Just Fucking Move!

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and what follows is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor and engage with them on the topics of eating well and moving well and the impact it has on your health.

“Anything that gets worse as you grow older gets better as you exercise.” Dr. Ralph Seal Paffenbarger, Jr.

The health conversation about what, when, and how we eat is very important but it sucks all the oxygen out of the room and steels critical attention away from the other big thing you need to do to unfuck yourself — MOVE!

(And sleep, more on that soon.)

Just as highly processed, calorie-dense food is now ubiquitously designed into our culture; required, routine movement has been thoroughly designed out.

As recently as 100 years ago, our relatives worked in the fields and at the factory. At home, they hauled wood for heating and cooking, cleaned by hand, and walked or rode bicycles and horses for transport. Just over 10,000 years ago (a nanosecond in evolutionary terms), our ancestors walked, jogged, and sprinted during the hunt, or walked long distances to gather food and dig for tubers, all of which they carried home.

Today, you wake up, drive to work, sit at your desk (or stand at it if you're really fit…), drive home, sit on the sofa while thumbing through social media, streaming videos, or playing video games, and go to bed. The most rigorous daily activity for some is walking to and from the car. For most Americans, whether you are a white-collar worker standing at your desk or a service worker standing behind the counter at Wawa, there is very little required, routine movement in your life. Some people work out, but that is an elective behavior. Couple lack of routine movement with eating a highly processed, calorie-dense diet accompanied by a couple of beers or glasses of wine, and you are at an incredibly high risk of developing one or more Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) — diabetes, arteriosclerosis, cancer, or another NCD that are now killing us at an alarming rate.

Improving the quality and quantity of food you eat is important, but will not independently make you “healthy” (nor will Ozempic).

You have to fucking move, too!

“Moving well” is just as important as “eating well” — they are an interconnected system that can’t be parsed apart and treated independently.

So, how much do you have to move to move well?

Move often (good effort, but able to chat), with short bursts of intensity (huffing and puffing), and, at times, carry a heavy load, every day.

Fuck, that sounds like a lot! Well, that is what makes us human. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends adults do at least 150 to 300 minutes of aerobic physical activity at moderate intensity, or 75 to 150 minutes at vigorous intensity and do muscle-strengthening activities two or more days a week. Our ancestors got all of their movement out of simply living life and surviving. You don’t NEED to move to survive anymore. Nearly all your movement is elective — walk to the store or drive, play pickleball or play Zelda, go to the gym or… fuck it, let’s just “Netflix and chill” (although that does come with some welcome movement). For your body to operate as designed, you must find extra time to add movement back into your day because nearly all routine movement has been designed out of American life.

The importance of movement isn’t just to get us from one place to another, chew, or pick our kids/grandkids off the floor. Movement is the critical stimulus for many of the human body and mind’s core functions.

Movement ensures you process energy effectively and efficiently. You are a beautiful hybrid engine that uses fatty acids and glucose (sugar) as fuel to produce the energy you need to move and live. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the energy your muscles need to contract and your heart needs to beat. When you move slow and steady (Zone 1 & 2), you are in fat-burning mode. The mitochondria (see more on Mitochondria in this post) in your cells use oxygen and fat to make ATP (a process called oxidative phosphorylation). It is a slower process but produces a lot of ATP for your long walks and Zone 2 jogs (chat, can’t sing). Your muscles have trillions of mitochondria and when you are moving well, your mitochondria work well, repairing themselves, multiplying, and increasing your aerobic capacity. When you are sedentary, your mitochondria do not receive a positive stress signal to repair and multiply, and begin to degrade due to lack of use. This is called mitochondrial dysfunction and is at the root of many NCDs.

