Young at Heart

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 5:11 pm

You’ve heard of the statistics. Most people encounter major health issues once they’ve passed the age of 40 or 50. As the years progress, you’ll see that even the younger generation suffer from a few problems themselves because of unhealthy diet and lifestyle choices. In fact, people believe that cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death. That, however, does not mean that you’re destined to become a victim. As early as now, you can already do something about it. Your cardiovascular system supplies food and oxygen to every part of your body. Keeping it healthy is the key to living a long and energetic life. And the secret to getting there is exercise. Being sedentary is one of the biggest risk factors for heart disease. It is tantamount to smoking and problems with high cholesterol levels.

Vigorous exercise cuts your risk of suffering a heart attack. And that’s not where the story ends. Besides preventing heart attack and stroke, exercise also helps prevent many other illnesses such as diabetes, some cancers, and even mental decline. By breaking sweat on a regular basis, you can help override the code to aging and sail against the tide. If you start right this very moment, you can literally be younger the next year. Centuries back, the human body and the complex systems that regulate it followed a different set of rules. Hunger was commonplace back then and strength was the most essential element to survival. Nature’s rules were not written for today’s era of fast food and sedentary lifestyle. People nowadays spend long hours in the office. During weekends, they just stayed glued to the television. The chemistry that helped your survival has a different impact in the couch-potato world. It programs you for slow and relentless decay.

Luckily, your body has the ability to renew itself. You just have to know when to turn on your internal switch. This is also how exercise dramatically reduces your risk of a heart attack. Your heart basically stays healthy despite the sinful lifestyle you lead. Ironically, heart attacks have almost nothing to do with your heart. In fact, most of it is all about your circulation. If you are lazy and are constantly binging on foods saturated in fat, you build up deposits in the walls of your arteries called plaques. This plaque accumulates over decades like gunk inside an old pipe until it decides to rupture one day.

Every time you work out and sweat your stress muscles, draining them of energy stores, you actually injure them a bit. It is luckily not enough to do long-term damage, but enough to stimulate repair and growth, and to make muscles just a bit stronger. Beyond diet, exercise helps heal those battered and wounded blood vessels. It appears to change the biology from inflammation to repair of muscle tissue. The more you get into shape, the more you cut mortality. When you get into a daily regimen, you can turn your life around and improve the quality of your health. You’ll feel younger and be more vital that you ever thought possible. This may be the best thing you can ever do for yourself.

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