagine, to a plan that works. (Need some help sorting out options? I can help).

Becoming More Resilient: Lean Body Mass Wins the Day

The fact that lean body mass correlates directly with a human’s ability to survive disease and disaster has been long established; modern medicine, along with popular society, seem to have forgotten this simple axiom, with devastating results.

Need a refresher on lean body mass? Read more here.

As data pours in related to COVID-19, obesity appears to be the single most significant co-morbidity reported, particularly in younger age bands. It doesn’t matter where you are today, get started now.

Becoming More Resilient: Functional Fitness Matters More than Ever

Maintaining functional fitness throughout life doesn’t require mind-boggling commitments of time, effort, or resources, yet might yield the most impressive returns over time of any investment of time, effort, or resources you can make, ever. By simply walking (perhaps with an occasional sprint throw in for fun and good measure) and completing thoughtfully specific body weight exercises, impressive fitness levels can be gained (and maintained).

And as an added bonus, recent data (take this report from UVA within the past week) shows impressive exercise-induced benefits in battling viral invaders and recovering from their impacts.

Volumes have been written about the beneficial impacts that exercise has on human physiology (and mind/spirit); now more than ever you need to lace up those walking shoes and get to it.

Becoming More Resilient: Connections Count

It’s damned revealing that during a time in history when humanity is ostensibly more connected than ever by technology, in reality time spent wandering through the morass of social media clearly makes us less happy, less productive, and we’re reporting a sense of loneliness at near epidemic levels.

Genuine and authentic connections with other humans count. We all need a trusted circle of friends and family; I get it that not everyone wants to play, but you need to find those that do, and work hand in hand to develop authentic relationships you can lean on when the waters of life grow rough (they inevitably do at some point).

By the way, my wife and I have found that the deepest and best relationships we’ve shared with friends over time have grown organically out of shared experiences pursuing worthy activities helping others.

Becoming More Resilient: Purpose, Problem Solving, and Pivots

A fascinating principle was taught to me by a mentor years ago, and it was ironically related to purpose. His argument was that the most successful people in world history, with few exceptions, were those who chartered their life course around helping others solve or fix some problem faced in every day life.

One of his key points was that life on this globe always has (and always will) present for most of us challenges that at times seem overwhelming; it’s inescapable and at times a harsh reality, yet with every challenge comes an opportunity to adapt, change, improve, grow, and perhaps even help others along the way. Having a strong purpose in life can make problem solving good (or great) solutions even more accessible.

Finally, rarely does life proceed according to our best crafted plans. The ability to problem solve and pivot to something adjacent or new is an impressive skill that takes some cultivating and practice. And while your crystal ball predicting your future is a bit cloudy today, with changes coming in society over the next few months there will likely be multiple opportunities to pivot to something new (and maybe even better) coming soon.

Be prepared to pivot for the win.

Older Bolder Foundations: Optimizing Lean Body Mass, Not Weight Loss, Is Goal One

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Many of us are drawn to efforts to improve our personal health (or the health of a loved one) by the lure of weight loss; given the fact that roughly a third of Americans are obese by typical measurement standards, weight loss is an appropriate and worthy goal.

What we should be more focused upon, though, is optimizing our lean body mass, given the almost astounding benefits optimal lean body mass provides.

Granted, weight loss and optimizing lean body mass are kissing cousins and very closely intertwined, though there are subtle (and some not so subtle) differences in approach and practice between the two.

Why bother with the distinction? The answer is easy – there are some extreme approaches to weight loss (and long term food plan choices) that compromise, some significantly, lean body mass and therefore general health and well-being over the long haul. Getting and staying optimally healthy and functional is of course the objective, and the road to get there is in reality pretty conceptually simple to navigate.

It’s worth thinking a bit more about lean body mass and its benefits…

What is Lean Body Mass?

Lean body mass is term used quite frequently these days by folks from all across the health and wellness spectrum. The simplest definition for Lean Body Mass (LBM) is the weight (mass) of everything in your body minus/without the various types of body fat stored on your frame.

LBM is sometimes (incorrectly) used interchangeably with muscle mass, and while they’re correlated strongly, of course LBM includes the weight of all “the other stuff” in our bodies beside muscle tissue – our skeletal structure, skin, internal organs, nervous system, the various fluids circulating through the system. There are a number of tools that are able to more accurately measure body composition and sort out with much greater precision your muscle mass, such as DEXA scans (duel-energy X-ray absorptiometry and BIA (bioelectrical impedance analysis).

