Old Age & Falling down

I had confusions at the beginning of my anti-aging, longevity journey. So there's this common approach: eat less, you look fit. Common wisdom: fit looking people tend to live longer.

On the other hand, I just think about what some health experts started mentioning these days. Okay, calorie deficit, intermittent fasting are good for anti-aging but building muscles is going to be the one that will be determining the quality of your life. So, you may live longer but may not be productive down the line.

Remembering my grandpa's experience

I was at university, studying for my finals and it turned out my grandfather was going through something. And my family didn’t share this ordeal with me so as not to distract me from my finals. So it turned out my grandfather fell down from the stairs, broke his leg, went for surgery and possibly they gave him some medication during the recovery after the operation.

That medication damaged his stomach and he almost died because of this problem. I also heard from other people multiple times; when old people fall down their health condition goes haywire. There are a lot of reasons for this.

So again, common wisdom suggests recovery takes longer for older people. When we go through the mechanics of recovery, the body needs things like cholesterol, protein to fix the broken tissues. So, if you are a skinny person at an old age, possibly your body cannot find resources for faster recovery because it has to move things from one place to another unless you are eating extra to compensate for the recovery. When loss of appetite is an accompanying side-effect of the health problem or the medications, eating extra might be tricky for old people.

I believe it's important to have some calorie deficit for fitness on a regular basis, but this should be above the base metabolism rate, by doing more exercises, you need to increase your active calories, and you can still create calorie deficiency in this way while retaining or even increasing your muscle mass.

You need to build muscles so that they would protect you from the adverse effects of falling down; hurting yourself and being more sedentary for a while. And they allow you to recover faster. Because you will be losing muscles regardless of your age when you are not using them.

Where does the muscle go when you are losing them?

The answer is your body will be breaking down your muscle tissue and protein within to fix more vital organs. Having extra muscle during a recovery period will not only be a resource for repairing more vital organs but also help you leave the recovery stage with still relatively strong muscles minimizing the time you stay sedentary helping you catch on being active again.