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.

Overcome the health harm from sitting too much....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-22-2010

Last Wednesday, 1-20-2010, there was a health news story on the AP online news that had results of a study showing that sitting too much causes health harm; and, according to this study, regular exercise was insufficient to overcome this health harm completely.

Further, it looks like virtually everyone today sits too much, well over 4 hours a day, & that doing so tends to cause type 2 diabetes, obesity, & heart disease. That much sitting also tends to increase the death rate & shorten people’s lives. This last point explains AP’s headline on the story.:

“Experts: Sitting too much could be deadly” was AP’s title.

It seems it matters not why you are sitting, the harm is from going over a certain number of total hours for any reason per day or per week.

In an editorial published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Elin Ekblom-Bak of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences said that the genes which regulate the usage of glucose and fats begin to malfunction after 4 hours of continuous sitting.

(In a related study, Jean Mayer, PhD found that below a certain level of physical activity, about half an hour a day of moderate exercise, people were hungry for MORE calories than they were burning up while above that level they only got hungrier if they used and needed more and their appetite matched what they actually were using.)

In a separate study in Canada, also noted in the AP article, it was found that people who sat more had a higher death risk, whether or not they exercised.

The story also quoted statistics showing that most people sit half their waking hours. So, if you sleep 6 or 7, which is close to average today, most people including me and thee, sit for 8 & a half to 9 hours a day or more.

Worse, if the average person watches TV 30 hours a week, which is about what I’ve seen quoted, this is particularly harmful since you burn fewer calories while watching TV than you do when you are asleep. Needless to say this also means that your circulation is very low, your muscles and motor nerves are not getting any action when this happens. This suggests that most of us get over 4 hours a day of this kind of sitting which is most likely to be harmful to our health.

Similarly, a recent story found that teens while sitting while using some form of media (from texting to video games, to watching TV, to email & using the internet on a computer) now average over 8 hours sitting a day by just while using some kind of media.

So, it’s simple. Virtually everyone sits too much now for good health.

But surely there must be something that can be done to overcome the health harm from this.

Here are seven things you can do that I think will work. Five you can try as soon as this afternoon while two you may have to work a bit for several days or longer to set up.

Some you may like and find easy and some you may not. Do what you can!

1. Drink multiple cups of tea or green tea or clean water or vegetable juice each day. (More than 3 cups of coffee will disrupt your sleep; but it takes far more tea or green tea to do this.)

If you do this, every so often, you’ll need to get up take a bathroom break. That provides regular breaks in your sitting each day.

(Note that soft drinks, both regular & diet, tend to make the health harms of sitting greater and so are NOT a good idea for this use.)

You can even prime the pump a bit extra by getting a drink of water right after you get out of the bathroom.

2. Part of the health harm from sitting may well come from NOT going outside and getting enough vitamin D from sunshine. We now know this causes everything from depression, to heart disease to autoimmune diseases to cancer to rickets & more.

You can overcome this in two ways.

You can take a daily walk outside each day for 20 minutes as part of your lunch hour. Surprisingly, this actually can give you a surprising amount of vitamin D even on an overcast & rainy or snowy winter day. (Your eyes adapt to the lower amount of light so it looks dim. But the actual amount of light measured by a meter is well over 10 times what it is inside even if it does NOT look that way.) Of course, this also can be part of your regular exercise to do this & has other health benefits from doing it.

And, it’s quite inexpensive to take enough vitamin D3 to overcome this part of the problem. We know that it takes at least 1700 iu a day of vitamin D to work. 400 to 800 will avoid the very worst deficiency states but little more than that we now know. The woman I posted on last time now takes 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 in the winter & 5,000 iu a day the rest of the year. That may be close to the ideal amount. It definitely is safe as I posted on yesterday.

3. In the same way that fat people who exercise have better health than sedentary thin people, things like regular strength training and interval cardio and regular walks and other regular moderate and vigorous exercise WILL largely offset the harm from sitting too much.

It may well be wise to do more than that if sitting too much is that harmful. But, the health records of the people who do regular exercise shows that it is somewhere between mandatory for good health & very highly recommended.

In short, if you sit much, you’re really asking for it if you don’t get regular exercise.

Harry Truman and a woman Venture Capitalist mentioned in Tina Seelig’s recent best seller, “What I wish I knew when I was twenty” both did as a matter of policy was to have many face to face conferences while going on a walk outside.

It looks like they were on the right track. (I presume the woman Venture Capitalist still does it.)

4. Virtually all the kinds of health problems they now think sitting too much causes are all also caused by drinking soft drinks and eating sugary or overly salty junk foods and packaged snacks and desserts and other commercial baked goods using mostly refined grains and harmful fats and oils.

So, if you eat and drink this way now, AND sit too much, you are getting a double dose of trouble!

So one cure is stop doing it!

Stop eating or drinking anything with high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy or refined grains and/or which has had tons of salt added to it. Stop ingesting that stuff; and paying the people who make and sell it now for making you fat & sick.

Instead, learn to eat vegetables and health OK fats and protein foods and some regular amounts of fresh fruit as well. Many kinds of traditional cuisine use spices to make such real food taste good. Some of the dishes are delicious in fact. Start finding out more of these ways of eating you like and learn to only eat that way.

Only eat sugary treat foods once a week or less if at all & only eat versions that leave out the most harmful ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy.

5. Find a way to get your TV watching to 10 hours a week or less most weeks. ONLY watch the shows you like best. Stop watching anything that’s OK but not great or just to pass the time. If you need someone to keep you company when you are alone and bored, listen to the radio while you do something active or phone friend. Sometimes exercise instead of watching TV. Use faster input media for most news stories than sitting passively watching TV. (Reading the stories that actually interest you on Yahoo is both dramatically faster than watching TV news and much more focused on your actual interests. Using weather.com, slow as it is to access sometimes, is faster than sitting through half an hour of local TV news to see the weather on TV.) Tape many shows & edit out the commercials to see more of what you want in less time.

6. It may well make sense to either get a timer that flashes a light in a color you find OK every 20 to 30 minutes & stand up, if only for a few seconds as soon as you can after the flashing starts every time.

Since this is quiet, it will not disrupt you if you are on the phone when it happens. And, you can continue writing or looking at the internet too. Simply continue without interruption but stand up while you continue.

7. The fix that I think makes the most sense is for a company that makes bicycles or exercise equipment now or a startup specializing in it to do is to make several versions of an under the desk or in front of the couch miniature exercise bike.

Then people can simply keep it going while they sit even if their pace it varies in speed and is rarely if ever done fast.

This will keep up their circulation and normal metabolism but can be done without distraction once you get used to it & without having to worry about getting sweaty -- as you might do if you were focusing on it and doing it as fast as you can.

I’ve not seen such a thing myself. But if one already exists, given this information, internet sales also would work and may happen soon!


Five of these 7 things you can literally begin within the next few days. If you want to stay healthy, I think you owe it to yourself to do your best to do all five of them.

Getting the kind of timer I describe or an under the desk mini-exercise bike style exerciser may take a bit longer.

But it looks like it may be important to add them when you can.