Higher Lean Body Mass Implies Enhanced Function (and Function is the Ultimate Goal)

Life is about function – engaging fully and productively with your environment – and to do so optimally implies an intact and fully functional lean body mass. In particular, engaging fully functionally with our environment implies consistent, high-level function of our musculoskeletal system (muscles and joints aren’t necessarily designed to wear to failure in our sixties), and all the organ mass that supports their mobility-centric activities (heart, gut, liver, brain and neural tissue, etc.)

Excessive fat (adipose) mass is an unwelcome traveler along for the ride, a lumpy mass of nutrient storage far, far beyond rational possible needs, dampening the actions of homeostasis-seeking hormones (i.e. insulin resistance, decreased leptin signaling), overloading joints, driving inflammation, invoking frustration, shame, and anguish, and much more.

Lean Body Mass Promotes Insulin Sensitivity

The plague of insulin resistance carries with it a host of metabolic consequences, though it’s been a well-documented and long-accepted fact that a higher lean body mass is associated with lower rates of what many term prediabetes and insulin resistance. It’s well established that increasing insulin sensitivity is good, and insulin resistance is bad; we’ll delve more into insulin resistance later.

Try a quick search engine query of “lean body mass and insulin resistance” and you’ll find a flood of studies completed over the past several decades; we’ll look in detail at several in a later post.

Higher Lean Body Mass Increases Longevity

Observational studies such as this one have demonstrated conclusively that higher muscle mass (a strong correlate of LBM) in older adults is associated with lower all-cause mortality. Lower skeletal muscle mass and abdominal obesity (implying low lean body mass) has been shown to correlate strongly with higher all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality.

Lean Body Mass Strengthens Bones

Osteoporosis, in lay terms often referred to as thinning of the bones in the body, is a bone disease that occurs when the body makes too little bone, loses too much bone, or a combination of the two. (The word osteoporosis actually means “porous bone”.) Osteoporosis in it’s worst forms leads to a plethora of fractures (femur, wrist, and spine among the more common and serious), requiring at times aggressive intervention, and inducing impressive losses in the functional realm.

Bones in our bodies constantly remodel and change in response to a variety of factors, one of the more critical being mechanical stress – the kind of stress that is delivered by weight-bearing movement and stress in particular, movement and stress that is driven by our lean body mass/muscle tissue.

Lean body mass has been shown to be much more effective in preventing bone density loss than fat mass.

Lean Body Mass Serves as a Reserve in Times of Illness and Injury Stress

Many of us, during our lifetimes, will encounter on one level or another an event or catastrophe in the form of illness or injury that serves as a serious, maybe even life-threatening stressor.

I spent the first years of my medical career caring for individuals who had suffered some of the most catastrophic, survivable insults to health imaginable – spinal cord injuries, multi-system and/or widespread orthopaedic trauma, severe burns, traumatic brain injuries, progressive neuromuscular diseases, and strokes. Despite a careful, intensive, multidisciplinary approach to care, more often than not, during these times of severe stress, some degree of lean body mass loss was noted as bodies reached for every available resource at their disposal to recover.

Breaking down muscle mass, among other healthy tissues, to support recovery in these situations isn’t optimal, but can be life saving in a crisis. And lean body mass can be rebuilt too.

Lean Body Mass Increases Metabolic Efficiency

Having a higher LBM clearly improves metabolic efficiency, though I should clarify what I mean here by metabolic efficiency (which implies a host of meanings pending context and author).

Perhaps the best example is that of a carb-dependent (CD) versus a fat-adapted (FA) marathoner. Our CD runner will burn through liver and muscle glycogen stores fairly early in their race, necessitating loading the gut with more carbs (a potentially problematic issue in and of itself), followed by an insulin spike to combat the flood of carbohydrate into the bloodstream, with the body then utilizing the glucose to generate energy, though that process is metabolically “dirty”, producing a host of oxidation by-products.

Our fat-adapted runner, hydrating with water or electrolytes, has built the much more efficient metabolic machinery to burn fats, and without any exogenous fuels, even the thinnest, fittest runners carry thousands of calories in storage with them wherever they run, pulling fats out of storage and utilizing more efficient cellular machinery (FA folks have happier and more functional mitochondria) to keep the fires stoked throughout a race event. The FA athlete, by utilizing fats which offer more than twice the calories of energy produced than glucose – roughly 9 Cal/gram in fats vs. 4 Cal/gram in glucose – has a distinct advantage.

Lean body mass can be “trained” to burn fats (and ketones) very efficiently; fat mass doesn’t.

Tomorrow’s Foundation Post will look at how excess body fat isn’t your friend.