You Need to Know the Dead End of Sitting Disease
Did You know that Sitting is Dangerous for your Health?
Sitting disease is real. The bottom line is that it is time to get moving. Even if you think you workout plenty at the gym, you just cannot sit on the couch anymore all day without consequences. Start with walking. Remember that? If you are blessed to be able to walk, it is time to start walking, for your own benefit. Build up gradually from 10 minutes to 20 minutes to 30 minutes. When you get to 60 minutes of walking, you are doing good. But even then, do not think that you can sit in the lazy boy the rest of the day. Your body is build to move.
What proof is there that the body is built to move? Isn’t the body just as capable of comfortably resting in a lazy boy and watching the tube? While your body loves lounging around, your body needs movement. Our skeletal muscles are those muscles which help us move our skeleton. You have no control over your organs, lungs, heart, circulatory system, digestion, assimilation, respiration. You do not tell your heart when to beat or your lungs when to breathe. Nor your liver when to filter substances or your cells to manufacture ATP for energy.
Skeletal Muscles are for Movement
But, you do have control over your skeletal muscles. These massive and powerful muscles, like your quadriceps and hamstrings, your latissimus dorsi and shoulder muscles, all enable you to move your body. And they are under your control. You must think to activate your muscles, in order for your muscles to contract. This demonstrates that movement of your body is under your thought and that you need to move to stay healthy. Of course, your body will respond to whatever you demand, so, if you just demand sitting on the couch, your body will comply. But, this will not be to your advantage. In fact, prolonged sitting is so bad, that the medical community has come up with a new term, sitting disease.
The following shocking news recently appeared in HealthDay and was published by CBS:
Even If You Do Exercise, Too Much Sitting Time Is Bad
By Robert Preitd Healthday August 16, 2016, 1:40 PM
Even if you exercise regularly, too much sitting can still be bad for your heart, a leading cardiologists’ group warns. The American Heart Association (AHA) also says that too many people are spending far too much time on chairs and sofas, period. “Based on existing evidence, we found that U.S. adults are sedentary for about six to eight hours a day,” said Deborah Rohm Young, chair of the AHA panel that wrote the new advisory.
The problem only gets worse with age. “Adults 60 years and older spend between 8.5 to 9.6 hours a day in sedentary time,” Young said in an AHA news release. She directs behavioral research at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. One heart specialist said the new stance is justified. “Don’t be a ‘sitting duck for cardiovascular disease’ — move more, sit less,” said Dr. Barbara George, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Lifestyle Medicine at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y.
“All studies are indicating that moving more throughout the day — in addition to getting the recommended 30 minutes of moderate activity on a daily basis — is necessary to lower one’s risk of heart disease and other causes of mortality,” she said. According to the AHA, the new statement reflects growing evidence that, on its own, exercise isn’t enough to counter sitting’s unhealthy effects. Read the rest of the story here.
I happened to come another shocking article about the dangers of sitting. You have to read it for yourself to believe it! Bottom line is that it is dangerous for our health to sit as the article explains in detail based on studies. And now, get ready to be shocked into moving. If this article does not put the fear of the chair into you, what will?!
Don’t just sit there! It could be harmful later in life
Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY 2:54 p.m. EST February 19, 2014
Sitting too much increases the risk of disability in people over 60, study finds.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Adults over age 60 spend an average of two-thirds of waking time being sedentary
- Each additional hour of sedentary time doubles the risk of being disabled
- Exercise more and sit less for better health as you age
The Fear of The Chair
Sitting too much, sometimes called sitting disease, may increase the risk of disability in people over age 60, a new study suggests. Adults this age spend an average of two-thirds of their waking time being sedentary — roughly nine hours a day, the research showed. Every additional hour adults over age 60 spend sitting increases by 50% their risk of being disabled for activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing and walking, says the study’s lead author Dorothy Dunlop, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Too many people “have very low levels of activity,” she says.
