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Beware the “sitting disease”!
Sitting is the new smoking! The more you sit, the more your health will suffer.
We love to sit—in our car, at the desk, on the couch, and at the game. New research shows that sitting and inactivity are linked to increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and depression. Stated simply, our bodies are designed to move. A recent study showed that if we spent less than three hours a day sitting, our life expectancy would increase by two years. Furthermore, reducing TV time to less than two hours per day can increase your life expectancy by 1.4 years. That’s a total of 3.4 years more of your life just by not sitting so much! Does that not make you want to stand up and read this book while pacing in your room? Do it now!
When I first started reading up on inactivity, and especially, the amount of time North Americans spend sitting, I immediately bought a standing desk. In fact, much of this book was written while I stood at my desk.
When you sit for long periods, your body adapts to the reduced physical demand by slowing down your metabolism. This means you burn fewer calories, and that extra energy is stored as fat.
Men who sit more than six hours a day have an 18 per cent increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 7.8 per cent increased chance of dying from diabetes, compared to someone who sits for three hours or less per day.
Today’s North American 10-year-olds are the first generation expected to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
According to the American Medical Association, just 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week on-going is enough to drastically reduce the risk of sedentary lifestyle illnesses, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Globally, 20 per cent of early deaths are preventable with moderate exercise. And for the first time in history, inactivity-related illnesses killed 5.3 million people worldwide, more than smoking. Many health experts are thinking of inactivity as an illness, with some doctors in the U.S. pushing to make lack of exercise a medical diagnosis.
In the U.S., adults sit for an average of 8–10 hours each day. This makes the American lifestyle one of the most sedentary in the world. After long commutes and hours at our desks, we can hardly blame ourselves for taking a load off, but getting more exercise is a lot easier than most of us think.
40
Dai Manuel’s Whole Life Fitness Manifesto
Overworked And Overfed
The workforce has changed since the 1960s. Back then, nearly 50 per cent of pri-vate sector (non-government) jobs, such as construction, freight logistics and retail, required at least moderate-intensity physical activity. Currently, less than 20 per cent of jobs demand this level of activity. The average workweek is now longer, too. Full-time employees work an average of 47 hours per week, or 7 hours more per week than the standard 40-hour workweek. That translates to approximately 14 extra days of work per year, at jobs that are largely inactive!
Additionally, employees now burn 100 fewer calories per workday than they did in the 1960s. A recent study, which com-pared workers from 1960 to 1962 with workers of 2003 to 2006, found that on average, employees are 17 pounds heavier than the average employee in the 1960s.
To add insult to injury, the past 50 years has seen the daily caloric intake increase by about 400 calories. This is a 20 per cent increase over the 1970 average, which hovered around 2,100 calories per day.
The bottom line is we’re moving less and burning fewer calories, but we’re eating more! And we wonder why we have an obesity epidemic on our hands?!
Surprisingly, the number one health issue in the workforce today isn’t inactivity or obesity. It’s stress. As you can imagine, inactivity and stress, coupled with longer working hours, has a massive impact on society. In fact, it’s believed that lost productivity due to chronic pain amounts to $11.6 to $12.8 billion per year! And, hello, this one really gets to me, given my past: In the U.S., overweight or obese workers who have other chronic health problems miss about 450 million more days of work per year than healthy workers, costing more than $153 billion per year in lost productivity.
I can’t emphasize this enough: Overwork and inactivity are disservices to your career and your employer. Is it any wonder that many corporations are invest-ing millions of dollars into corporate wellness programs? They have learned that employee wellness affects the bottom line, both in hard costs and productiv-ity. Good health means a happier, more satisfied workforce, which translates into increased productivity.
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In this day and age, true role models are hard to find. Dai Manuel is a man who one can look up to and relate to. He wasn’t born with a six-pack; he created it himself. He genuinely wants you to be the best version of yourself, in every aspect of your life. Dai and his wife are perfect examples of people living their lives to their potential and they inspire you to do the same. That’s a role model.”
—Brittany
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