Healthy Fitness Ideas

Leave it to mod­ern sci­ence to tell us exactly what we’ve always sus­pected, but don’t really want to know for cer­tain. A recent sci­en­tific study, pub­lished in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Epi­demi­ol­ogy warns those of us who sit most of the day that we are putting our very lives in jeop­ardy. A recent sci­en­tific study, pub­lished in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Epi­demi­ol­ogy warns those of us who sit most of the day that we are putting our very lives in jeop­ardy.  It turns out that it’s actu­ally health­ier to be pound­ing the pave­ment than sit­ting at your desk and fret­ting about hav­ing too much work and too lit­tle time.  While some prior stud­ies showed a cor­re­la­tion between obe­sity and dis­eases like type II dia­betes, few researchers have looked at the ill effects of the butt-in-chair, hands-on-the-keyboard, socially-networked-24/7 lifestyle that ubiq­ui­tous broad­band inter­net has made pos­si­ble. The not-so-startling con­clu­sion is that the longer we sit, the sooner the Grim Reaper will likely visit.  So how can we reduce the time spent sit­ting and still get our blog­ging done?

Sit­ting is More Risky for Women Than Men

Accord­ing to the study, women who spent more than 6 hours per day of sit­ting were 37 per­cent more likely to pass away than women who sat fewer than 3 hours per day. Men who sat more than 6 hours per day were 18 per­cent more likely to expire than men who sat fewer than 3 hours per day.  Sit­ting the least and being phys­i­cally active were asso­ci­ated with a lower risk of mor­tal­ity; but sit­ting more than 6 hours still increased the risk of death, even for peo­ple who reported being physically-active. But the new study doesn’t tell us exactly why sit­ting is so bad for us.

Why is Sit­ting so Unhealthy?

The sit­ting as health threat rid­dle appears to have two likely causes. Sci­en­tist Alpa Patel, who led the 13-year study, said that extended peri­ods of sit­ting may neg­a­tively influ­ence the blood chem­istry in ways not yet fully under­stood. First, because it requires so lit­tle mus­cle activ­ity, sit­ting may increase cer­tain risk fac­tors, includ­ing triglyc­erides, HDL cho­les­terol, glu­cose lev­els, and blood pres­sure, which are asso­ci­ated with obe­sity and heart dis­ease. All those hours sweat­ing at the gym are seem­ingly negated by all those hours spent sweat­ing over the key­board. Sec­ond, sit­ting just doesn’t burn many calo­ries at all, and all those extra calo­ries add up. Michelle Obama may be on to some­thing in urg­ing us to “get mov­ing.”  Even fid­get­ing ner­vously in your chair or re-arranging the piles of paper on your desk does more for your calorie-burning than sneak­ing a sub­tle peek at the clock or day­dream­ing about your next vaca­tion. Don’t Just Sit There I’ll admit it: I absolutely hate to stand and wait in lines. But com­pared to the min­i­mal mus­cu­lar effort required to sit, stand­ing in one place is down­right gru­el­ing. To stand up, you have to tense the large mus­cles in your legs and but­tocks, and acti­vate the big mus­cles in your back and shoul­ders. If you’re like me, while stand­ing, you prob­a­bly fre­quently shift your weight from one leg to the other. All of that mus­cle activ­ity burns more calories.

Small deci­sions have big calo­rie impact

Stand­ing rather than sit­ting each day may help your body con­sume around 12 to 30 more calo­ries per hour, depend­ing upon on your weight.  Reduc­ing 30 calo­ries per day may seem triv­ial, but 30 fewer calo­ries per day means 3.1 pounds lost over the course of a year. For many of us, weight gain is a grad­ual process, a mat­ter of a pound or two per year. You can gain 3 pounds in a year if, each day, you con­sume just 30 calo­ries more than you burn.  As lit­tle as one hour stand­ing on your feet and one less hour sit­ting can actu­ally spell the dif­fer­ence between remain­ing at your cur­rent weight or get­ting fat­ter. I hear you say­ing that you no way to con­trol the amount of time you sit dur­ing the day.  But think about it.  Even if you exer­cise for 1  hour each day, the 8 hours you spend work­ing and the sev­eral hours of leisure time each day can have a big impact on weight gain or loss. You can make health­ier deci­sions through­out the day. Will you take the stairs or ride the ele­va­tor? As lit­tle as 5 min­utes of stair-climbing burns 144 calo­ries. Do you rely on email rather than get­ting up and hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with your co-worker? Walk­ing, even at an easy 3 mph pace, burns 280 calo­ries per hour.  When you get lunch, do you always have it deliv­ered, or could you eas­ily walk to get it? Just by tak­ing short breaks (stand­ing up occa­sion­ally to stretch or walk­ing down the hall) you be on your way to a slim­mer waist. To learn more about exer­cises that can be done any­where, any­time, read about these exer­cises you can do any­time, any­where. But what­ever path you choose, by stand­ing and walk­ing more, and sit­ting less, you’ll be health­ier in the long run.