Convenient inventions are killing us!
Researchers have just discovered that the little things, which make our life more convenient, are actually killing us! For the last 50 years every invention in society has focused on reducing our need to move. While remote controls, mobile phones, even the fridge make life more convenient they are actually killings us. What we now know is that the longer we sit in our day the more likely we are to die early and get chronic disease.
Did you know the majority of Australians’ non-sleeping time is spent being sedentary, i.e. sitting on their backsides?! Up to 60% of our day is spent being completely sedentary, while the rest is spent doing light-intensity activities (around 35%) and only a very small proportion is left for moderate to vigorous physical activity (often less than 5%!). So that means, if you’re someone who spends 8hr in bed asleep, even if you get your recommended 30min of “exercise” in per day, you’ve spent, on average, 9hr and 18min sitting down (at your desk, in the car or on the bus or train, eating meals), 5hr and 26min in incidental activities (think things as physically exciting as walking to the bathroom), and less than 17min in moderate to vigorous physical activities. What does that all mean? When we are sitting down our body is metabolically turned off. We burn very few calories and our muscles are completely at rest. All this leads to weak muscles, a sluggish metabolism and we put on weight. On the flip side people who break up their sitting time across the day can reduce their waist circumference by up to 6cm, as well as reducing their BMI, blood fats and blood glucose levels… That’s a pretty great outcome for a fairly small effort!!
Research around the links between physical activity, and mortality and risk of chronic diseases (things like type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease) has previously focussed on how much time we spend exercising. However, due to massive changes in how we spend our days (driving or catching public transport to work, sitting for hours at a desk, watching TV, surfing the internet and emailing friends and family), scientists are now starting to look at how much time we spend not moving our bodies. Studies are measuring how much time we spend sitting on our rear-ends, and are finding there is a strong link between hours spent sitting and our risk of death. An Australian study published in January 2010 found that for every hour spent watching TV (the activity found to be our most frequent in the home), there was an 18% increase in deaths from heart disease, and an 11% increase in deaths overall.
So far, this is possibly sounding a little “doom and gloom”… But trust us, there is good news to be taken from all of this!! If you’re someone who perhaps doesn’t get his or her recommended 30min of moderate to vigorous physical activity on most, if not all, days of the week, then there is definitely hope for your health! Through the simple of act of standing up a few more times in the day, you may be saving your own life. We’ve all heard the clichéd examples for how we can increase our incidental activity time (Get off the bus two stops earlier! Take the stairs instead of the lift!), and as cheesy as they might sound, there’s actually value in them.
But in case you hadn’t noticed, we like to do things a little differently here at The Glucose Club… Everyone here is a HUGE fan of the show Modern Family. Rather than spending the ad breaks whinging about the terrible commercials on TV these days, we do things like standing up to put a basket of washing away, packing up the dishwasher, preparing lunch for the next day, or even doing those physio exercises we may have forgotten to do for the last few days! While none of this is going to replace a solid block of exercise, and it may not help anyone look like Elle MacPherson or Miranda Kerr, it can make a world of difference when it comes to reducing our risk of chronic disease.
Some of the other ways you can move more include…
• Using that cordless or mobile phone to it’s full potential! When you answer a call at work… Stand up! At least for the first part of the call.
• Say hello to your neighbour! Rather than emailing your colleague in the cubicle behind you, stand up! Go over and have the conversation face-to-face, even if you have to come back and email them later for a “paper trail” of what you’ve discussed.
• The escalator is not a ride! We often see people hop on an escalator, and then stay in that spot till the reach the next floor. But the view around a Westfield really isn’t all that exciting, so why not walk up or down the escalator, and that way you’ll be at the next store sooner!
And it’s not just our risk of chronic disease that goes up for every hour spent sitting on our backsides, but also our risk of injury. Spending prolonged periods of time in the one position (such as sitting at a desk) can overload some muscles, and under-work others, which can lead to shoulder, neck and hand injuries. Many of the clients we see in clinic report that they sit at a desk all day and they have extremely tight neck muscles and they find in hard to relax their shoulders. A lot of people leave work at the end of the day stuck in a “slumped” position, and they don’t even realise it. Why not try putting an hourly reminder in your computer calendar to stand up, arch your back, and then do a few shoulder rolls…? It will break up your sitting, give your backside a little break, and do wonders for your posture. Not to mention get a bit of oxygen flowing again to help the brain power through the rest of the day!
And if you’re reading this, thinking “Great – all this time, I’ve been doing my hour a day at the gym, and now they tell me it’s still not enough?!?!” We know it is hard, but to really make the most of your health you have to look at these things as being separate. Not only do I have to get my 30 mins of exercise, I also have to view movement in my day as an opportunity, and move my body as often as possible. Actually to tell you the truth, we do it in our office and it is not that big of a stretch it really comes down to a change of habit.
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