Thank you to Janet Huehls, a
Certified Wellness Coach and Registered Clinical Exercise Physiologist here at
UMMS, for the following insightful advice. And to SHARE Treasurer Kathy Bateman for sending it in to be posted on the blog!
This weekly email, provided by the exercise program at UMass Memorial Weight Center, is also blog: www.keepmovingweekly.wordpress.com
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Thank you!
The term “sitting is the new smoking” is not an exaggeration.
“Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.” James Levine, MD, PhD. Researcher Mayo Clinic and founder of N.E.A.T.
The human body is amazingly designed to move. Each system works better when we move and suffers when we are inactive. Even if you exercise regularly, prolonged sitting still puts you at risk.
This is powerful knowledge because anyone can improve health in this way. If you can move, even in a small way, you can improve health by moving often.
Our current environment provides us with many reasons to sit and has led us to the newer science of inactivity. Like opposite sides of the same coin, exercise physiology studies what happens in the body when we move and inactivity physiology studies what happens when we are still. It turns out both studies are critical for understanding health.
The physiology of inactivity has discovered that when we don’t move, things start to back up in the cells. The process to deal with sugar and fats in the blood slows down or halts. Sugar and fats in the blood accumulate and are triggers for disease.
The good news is that it does not take much movement to get the system working again. Simply moving from sitting to standing, taking a short walk, stretching – all activate the muscles’ ability to manage these triggers for disease.
Standing desks are one attempt to fix this problem, but standing still is not much better. Imagine stagnant water, things accumulate. Inactivity or simply stillness is the root of the problem. We need to move to get the system working.
If you exercise regularly no one would call you a couch potato. But…you can be an active couch potato. The chair does not care if you exercise regularly or not – stillness will cause these changes in the body despite your fitness level.
The term lifestyle activity is used to describe how much we move during the day. Getting 10,000 steps a day on a pedometer all at once does not have the same benefit as taking 5000 steps in one shot and then spreading the other 5000 out during the rest of the day.
When you are trying to lose weight or maintain weight loss add a goal for lifestyle activity in addition to exercise goals. Often, lifestyle activity is a great first step if you are not ready to exercise yet and a great addition if you are exercising but the scale is not budging.
Bottom line – how often we move during the day is as important as how often we exercise in a week.
Keep Moving, Be Well,
Janet
These weekly emails are general guidelines. These guidelines apply to patients who are cleared by a physician for the type of exercise described. Please contact your physician with any concerns or questions. Always report any symptoms associated with exercise, such as pain, irregular heartbeats, and dizziness or fainting, to your physician.
Certified Wellness Coach UMass Memorial Weight Center 774-443-3886