I started medical school this past August and since that time my body image, activity level, and desire to treat my body with the utmost respect has exponentially risen. For the past decade or more I have struggled with accepting myself “despite” my faults or being totally awash with anger and resentment at this body I have to “deal” with. Admittedly, I still have moments of that sort, but more and more I look at my body as this amazing work of biological art and want to help my body and all its wonderful parts be at the optimum of health.
I have yet to fully let go of the notion that health and thinness go together, as most of America (and the world to some extent) fervently believes. However, as I learn more and more about the body, I am driven to the understanding that health is attainable while weight loss like that on The Biggest Loser is generally not.
First it was Anatomy and Histology (the microscopic study of tissue) that inspired me to truly appreciate my tissues and see that they remain healthy all my living days— a.k.a. I started “working out” again because once I saw how “cool” muscles are and what each one is designed to do, I couldn’t wait to see what my muscles and tissues could do. As I ran or lifted weights, I thought about every muscle strand that was helping me accomplish my goal.
Second it was the body’s physiological and anatomical responses to exercise that inspired me to stick with my crazy schedule of getting up at 4:30am so that I could be a medical student and work out. I learned that when we exercise several aspects of our individual cells change. Everyone knows about the hypertrophy of muscles, but on an even smaller scale we actually change the inside of our cells and their surface receptors depending on what type of exercise we are engaged in, e.g. aerobic, anaerobic or a mix.
Without getting too “medical schooly” the more aerobic exercise we do increases the number of energy producing parts of our cells (mitochondria for the dorks out there) especially in muscle tissue. In addition, we also increase the receptors for glucose (GLUT4 mainly), which make us more efficient at maintaining homeostatic glucose and insulin levels (hence the reason we are satiated longer after meals when we are active). This latter finding is the reason that lack of exercise accompanied by overeating of glucose rich foods can lead to diabetes and why people with diabetes who exercise can not only reverse their diabetes (if it is diet induced) but also make controlling their insulin/glucose levels easier.
On the other hand, when we do more anaerobic exercise (e.g. lifting heavy weights, sprinting) our body increases our storage of energy (glycogen) rather than energy makers (mitochondria). Please do not take this the wrong way to mean storage of energy as storage of fat. I mean that our body makes glycogen which is the second most readily accessible form of energy that our cells can house. Our body’s energy sources from easiest to hardest to burn are: glucose (food), glycogen (created by the liver when we eat too much food and need somewhere to store the good stuff for later), and fatty acids (fat post “breakdown”). There may be some I have not included and when I get to the gastrointestinal section in Week 7, you can all be on the lookout for more gut-wrenching information to come.
My response to this information I am attaining in medical school makes me wonder:
If people were more educated about what makes up the body, how the body moves and responds to movement, and how amazing the body really is (a work of mother nature’s most intricate art), would they too have a greater appreciation for their bodies and stop eating heavily processed foods and find ways of making their bodies move that excites and invigorates them?
As for me, I am back to loving “working out” which is generally such a negative term for me. Now I crave and can’t wait to see how my body changes and adapts to my newfound energy and excitement. I no longer look to the scale or the mirror for my acceptance and “right” to be who I am. I love the way that I feel every day and as long as that is positive, amazingly, my mirror always screams,
You are awesome.
I love it!
Shannon Stevenson studies medicine and osteopathy at Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences.
Jamie Dreyer is off today.
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February 4th, 2009 at 6:57 am
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February 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
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February 12th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
I can’t wait till you come back to NYC so we can talk shop and be “dorks” together. Mitochondria and fascia fascinate me.