The farmers rarely sat down unless it was for a meal or to maybe have a glass of water, tea or lemonade. And they, of course, succumbed to heart disease if other ailments/diseases didn’t first take them. THEIR heart disease episodes were probably causative from the way they prepared all of their good food…frying? Also, they had constant worry about crops being destroyed and not being harvested…and most of them smoked.
The modern-day employees or business owners spend - get this - a daily average of 9.3 hours SITTING! This compares to 7.7 hours of sleeping. Since morphing into a life of primarily “sitting” we rarely even think about it…like it is ok and fine for our health, etc. The couch potato lifestyle is basically killing us equally as fast as smoking can and does. We must contemplate seriously on how to put movement back in our lives to the extent that we don’t even think of it anymore and that it becomes as natural as breathing, eating or sleeping.
Even though most of us have acquired a conscience against smoking, we need to do likewise with the concept of sitting for too many hours. This would be due to “Sitting is the smoking of the last couple of generations!” Death from obesity is literally 90% higher than from smoking! Sitting or low activity is responsible for a higher rate of diabetes, heart disease, breast and colon cancer. A medical journal called “Circulation,” did an in-depth study and learned that for each additional hour of sitting (TV, gaming, etc.) the risk of dying was elevated by 11%. In that article, a doctor stated that “excessive sitting” (nine hours per day) is a lethal activity.
Over the last few years we have noted the presence or mainstreaming of “the standing desk” and though this is a baby step positive action that gets us off our tushies, it is NO replacement for real exercise or movement.
People now are doing walking meetings! Depending upon the number of meetings needed for bosses/employees, it would be easy to make this a habit and log in 20-30 miles per week. Before the paradigm changes from exercise or gym time being selfish or vain and a general waste of time because it was not “productive,” to considering it a ways and means to multitask, then one does NOT have to sacrifice health for work, nor work for fitness.
In the book by James Fowler and Nicholas Christaki called “Connected,” they observed that obesity spreads based on Network Effects. For example, if your friend’s friend (who may live 1,000 miles away) gains weight, you may be likely to gain weight, too, just by hearing about it. And, by the same token, if that extended friend loses weight, even not in the same city, you are likely to lose weight as well.
A great goal would be to become someone who socializes (influences) the idea that physical activity is pivotal for good health and that we each are valuable and smart enough to take steps to improve and maintain our health.
It has been noted that there are serendipity benefits that have arrived out of “walking meetings” such as better quality of listening to one another, across the board. Something about being side by side as opposed to being across the table at a coffee shop. As well, the simple act of moving also means that the mobile devices mostly remain “put away.” Undivided attention has become today’s scarcest commodity and hiking or walking meetings allow investment of that resource very differently. And then it seems, from reports gathered, that the meetings end joyfully much more often. All are on the same page and it makes for more creative time. Research has compounded that “walking is good for the brain.”
If you want to think out of the box, one must remove themself from the box. What we get out of the elements of nature, respecting its cycles and unpredictability, keeps us on our toes! It makes us present to the world that surrounds us rather than being insulated from it.
Nilafer Merchant is a huge proponent of moving meetings and, as well, and has launched 100 different products amounting to a revenue of 18 billion, plus! She is ranked in the top 50 most influential management thinkers in the world by “Thinkers 50.” Her latest book is “The Power of Onlyness—Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World.”
This article is just an example of one way to decrease our sitting time; if we all collectively understood the magnitude of what our evolved lifestyle is causing, we could all devise solutions and share in getting our heart diseases reduced, drastically!
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