The health problems associated with sitting disease are mounting. Research has linked sitting disease, too much sitting to increased risk of heart failure, type 2 diabetes and death from cancer, heart disease and stroke. It may affect mood and creativity. One study showed that if most people spent fewer than three hours a day sitting, it would add two years to the average life expectancy in this country. Dunlop and colleagues reviewed data on more than 2,200 people, age 60 and older, who participated in the government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The Study
The participants wore accelerometers (motion sensors) during their waking hours for one week during the three-year survey period. This measured the time they spent being sedentary, doing light physical activity such as pushing a grocery cart, doing moderately vigorous physical activity such as brisk walking, or vigorous physical activity such as running. Among the findings out Tuesday in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health:
• 6.2% of participants met the government’s physical activity guidelines, which advise adults to get at least 2½ hours of moderate-intensity physical activity each week, such as brisk walking, or 1¼ hours of a vigorous-intensity activity, such as jogging or swimming laps, or a combination of the two types.
• 3.6% reported having disabilities in activities of daily living (eating, bathing, dressing, walking).
• The odds of a person being disabled were almost 50% greater for each hour spent in sedentary behavior, Dunlop says. This was true after researchers controlled for physical activity, obesity, socioeconomic status and other health factors.
Stop Being Sedentary – Get Up and Move
Each additional hour of sedentary time doubles the risk of being disabled, study finds. So if you take two women who are 65 years old who spend the same amount of time doing exercise and have the same health profile, if one was sedentary for 12 hours a day, her chance of being disabled is about 6%, Dunlop says. If another person with exactly the same health profile spent 13 hours a day being sedentary, her chance of being disabled was 9%.
This study doesn’t not prove cause and effect, she says. It could be that disabled people are more sedentary, but there are good reasons to believe that being sedentary could lead to disability, Dunlop says. “Older adults should be as physically active as possible,” she says. “We know that moderate physical activity, such as brisk walking, is good for your health, and being sedentary is bad for your health. People should find opportunities to replace some of their sitting time with light activity. It’s a low-cost strategy to good health.”
This study is “further evidence that simply getting off the couch has great health benefits,” says Tim Church, a physician and director of preventive medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. “The only known prescription for maximizing quality of life as we age is the prescription of physical activity.”
This research is “heavy hitting” because it is “telling us that being sedentary is debilitating when one is elderly,” says James Levine, co-director of Obesity Solutions at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix and Arizona State University. He did some of the first research on sitting disease but was not involved in this study. “This is the first time that has been well illustrated.”
Levine says if you’ve been sitting for an hour, you’ve been sitting too long. He recommends getting up for 10 minutes of every hour.
Dunlop offers these suggestions for replacing some sitting time with light activity:
• If you are watching TV, get up and walk around the house when a commercial comes on.
• When you are working in front of a computer, get up and walk around every hour.
• When you go to grocery store or mall, park in a space that is far away.
• When you get up to have glass of water or for a meal, walk around the house or office.
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator, if you are able.
Fine, I Have Sitting Disease, Now What?
After I read this article, all I could think was it definitely put the fear of the chair into me. No more consecutive hours in front of the desktop! And while I have never been much for doing cardio, I am going to start hitting up the elliptical as I mentioned above, a mile for now and build it up to 2 miles. Update: The additional cardio I started to do has had spectacular results. For a long time, I could not get my BMI down to a normal range for my height. Especially after the ‘flaring nostrils’ incident I mention here where I advocate weighing yourself daily.
When I started to add cardio programming to my training, dramatic changes happened. They were so dramatic, that I wrote an entire post about how to shred body fat in 12 weeks using this cardio programming technique. In 3 months, I took off 30 pounds, and finally brought my BMI down to a normal range. You can absolutely do the same, if you need to.
The bottom line is that you start eating real foods, healthy foods, every few hours. Never go hungry. Stop starving yourself and start moving. You will see for yourself how your body responds positively to good fuel and movement. Once you have a foundation of real food and 30 minutes a day of walking/swimming/biking/movement, then add some strength training. Compound movements like squats, deadlifts, push ups and presses.
You probably knew intuitively that it is not a great idea to lounge around all day. Too much sitting on the couch, at your table, on the train, in the car, is not going to help you lose weight and get fit. You already know that. So, time to change it up. If I can lose 100 pounds, after having failed so many times, so can you. Just start to walk and eat moderate real food meals every few hours.
Get out of the way of your body, and let your body do it’s magic. As it does for you all of your life. Stop eating junk and factory processed food, get out of the chair and get going. You will be amazed at how your body can heal and change. What are you doing to fight sitting disease and get moving? Well, I am going out now for a walk. Please share what you are doing today to get moving!
Rich is a NASM-CPT (Certified Personal Trainer), an