Your second fuel is glucose. When you need to go all out in a sprint, cycle up a hill, or lift something heavy, your muscles need more ATP than your mitochondria can produce, so your muscle cells switch from fat to glucose, which is stored in your muscles for easy, fast access. Your muscle cells convert the glucose to ATP in a process called glycolysis. Glycolysis does not produce as much ATP as oxidative phosphorylation in your mitochondria, but it can create ATP quickly for a short time. That is why you can sprint for a few seconds but jog for hours. When you bring your effort back down, your mitochondria kick back in to burn oxygen and fat. This fuel switching from oxygen+fat to glucose and back is called metabolic flexibility, a strong indicator of good health.

But what if you are eating a SAD (Standard American Diet) of highly processed, calorie-dense food? You overload your body with glucose and force your body to burn glucose when it should be burning fat. So poor movement and poor eating together result in a double whammy of not burning fat and creating more of it. A wonderfully horrible example of how we eat and how we move are inextricably linked.

Movement also has a critical impact on how your body processes insulin. There will be posts on insulin sensitivity and resistance in the near future, so here is a brief explanation. Insulin shuttles glucose in your blood into your liver, muscles, and adipose tissue (fat cells). When you eat (or even think about eating), your pancreas releases insulin into your bloodstream. If you are eating well, your liver, muscles, and adipose tissue are sensitive to insulin and readily take up the glucose. But when you eat highly processed, calorie-dense food, your blood is filled with glucose, but your liver and muscle cells resist the insulin (insulin resistance), and refuse the glucose. That’s a problem because too much glucose in your blood is toxic, so your body needs to clear it. In reaction, your pancreas releases more insulin, trying to force your liver and muscles to take it. They do, but get fat and unhealthy in the process. And the glucose your liver and muscles don’t take is taken up by your adipose (fat) tissue.

What does this have to do with movement? Physical activity has an immediate impact on insulin sensitivity. After exercise, “glucose uptake remains elevated for up to 120 minutes” and can improve insulin sensitivity for up to 16 hours. Part of this is because when muscles contract, they mechanically pull in glucose without the need for insulin. Over time, movement is so effective at improving insulin resistance that diabetics can reverse type 2 diabetes with habitual physical exercise.

More and more evidence links movement and exercise to reducing chronic inflammation, improving mood, and many other benefits, but let’s end this on sarco-fucking-penia.

Sarcopenia is a fancy term for muscle loss. It can start in your 30s and by the time you’re 50, you are losing 3% of muscle a year, if you are not lifting. By 80, your muscle can be cut in half. This matters because your muscle mass determines your strength and balance. When you do not have adequate strength and balance, you are frail and frailty is a hidden killer. For example, a woman who breaks her hip is five times more likely and a man almost eight times more likely to die within the first three months of the accident. You stave off sarcopenia by putting your muscles under tension (lifting weights). And the amazing thing about lifting weights is it builds muscle no matter how old you are, it is never too late.

So what do you do? (Please consult your doctor before any changes to your exercise regime.)

If you are thinking, “damn, I’m pretty sedentary…” great, just move more than you do now. Any additional movement is better than what you are doing now. Try to walk 4,000 steps a day. Start there.

If you’re kind of a walker, exercise a little, then increase your intensity a little. Go a little longer with your walks/workouts and put a little bit more into it (meaning increase your heart rate a little).

Have a workout routine? Diversify it. Mix it up with Zone 2 workouts to improve your fitness base. Do some HIIT to increase those mitochondria and elevate your Vo2Max. Lift a couple times a week to maintain and increase your muscle mass (and no, Zone 2 and HIIT are not optimal for maintaining and increasing muscle mass).

Are you already crushing it? Awesome, keep it up and be as welcoming, kind, and helpful to those who are not as fit and committed as you, yet.

Thank you for reading! If this post was helpful, please add a comment, give it some “claps,” follow Unfuck 50, and share it with a fellow 50-something-year-old that may need a little help getting/staying unfucked. You can also follow Unfuck 50 on Instagram, Threads, and X.

Further reading:

Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel Lieberman

The Miracle Pill: Why a Sedentary World Is Getting It All Wrong by Peter Walker