Stand up for your life
Scientists say too much time spent sitting can cut your life short. But don’t panic. The first step to fixing any problem in life is to get a better understanding of it, so let’s look at how parking your butt in a chair actually affects you.
Here’s how parking your butt in a chair for too long affects your body, from head to toe
Sitting disease. It sounds like some mysterious condition you’d bring back from an exotic holiday, but it’s actually a modern, homegrown ailment caused by going from the breakfast table to the driver’s seat, from your desk to the car, then to the couch for the evening, with little movement otherwise.
The staggering amount of time many of us spend being sedentary – up to 15 hours a day if we work in an office, according to one study – can lead to problems inside and out. You’re probably familiar with the aches and pains caused by hunching over a computer, but spending too much time in a chair or slumped on the couch has also been linked to several life-threatening conditions, including blood clots, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, heart disease and cancer. Not even your brain is spared. In April, researchers published a study that found an association between sedentary
behaviour and thinning of the regions of the brain that are critical to memory formation.
The issue with sitting goes beyond concern about obesity, although clocking up so many hours in your seat can make it harder to maintain a healthy weight. “When you’re sitting, you’re burning only half the kilojoules you would standing or walking lightly,” says cardiologist Dr David A. Alter.
But even if you’re slim, a sedentary lifestyle may still wreak havoc on your health. That’s because, “lack of movement affects how we burn fat and metabolise sugar and the body’s response to insulin,” Dr Alter says. Your cholesterol may also go up, along with markers of inflammation and heart disease. Such physiological changes can nearly double your odds of diabetes and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease by 14 per cent.
In a small study last year, researchers took
Adding just two minutes more walking to each hour can decrease a person’s risk of dying by 33 per cent, a study has
found.
a group of healthy young adults who regularly clocked at least 10,000 steps a day and had them cut back to 1,500 steps. Participants still went to work and took care of their families, but it was no surprise that, within two weeks, they increased their total body fat – particularly around their middles – and lost muscle mass. But strikingly, the group also experienced a decrease in insulin sensitivity and an increase in both fat accumulated in the liver and triglycerides, an important measure of heart health, says physician Dr Dan Cuthbertson, PhD. Staying sedentary had consequences that were both swift and potentially serious in the long term. These changes, though, were all reversible when participants resumed their normal activity regularly.
STEP RIGHT UP
Chairs are hardly a modern invention, but roughly 200 years ago, people sat for just five hours a day. The rest of their waking hours were filled with physical exertion – manually washing clothes, kneading bread, walking everywhere and working in the garden. Great-great-great-great-greatgreat-grandma would have been just as fit as if she’d been a daily gym devotee. By contrast, today, including eight hours of sleep at night, we may move as little as 60 minutes each day.
Were our ancestors cocooned from the perils of a sedentary lifestyle because they were moving more, or because they weren’t sitting as much? We do know that 44 per cent of Australians describe their day at work as mostly sitting. It’s no surprise that the physical activity guidelines of 150 minutes of exercise a week (which translates as half an hour a day for five days) are met by just 55 per cent of us. There’s no question that hitting those targets can help your health and improve your longevity. But it may take more than double that amount of conscious exercise to offset the time you spend sitting. A study in the medical journal The Lancet, that analysed data from more than 1 million adults, found that it took 60 to 75 minutes of moderate cardio per day to wipe out sitting’s higher risk of premature death. And even the most active participants saw an increase in mortality risk when they sat in front of the TV for five or more hours a day. That means exercise, while worthwhile, doesn’t completely make up for sitting. When researchers strapped activity monitors on nearly 8,000 adults aged 45 and older, they found that sitting for 12 or more hours a day increased the odds of early death regardless of exercise habits. The risk was especially high if chair time was in uninterrupted stretches of 60 to 90 minutes, says exercise physiologist Dr Keith Diaz, PhD, the study’s lead author. “It’s simply not enough to be active or move at one specific time of the day,” he says. “We need to be mindful of moving frequently throughout the day in addition to exercising.”
MIXING IN MOVEMENT
Before you quit your job or swap your washing machine for an old-school washboard and a scrubbing brush, be aware that moving more doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing endeavour. You can have your modern life and conveniences without fear that you’re harming your body. The main trick is to scale back both your sitting and how many consecutive minutes you spend in one seat. A London study showed that people who targeted their sitting time with a specific strategy – switching to a standing desk or walking to the tea room more often – were more effective in reducing their sedentary lifestyle than those who focused on adding more exercise sessions into their days.
So work on replacing at least two hours of sitting time with movement breaks – which has many benefits, including 14 per cent lower triglycerides, higher “good” HDL cholesterol, a trimmer waistline, and better glucose control, according to a study in the European Heart Journal. “Little breaks don’t seem like much, but they add up,” Dr Alter adds.