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Improving your health needs exercise and even more important as we grow old, so you should strive to be more active regardless of your body weight and also to avoid illnesses.
Everyone knows that fat is where the extra calories you eat end up and the reason your clothes fit too tightly. But beyond that, it doesn’t do much, right? While fat, or adipose tissue, is a place to store excess energy, research shows that it also plays an active role in health and disease. In fact, your fat may be keeping you fat. The good news is that weight loss and regular exercise can reverse the negative health effects of excess body fat.
Body fat is essential for storing extra energy, something that allowed our caveman ancestors to survive times when food was scarce. But fat cells have important biological functions beyond storing extra energy. It turns out that fat cells release chemical signals called adipokines that have effects on other organs and tissues.
For example, type 2 diabetes is strongly linked with obesity. Type 2 diabetes is a condition of high blood glucose caused, in large part, by cells not responding to the hormone insulin. Resistin, which is produced by fat cells, has the effect of causing insulin resistance in the liver and muscle, the two major places where excess glucose is stored. The result is high blood glucose, the hallmark characteristic of diabetes.
