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Your Body's Biggest Enemy: SITTING
The dangers of living a sedentary life: Learn how to ward off the nasty effects of a new epidemic called Sitting Disease
You might not want to take the following stat sitting down: According to a poll of nearly 6,300 people by the Institute for Medicine and Public Health, it's likely that you spend a stunning 56 hours a week planted like a geranium—staring at your computer screen, working the steering wheel, or collapsed in a heap in front of your high-def TV. And it turns out women may be more sedentary than men, since they tend to play fewer sports and hold less active jobs.
Even if you think you are energetic, sitting all day at work is common for most of us. And it's killing us—literally—by way of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. All this downtime is so unhealthy that it's given birth to a new area of medical study called inactivity physiology, which explores the effects of our increasingly butt-bound, tech-driven lives, as well as a deadly new epidemic researchers have dubbed "sitting disease."
Read More
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| Top News Articles on "Sitting Disease" |
WebMD - (Do you have Sitting Disease?)
ConsumerFreedom.com - (Sitting Disease: Obesity’Äôs True Culprit)
CBN.com - Excessive Sitting Linked to Heart Disease Risk
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All the sitting people do contributes to the extra and unhealthy weight roughly two-thirds of us are carrying around. This unhealthy weight in turn greatly increases the risk of many unpleasant diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.
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Want to lose up to 57 lbs in one year?
Can't find enough time to get to the gym?
Spend lots of time in front of a computer?
If you answered yes to these questions, then welcome to the solution...the Treadmill Desk. |
According to the Mayo Clinic study, the average person burned 100 extra calories every hour while walking slowly at 1 mile per hour rather than sitting in a chair.
Dr. Levine of the Mayo Clinic believes that if individuals were to replace 8 hours a day of sitting at their "normal" desk with a Treadmill Desk, and if other components of energy balance were constant, a weight loss of 57 pounds a year could occur.
Research being conducted by James Levine, M.D. at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester has begun to reveal the many benefits of walking and standing throughout the day instead of sitting. His work has shown that standing and walking can increase daily calorie expenditure in a way that will contribute to improved measures of health and weight. Just standing in place will cause you to burn 20 calories per hour more than sitting. Some offices are being equipped with special walkstations so workers who spend hours in front of a computer can walk slowly (as slow as 1 MPH will do it) while continuing to walk as they would if they were sitting at a traditional workstation. These offices are also working to facilitate the holding of meetings while walking instead of sitting. For a person walking at the leisurely pace of 1 MPH that translates into 100 to 130 calories/hour more than sitting and for an 8 hour day this potentially could lead to losing 40 pounds per year.
I have been experimenting with this standing approach to daily living during the business day. I have found that it contributes to my 18,333 daily step goal. As I stand I tend to move about and surely add to my step count. My personal experience has shown that this number of steps and now adding 20 calories per hour more by standing instead of sitting is helping me to maintain my healthy weight by burning all of the calories I consume each day. Given that I am now at a healthy weight my primary goal is to remain in what is referred to as a net zero state of calorie balance so that I just maintain the 45 pounds I have lost over the years.
Learn More About Ergonomics
http://www.laptopdesk.net/ergonomics.html
Fit Fact: Why sitting makes you fat
http://exercise.about.com/b/2008/09/12/fit-fact-why-sitting-makes-you-fat.htm#gB3
Friday September 12, 2008
You might want to stand up while you read this, especially when you find out what some scientists have discovered about sitting.
We all know that sitting can contribute to weight problems and common sense tells us that's because sitting doesn't burn as many calories as, say, standing or walking. But, that isn't the only issue with sitting.
In a study published in Diabetes, scientists found that when we sit for long periods of time, the enzymes responsible for burning fat actually shut down. Not only that, but sitting too much can also lower HDL ('good' cholesterol) and lead to a slower metabolism. Even if you exercise later in the day, that won't necessarily undo the damage done by sitting.
The question these scientists are asking, and maybe the question some of us are wondering is: "Can the average adult who already does not follow the public health policy prescribing regular moderate-vigorous exercise become even more unhealthy in the coming years if they sit too much and do not maintain sufficient daily nonexercise physical activity?"
The answer to that is probably a yes, unless we do something about it. The good news is that just standing up can kick your fat-burning enzymes into gear.
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The Modern-Day Desk Sentence
"Our bodies have evolved over millions of years to do one thing: move," says James Levine,M.D., Ph.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and author of Move a Little, Lose a Lot. "As human beings, we evolved to stand upright. For thousands of generations, our environment demanded nearly constant physical activity."
But thanks to technological advances, the Internet, and an increasingly longer work week, that environment has disappeared. "Electronic living has all but sapped every flicker of activity from our daily lives," Levine says. You can shop, pay bills, make a living, and with Twitter and Facebook, even catch up with friends without so much as standing up. And the consequences of all that easy living are profound.
When you sit for an extended period of time, your body starts to shut down at the metabolic level, says Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri. When muscles—especially the big ones meant for movement, like those in your legs—are immobile, your circulation slows and you burn fewer calories. Key flab-burning enzymes responsible for breaking down triglycerides (a type of fat) simply start switching off. Sit for a full day and those fat burners plummet by 50 percent, Levine says.
That's not all. The less you move, the less blood sugar your body uses; research shows that for every two hours spent on your backside per day, your chance of contracting diabetes goes up by 7 percent. Your risk for heart disease goes up, too, because enzymes that keep blood fats in check are inactive. You're also more prone to depression: With less blood flow, fewer feel-good hormones are circulating to your brain.
Sitting too much is also hell on your posture and spine health, says Douglas Lentz, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and the director of fitness and wellness for Summit Health in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. "When you sit all day, your hip flexors and hamstrings shorten and tighten, while the muscles that support your spine become weak and stiff," he says. It's no wonder that the incidence of chronic lower-back pain among women has increased threefold since the early 1990s.
And even if you exercise, you're not immune. Consider this: We've become so sedentary that 30 minutes a day at the gym may not do enough to counteract the detrimental effects of eight, nine, or 10 hours of sitting, says Genevieve Healy, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Cancer Prevention Research Centre of the University of Queensland in Australia. That's one big reason so many women still struggle with weight, blood sugar, and cholesterol woes despite keeping consistent workout routines.
In a recent study, Healy and her colleagues found that regardless of how much moderate to vigorous exercise participants did, those who took more breaks from sitting throughout the day had slimmer waists, lower BMIs (body mass indexes), and healthier blood fat and blood sugar levels than those who sat the most. In an extensive study of 17,000 people, Canadian researchers drew an even more succinct conclusion: The longer you spend sitting each day, the more likely you are to die an early death—no matter how fit you are.
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