Who me, sedentary? A guy who plays full-court basketball for an hour, twice a week, who runs up the alp behind our offices every Friday (uh oh, only three hours away from my appointment with agony), who regularly rides his bike for hours on weekends, and plans hiking and rock-wall excursions with his strapping teen-age son? Me, a 155-lb. fightin’ fit couch potato?
Not exactly. It turns out I’m a new species of vegetation: a chair potato.
That’s right. At least according to a terrific story that mh.com staffer Maria Masters wrote for the September issue of
Men’s Health. In it, she details the stunning, and scary, new research that shows a direct link between the number of hours you sit in a chair every day (hey, that’s me!) and heart-disease risk (hey, that’s me, part two!). And I quote: “New evidence suggests that the more hours a day you sit, the greater your likelihood of dying an earlier death regardless of how much you exercise or how lean you are. That’s right: Even a sculpted six pack can’t protect you from your chair.”
And I don’t even have the six-pack!
But I did make note of the story’s silver lining: if i can find ways to escape my chair during the workday, I can dodge my chest-clutching fate. So I dove in online, and found the “In stride electronic stepper,” and my butt is back in gear.
Yes, it looks like something you’ve probably seen Richard Simmons pumping away on.
But consider this: The majority of the calories you burn any given day come from a process called non-exercise activity thermogenisis. (Brilliant piece by Jim Thornton, about metabolism and N.E.A.T. here.) That’s a fancy way of saying “calories you burn just moving around all day”—walking to your car, jawing with coworkers, stretching at your desk. If you can up that aspect of your life, then you can easily incinerate an extra 500 calories/day and burn a pound of fat per week.
And you can do that without a gym membership. You simply need to find excuses to move around more during the day.
My new excuse is now mounted next to my desk. When the phone rings, I’ll hop onto the electronic stepper, and fight off a
heart attack and love handles at the same time. Can’t wait for it to ring, and save me from a gruesome fate.
