Taking A Stand Against Sitting

Are you sitting down? You might want to take a little walk after reading this article.

AnnabelBanner

AsianScientist (Jul. 31, 2014) – Now that I’ve started working full-time, I’m bound to my desk a lot more than I was as a graduate student—if you can believe that. I used to procrastinate by walking around my building, going to get lunch from the food carts, taking random gym breaks, going to the pharmacy to buy floss and Clorox cleaning wipes that I suddenly needed in the middle of writing my paper, etc…

Alas. As a gainfully employed individual, the luxury of aimless wandering and untimed procrastination has all but vanished.


The slide into sedentary life

In the year 2015, the sedentary lifestyle has become extremely commonplace. We lack patience now for a great many things. We drive everywhere, we take elevators, and we microwave our food instead of putting it on a stove. The whiny ‘I want it now’ mentality from our childhood has somehow crept into our adult lives: instant noodles, instant gratification, and instant time. Because walking one mile takes about fifteen minutes more than driving one mile, we don’t walk as much anymore.

In this generation of convenience and ‘instantification,’ we certainly do not engage in as much physical activity as our ancestors used to do. Nowadays, drones will deliver your goods to you in a very short period of time.

This reminds me of a disarming scene in the Pixar cartoon Wall-E where people are shown to no longer use their legs. Instead, we are depicted to travel around in little floating pods with our beady eyes fixed to the screen in front of us, constantly sipping soda and stuffing our faces with chips. Truly, it’s not too far from the truth. We are getting fatter and less active as a planet.

Recent research has shown that sitting time—quite literally defined as the amount of time spent sitting down—is associated with risk for disease incidence, mortality and even increased anxiety. It seems fairly obvious that the more sedentary you are, the more likely you are to put on weight.

Many of us have heeded this fairly obvious advice and joined a gym, a yoga studio, bootcamp, etc. An hour of profuse sweat later, we go home or to the office, make some food and sit down on our behinds for the rest of the day.

To put this into perspective, this means that we spend an hour a day moving around, are asleep for eight, and then mostly sedentary the other 15 hours of the day.


Are you getting enough exercise?

So what do we do? Exercise more, it would seem.

Most public health professionals will not argue against any sort of physical activity, though, as physical inactivity has been deemed the ‘greatest problem of the 21st century.’ However, there has been a slew of mixed research floating around the Internet. One paper states that intensive exercise an hour a day may not be enough to counteract the adverse effects of sitting.

Although you might be one of those folks who leaps out of the office chair at 5pm (6 if you are in Singapore) and goes for a blazing run through the park, it still won’t be enough enough to counter all that sitting you’ve been doing all day. Increased exercise lessens the adverse effects of sitting, but does not eliminate it.

Other creative solutions to combat physical inactivity include treadmill desks, FitBits, office physical activity competitions. I have noticed professors and coworkers in my building who have opted for standing desks to counter the adverse effects of sitting and physical inactivity. However, these new devices can have equally harmful effects on our backs, typing and general productivity levels. Truly, nothing seems right!

It has been widely recommended that we take 10,000 steps a day to maintain a minimum level of fitness. The CDC in the United States recommends that adults aged 18-64 need to have at least 150 minutes of brisk walking a week and need to engage in muscle-strengthening activities at least two days a week. Only 20 percent of adults in this age range reach this requirement. Furthermore, this recommendation also does not account for the number of calories consumed.

On average, given the rising obesity rates around the world, it is safe to conclude that we are consuming more than we are exercising. It is therefore little wonder that the slow-burning mix of sedentary behavior and overconsumption of food, we are all going to end up like the short-limbed rotund people of the future in Wall-E.

While there may be conflicting evidence everywhere, I think the main messages are clear: eat unprocessed food, eat less food, and try to move about for more than an hour a day—even if it is for an aimless wander around the block.



This article is from a monthly column called Our Small World. Click here to see the other articles in this series.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Michael Dorausch/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Annabel is currently a 2nd year Masters in Public Health student at Yale University. She received her MEng in biomedical engineering from Imperial College London in 2010. She spent the summer of 2014 researching substance abuse in Tanzania. She has a keen interest in food, yoga and metal music.

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