Sitting less helps fat loss and protects your health....

Today's Post: Friday, 5-13-2011

Earlier this week my son in law posted this on Facebook,

http://brainz.org/truth-about-sitting-down

I found it a bit hard to read due to its graphics heavy style and the information in it a bit scary.

But here are some of the key facts from it. I’ll add my comments after that.

Sitting down more than 6 hours a day makes life threatening illness more likely than it is for people who sit 3 hours or less. The people who sit more have a 40% higher risk of death from all causes.

Yet between work and TV the average person today sits for 9.3 hours a day.

When you sit, you send virtually no messages to your legs using your nerves and you give them little circulation.

Sitting tends to make you fat. For example, obese people sit 2.5 hours a day more than thin people. When you sit, you only burn 60 calories an hour. And, when you sit, fat breakdown enzymes drop by 90%.

Also, people who exercise and watch over 3 hours a day of TV are usually are usually as fat as people who watch that much TV and don’t exercise.

My comments:

1. One of the most controllable factors in this is TV watching. First, watching TV while sitting burns less calories than sleeping per hour!

Second, people who eat while watching TV tend to keep eating even if they stop being hungry because their attention is on the TV.

And, worst of all, most of the food items and the soft drinks advertised on TV are the very things people who are trying to lose fat or stay healthy should close to totally avoid.

So with TV watching, it’s more than just the time sitting. But the time sitting is important too. Since people often have to sit at work or sit at school for younger people, time spent at home sitting and watching TV is extra. So, it will definitely pay to watch it less than 2 hours a day!

Also, if you mute the ads for food and drink and you exercise while watching during the lighter programs you do want to watch, you can make the TV watching you do much less harmful.

In fact, one way to find time to do take walks or workout at home or go to the gym is to do that some evenings instead of TV watching at all. (Many people who have trouble finding time to exercise watch enough TV they actually don’t value that they can skip such TV shows and have the time to exercise!)

There are many ways to watch less TV.

List the programs you watch now and list those you like most and those you watch just for something to do or they are between two shows you want to watch. List the ones that there is a reason to watch when it comes on and those that you could watch later that day or on a different day. Then watch those you like most and stop watching the others. And for those you record, fast forward through the commercials for fattening stuff or ads that aren’t of interest to you.

Unless it’s breaking news that’s important or about local threats like floods, get your news from online sources, radio while you commute to work, and newspapers. That’s faster to get the information from since you can often read 3 or 4 stories in the time one would run on TV. You get more of the news you do want that way and less of the news you don’t want. Best of all, you no longer lose sleep from staying up for the late night news!

By doing these things, you can cut down to watching TV less than 15 hours a week or even less than 10. That means you’ll sit less and have more time for the rest of your life. And, you can use an elliptical trainer or a sit down bike while watching some of the TV you do watch to make that TV watching time safe for your health and waistline!

2. Sitting at work is harder. But there are some ways to cut back on it.

I drink tea I get up and fix several times a day which also has me visiting the bathroom several times a day.

I once tried a kind of general idea to take more breaks from sitting besides that and found that nothing happened.

But, recently I decided on a kind of exercise to do for about 25 or 30 seconds five times each week day at the same time I finish my tea. I use finishing my cup of tea to anchor when to do these exercises. And I keep a log book and make a mark in each time I do one of these brief sets. Now, except for the wildest and most challenging days, I do the exercise sessions all five times each day.

3. For sit down work in the future, I think there will be more and more products to allow you to work at your desk -- while under it you can move your legs as you work. Something like a partial, low key and very smooth mini sitting bike exerciser.

Desks where you walk at your desk have been tried but I think may be a bit too hard to use and expensive for wide use.

But an well designed and far less expensive pedaling device would work well.

So, I think we’ll begin to see more and more of those.

4. Getting regular exercise every week has been shown effective even if you sit too much at other times.

So, even if most of your sitting is while working, you can be less fat and cut your health and death risks by exercising.

Fat people who exercise are often healthier than sedentary thin people for example.

So that is also a partial solution that has been proven effective.