The effect of exercises on fat and muscle cells, understanding methylation and how it affects your weight and energy.

I first heard about methylation from Dr. John Bilas, who placed me on a detox/weight reduction diet to help decrease my cardiac risk factors, help me improve my blood factors and increase the energy I had. 17 pounds and 5 months later, unlike many dieters, I have had an easy time maintaining my weight and my energy level has stayed high. One of the things he addressed was methylation via a cream that I put on the bottom of my feet.

Methylation occurs at the cellular level and apparently, recent study cited in the NY Times seems to indicated that methylation patterns are driven by how we live our lives and with exercise changing the pattern of methylation, we can help prevent diseases such as diabetes and affect the behavior of certain genes in our cells. It also helps us possibly keep our weight lower as well. Read about this further here

How Exercise Changes Fat and Muscle Cells

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Exercise promotes health, reducing most people’s risks of developing diabetes and growing obese. But just how, at a cellular level, exercise performs this beneficial magic — what physiological steps are involved and in what order — remains mysterious to a surprising degree.

Several striking new studies, however, provide some clarity by showing that exercise seems able to drastically alter how genes operate.

Genes are, of course, not static. They turn on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from elsewhere in the body. When they are turned on, genes express various proteins that, in turn, prompt a range of physiological actions in the body.

One powerful means of affecting gene activity involves a process called methylation, in which methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, attach to the outside of a gene and make it easier or harder for that gene to receive and respond to messages from the body. In this way, the behavior of the gene is changed, but not the fundamental structure of the gene itself. Remarkably, these methylation patterns can be passed on to offspring – a phenomenon known as epigenetics.

What is particularly fascinating about the methylation process is that it seems to be driven largely by how you live your life. Many recent studies have found that diet, for instance, notably affects the methylation of genes, and scientists working in this area suspect that differing genetic methylation patterns resulting from differing diets may partly determine whether someone develops diabetes and other metabolic diseases.

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