Why sitting is bad for you.

Hello to you from the past.

When this post gets (hopefully) posted on it's own, I will (again hopefully) be sitting in a plane on my way to Barcelona. I will maybe tell you something about that next week.

At first I want to answer your question about if it's summer here.
I took a picture for you:

The green is a little light to be quite summer yet, but it is t-shirt weather already, so it won't be long any more until it's properly summer. Although I can already hear swallows out there, that means it's summer, does it? And that picture was taken on Friday, it has become more summer over the weekend.





Anyway, what I want to talk to you about today is sitting. I've noted that lately people have started to talk about today's human sitting way too much, since we haven't really developed for sitting, but a great deal of jobs (and studying) require us sitting eight hours a day, and then some more at home in the evening, watching TV or internet. And our bodies don't like it.

People who sit over four hours a day are 46% more likely to die of pretty much any disease than those who sit less than 2 hours a day. With cardiac diseases it's even higher: people who sit a lot are 80% more likely to die of some kind of heart problems.
And if you sit a lot, moving some every day doesn't really do much to improve your health from what it would be if you didn't sit so much.

This is because sitting is a passive position. You hardly need to use your muscles, because you don't need to support yourself. And this is bad, because there is an enzyme that transforms your lipids and sugars into a form that lets muscles use them. When you don't move, the enzyme doesn't work, because the muscles don't need the energy, and all the lipids get stuck in your blood vessels, causing blocks and inflammation and all kinds of other nasty stuff in those blood vessels. Not using your body also causes the blood vessels to get thinner, which makes the blocks blocking the vessel way easier.
Passivity also decreases the need and effect of insulin, and then you're on your way to type II diabetes. And obviously the lack of need for your muscles, bones and other supporting tissues makes them weaker.

However, simply standing up every once in a while helps enormously, because it gets the enzyme I was talking about earlier working again. In this case every once in a while means every half an hour or so. It's that easy. Stand up every half an hour, and you're preventing a lot of the damage done to your body by sitting.
Obviously you also have to get some exercise on top of that standing up every thirty minutes to stay in any kind of health, but it's a start if you have to for some reason sit a lot.

Now, thanks to the warm weather outside and  vivid imaginary pictures in my mind of fat blocking blood vessels, I present you with a challenge for the summer. (I wanted to name it something catchy, but I couldn't easily come up with anything, and I figured it's not that important.)
How it works, is you get points for the time you move. Just standing around won't get you points, but if you do light not-quite-exercise, like walking in a park or carrying a two-year-old around the house, you get a point for every full twenty minutes. If you do heavier exercise, like jogging or in my case training capoeira, during which you actually have to stop drinking every now and then, you get two points for every twenty minutes. Of course this isn't all that clear, and there are cases that could go into either category, but I suppose you get the point. Also, you get a minus point for every full hour you spend sitting. Obviously the time you spend sleeping doesn't count.
The challenge would be starting in the beginning of June, and lasting for ten weeks. And in the end, the one with most points gets a prize. I just haven't yet come up with anything that could be.
I say most points, because I'd also like to challenge our younger siblings (and maybe mom and dad?), who also spend way too much time sitting, though they don't read our blog and won't hear about this unless someone tells them.
And before you say no, I want to note, that it's for your best (and my best, and everyone's best) and you actually do have a chance to get more points than me, because even though I do do 2-point-worth training three hours a week, I spend the rest of the time sitting (especially since I'll be working for dad again), whereas you spend eight hours a day taking care of kids, which does not include all that much sitting. So it's easier for me to accidentally collect a lot of minus points.

So, as a summary:
Starting 1.6., lasting for ten weeks (-> 10.8.)
+2 points: heavier exercise 20 min
+1 point: light "exercise" 20 min
-1 point: sitting 1 hour

A prize in the end for the winner.

How does that sound?

~matu