Skip to main content

I Strength Trained for a Year--Here's What Happened

No dinky weights! Photo from Unsplash.

After years of being frustrated by a lack of energy and carrying around more fat than I wanted to, last year I finally regained enough of my health to start...lifting weights. That might not be conventional wisdom, but it makes more sense than eating less or simply moving more to lose weight and be more energetic. I started in March of last year with a few sessions with a personal trainer who showed me how to work out without hurting my neck. Since then, I've been lifting weights twice a week at home, missing workouts only when I'm sick or doing a lot of landscaping. I use 10- to 25-pound weights and a stability ball. After eight months, I lost enough fat that I had to buy new pants, but more importantly, I've improved my metabolic health and reduced my risk of various diseases of aging. The lab tests I took five months in showed a big drop in fasting insulin--from 4.4 in 2021 to 3.7. Other metabolic markers stayed about the same. 

If you're thinking this was because of a big weight loss, it wasn't. The machine at the personal trainer's gym showed I started with only 6% visceral fat, well within the normal range for women. I lost less than 10 pounds and the before and after photos I posted hardly got a comment, they were so similar. I didn't change they way I ate. I did strength training.

Strength is so important that grip strength has been proposed as a biomarker. "Supporting this proposition, evidence is provided herein that shows grip strength is largely consistent as an explanator of concurrent overall strength, upper limb function, bone mineral density, fractures, falls, malnutrition, cognitive impairment, depression, sleep problems, diabetes, multimorbidity, and quality of life. Evidence is also provided for a predictive link between grip strength and all-cause and disease-specific mortality, future function, bone mineral density, fractures, cognition and depression, and problems associated with hospitalization."(1) People with diabetes tend to have lower grip strength compared to non-diabetics(2). Sarcopenia (age-related loss of muscle mass, strength and function) is associated with falls and fractures, poor quality of life, increased mortality, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and depression and anxiety(3).

Some of these things are self-evident, but does strength training really improve cognition, depression and diabetes or are these just associations? "Muscles serve as storage facilities for consumed sugar and carbohydrates," says an article in Everyday Health(4). Strength training also improves insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance and boosts metabolism(5). And it's widely accepted that some cases of depression are exercise deficiency syndrome and Alzheimer's disease is type 3 diabetes. 

I suspected a link between weakness, diabetes and dementia eleven years ago when my father, who seemed to be made of iron even in his 60s, rapidly went downhill a few years before he died. Here's what he and my mother were eating:

Four trash bags of chips, crackers, cookies, pretzels, potato mix, gravy mix, cake mix, cornbread mix, macaroni and cheese mix, oatmeal, sugar and grapes. No wonder my parents ended up frail and diabetic.

You need protein to build muscle, and probably most of us need to limit carbs to avoid putting on fat. L. reuteri yogurt helps build muscle, and Bacillus coagulans helps with muscle recovery. I use L. reuteri from BioGaia and B. coagulans Unique IS-2 from Culterelle. After I was rehabbing my garage in 2020 and left feeling like I'd been run over after a few hours' work, I was blown away later that year at my speedy recovery from an injury. The only thing I was doing differently was eating yogurt made with B. coagulans. 

It's hard to exercise if you're in pain. Stretches have helped me so much in eliminating TMJ pain, headaches and kinks that I've added a new YouTube channel to my video feed. SpineCare Decompression is run by a chiropractor who shows you how to relieve joint and muscle pain in minutes with stretching exercises and find long-term relief with strength training exercises. (If you don't see the video feed, click on the three horizontal lines at the top right of my blog and scroll down.) 

You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet--but you also can't diet and supplement your way to fitness (although they can help). When you lose weight, you also lose muscle and therefore strength, and research shows that makes you more prone to debilitating illnesses and injuries. Strength training is a way to lose or maintain weight and stay fit.

How I train

3 sets, 8-12 reps each of upper body, core, back and lower body exercises with 10- to 25-pound dumbbells or a stability ball, repeated a second time with different exercises, twice a week. Each workout takes about an hour.

Sources

  1. Bohannon RW. Grip Strength: An Indispensable Biomarker For Older Adults. Clin Interv Aging. 2019 Oct 1;14:1681-1691. doi: 10.2147/CIA.S194543. PMID: 31631989; PMCID: PMC6778477.
  2. AI-generated content from Brave.com. Sources: Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, Science Daily, BMC Geriatrics, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, EverydayHealth.com, and WebMD.com. https://search.brave.com/search?q=strength+training+and+blood+sugar&source=web&summary=1&summary_og=62124d6f85b214af7271e7
  3. AI-generated content from Brave.com. Sources: Nature.com, Current Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Reports, Frontiers in Neurology, Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, and Progress in Rehabilitation Medicine. https://search.brave.com/search?q=sarcopenia+risks&source=web&summary=1&summary_og=5cbd85b0edd191f0607ae1
  4. "Why You Should Be Lifting Weights if You Have Type 2 Diabetes by K. Aleisha Fetters." EverydayHealth.com Updated on December 12, 2023. https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/living-with/weight-lifting-get-strong/
  5. Strasser B, Pesta D. Resistance training for diabetes prevention and therapy: experimental findings and molecular mechanisms. Biomed Res Int. 2013;2013:805217. doi: 10.1155/2013/805217. Epub 2013 Dec 22. PMID: 24455726; PMCID: PMC3881442. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881442/

Other references

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community.  Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll.  Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing.  That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...
2 comments
Read more

We Hate the ADA; Why does the Perfect Health Diet Get a Pass?

Some people keep touting the Perfect Health Diet as low-carb, but carb levels that are mostly in the triple digits aren't generally regarded as low-carb; in fact, one of the authors says low-carb diets are unhealthy. A lot of us hate the  American Diabetes Association's advice for diabetics: start with 45g to 60g of carbohydrate per meal and go higher or lower from there. That's 135g to 180g of carb. Perfect Health Diet advice for diabetics: eat 20% to 30% of your diet as carbohydrate. On 2,000 calories, that's 100g to 150g of carb. On 1,700 calories, that's 85 to 128g; on 2,200 calories, that's 112 to 168g. Depending on your carb and calorie intake, carbs would be 85g to 168g per day. That's not a mile off from the ADA's recommendations. Paul Jaminet, one of the authors of the Perfect Health Diet, says, "the basic biology here is that the body's physiology is optimized for a carbohydrate intake of about 30%." He warns against a ...
14 comments
Read more

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...
18 comments
Read more

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...
24 comments
Read more

Doing Old-School Atkins

Last time I wrote about getting jittery and having a rapid heartbeat on VLC (very low carb). I cut way back on nuts a few weeks ago and felt remarkably better: more energy, and I can tell I lost a little weight because of the way my shoes and watchband fit. As I mentioned, taking a potassium pill helps the jitters and rapid heartbeat, and if it gets really bad, I can just eat a candy bar (we don't have safe starches at work). So for the first time, I tried Atkins induction. Why Atkins induction? It started with shorts. I'd been shopping for shorts and everything was very short (think Officer Jim Dangle on Reno 911 ), wildly patterned, ridiculous (where do you wear lace shorts if you're not starring in a Korean drama?) or knee length. There was even a high-waisted, pleated, acid washed pair from circa 1985. So when I saw a gray pair with sailor pant buttons, I bought them--even though they were pretty short (but not tight). Think Officer Dangle again. Being conscious of wea...
12 comments
Read more