Is Sitting At Your Desk Killing You?

Spending more than just 6 hours a day on your backside drives up blood pressure and places you at a greater risk for diabetes, obesity, depression, and some types of cancer. People who already have chronic illnesses see an increase in their symptoms. Think you’re out of danger if you go to the gym regularly?

“Sitting,” says Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic who has researched the dangers of a sedentary life for the last 15 years, “is the new smoking.” Levine’s studies have shown that sitting around—as many of us do for both work and pleasure—is bad for your health. Spending more than just 6 hours a day on your backside drives up blood pressure and places you at a greater risk for diabetes, obesity, depression, and some types of cancer. People who already have chronic illnesses see an increase in their symptoms. And that’s just for starters.

Think you’re out of danger if you go to the gym regularly? Think again: The usual guidelines for regular exercise simply aren’t enough to counteract the dangers of all the sitting we do. And we do a lot of it: Americans average 9.5 hours on our collective butts per day. That’s a lot of smoking.

So maybe it’s possible to limit our time on the couch. But when you make your living sitting at a desk, what’s to be done?

The answer is NEAT—nonexercise activity thermogenesis. In other words, getting up and moving around, at an easy pace, as often as possible, for as long as possible. NEAT used to be far more interwoven into our lives: Walk to the post office. Walk down the hall to confer with a coworker. Walk to the market and walk back with the groceries. These days? Not so much: Technology allows us to do almost everything from the comfort of a chair.

This may help to explain why we’re getting so much heavier than the Americans just a few generations back, even as we have become more and more obsessed with fitness. Our grandparents certainly didn’t have a big-box gym on every corner. As a group, in fact, people probably got less formal exercise than we get today.

See full story on mindbodygreen.com

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BeWellBuzz

Larry & Oksana Ostrovsky, founders of BeWellBuzz, are Life Upgrade Coaches committed to helping you navigate through the latest natural health and personal development information to a destination of optimal wellness. The goal of this site is to be a catalyst in creating and spreading the Buzz, dispelling dangerous myths, society norms and helping you elevate your spirit, do more, live better, and think deeper one day at a time. We’d like to thank you in advance for not only visiting and arming yourself with great information but also sharing it with family and friends. Check out and subscribe to our YouTube Channel and become a fan of our Facebook Page.  

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