Get Up.
April 23, 2011
Get up! Stretch! Move around! It’s official. Sitting has been determined to be a lethal activity (death by couch?). In a study on weight loss conducted by Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and summarized in the 4/15/11 edition of the New York Times, it was determined that people in the study who did not gain weight unconsciously moved around more (actually exercising was prohibited by the study). Their bodies simply began making more little movements: taking stairs, moving more quickly to the water cooler at work, bustling about with more chores at home, or simply fidgeting. The subjects in the study who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who did not gain weight.
When we sit (or lie down), electrical activity in the muscles drops, calorie burn rate drops, insulin effectiveness begins dropping, and the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes begin rising. All of this begins happening surprisingly quickly. In a related article Marc Hamilton, a researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center determined that in rats forced to be inactive, “the leg muscles responsible for standing lost almost 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipoproteins from the blood” almost immediately. Further, the unhealthy effects of just sitting around add up. Men who sit for six hours per day or more have an overall death rate 20 percent greater than men who sit for three hours per day. For women the difference is closer to 40 percent. In a related Australian study it was found that the risk of dying rises by 11 percent for each additional hour per day a person spends watching television. Television itself, however, is not the culprit. I think it is safe to assume that sitting in front of the computer screen would produce the same results. Presumably, too, if you were doing this television watching while walking on your treadmill things would be different. All that sitting, Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”
If you are having trouble getting off the couch, at least start fidgeting more. Or call me.