Daily Smart Fact #10: Get off the couch! Sitting can actually kill you.

Key Takeaway: Sitting for more than 6 hours a day raises the death rate for men by 20% and for women a whopping 40%.

I started wearing a pedometer about 2 months ago at the beginning of Lent, because I was tired of being such a lazy bum.  At the tender age of 29, I’ve been having a lot of lower back pain and I made a correlation that on the days I did nothing but sit and stare at a computer, my lower back would kill me by the end of the day.  When I started wearing my pedometer, I was walking less than 2000 steps a day (I can’t even tell you how many steps because I’m embarrassed).  Now I’m walking over 7,000 steps a day and I actually feel better!  Wearing a pedometer, besides making me look incredibly dorky, makes me conscious of my inactivity.

Anyway, so I started doing some digging around about inactivity and found this New York Times article Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? Here’s some cool points below:

• Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight?  The answer is that people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more (not exercise, just simply moving more).
• Men who spent 6 hours or more per day sitting had an overall death rate that was 20 percent higher than men who sat for 3 hours or less
• For women, the death rate was about 40 percent higher

When you are sitting:

• electrical activity in the muscle drops – “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse”
• your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute
• insulin effectiveness drops within a single day
• the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises
• the risk of being obese rises

So…if that doesn’t motivate you to sit less than I don’t know what will! Walk, fidget, jump, take multiple stretching breaks…JUST MOVE!