What happens if you sit down too much?
Hello everyone, welcome back to the imperfect podcast called One Day at a Time and the key message is there's no such thing as perfection when it comes to health fitness and all sorts of things and if you think there is and you think you have to be perfect you've got on the wrong boat and that boat's taking you nowhere. So if you want get a boat that's going to take you somewhere slow nice view, hola join this boat. Now here's a study for you What happens if you just sit less, exercise, does it make you live longer or does it shorten your life? Sitting, sitting down, standing up, how much of an impact does it actually have? Okay so a lot of the time you think you're active because you've done a workout, but actually you sit down the rest of the day, you work all day, stay on the couch, you're not active at all.
Speaker 1:So this study titled leisure time spent sitting in relation to total mortality in a prospective cohort of US adults. Hundred and twenty three thousand people are analyzed by the American Cancer Society. Here's what they found. Men who sit six plus hours face increased health risks even if they exercise regularly, and for both men and women the risks spike when combining long sitting with little exercise. Same for women, okay, double health risk.
Speaker 1:So if you said six plus hours a day, you're at a 37 higher risk of an early departure compared to those who sit less than three hours, irrespective if you exercise or not. So even frequent exercises face up to ninety four percent higher risk if they say too much and are not active enough in terms of standing up and stuff. Shape and size doesn't matter here, the risk stands for everyone. So really the main takeaway from this is that like, yes you can exercise but it doesn't replace and this is why steps is important because you have to stand up to step to do your steps, you know what I mean? And you could sit down and do a pedaling but you kind of are missing the point about it.
Speaker 1:Steps means you're going to be standing up. Standing up for 10,000 steps a day means you're probably gonna be standing up for about an hour or hour thirty extra today versus if you don't have any of those steps. You also wanna be thinking about, in general, standing up more. If you're going to watch a TV show for sixty minutes, stand up for ten minutes of it. Or stand up for every ten minutes stand up for five or watch as much as you can standing up.
Speaker 1:Know, there's little things you can do. When you're taking meetings at work, you take a stand in. If you don't have a standing desk, just take a stand in, ask for the camera off, just be linked in audio wise. So it's really important that we think about not only how can we walk more, but how can we stand more. And there's another study that was fascinating.
Speaker 1:Was telling my jujitsu professor about it. You're looking at modern hunter gatherers, and they don't necessarily walk more than us, but what they do is they do sit up and run a lot more than us, they kneel down, they sit and do a squat a lot, they're going on the floor making something, they stand up, they do a lot more movement in different directions, up, down, across, know, like they're not just laying on their back, getting up, sitting down and not moving, they're always dynamic in small ways. So we kind of have to combine the lessons from this and saying like, that's how they're moving, we need to get steps because steps burns a decent amount of energy, and we just need to be generally more active. So this is the lifestyle question. Like, if you want to maintain a lower body weight, if you want to maintain a new weight, say, you know, you lose 50 pounds and you want to maintain that, you've got to be as active as someone who can maintain that age, you can't just go back to your previous state.
Speaker 1:This is not a thing where you stop, it's who you become. That's why the journey is better to take it slower, steadier, thinking of the psychological impact, thinking about you as a whole and digging deep into why you do these things. Because you have to change, fundamentally have to change at the root to become this new person, the byproduct of this lifestyle that you build is that you're less body fat, potentially maintain more muscle mass, generally more active, better mental health, less back pain, better posture, you know, overall a more confident person. You have to become that and the side effect is the rest of the juicy gains that you're after, you know. Such an important thing to think about because you can become whoever you want today, essentially.
Speaker 1:If you wanna be a real lazy git today, you can go and do that. If you wanna be someone if you wanna be the healthy person that you think you should be, you can be that today too. That means you're going to be tracking your energy and taking your steps and standing up as much as you can, trying to get those whole foods in if you can. Also having a healthy flexible mindset where you can have a Mars bar and not catastrophize and turn into a massive issue for yourself. You control your psychological stresses.
Speaker 1:You realize what's in your control and what's not, and you focus on what is in your control, which is your voluntary actions and your attitude. You have a cool head. You know being able to have a cool head when life gets hard is one of the most important skills you can have. So what do you think happens to people who lose their minds when they step on the scale and it's 0.4 pounds heavier than they thought? Knowing deep down water retention fluctuates every day but still having a meltdown.
Speaker 1:When life really comes out to you, we need to be better than that. It's our decision to get freaked out over gains day to day on the weighing skills because you've been told many times over that those gains are water retention. It goes up and down all the time. That's why we take a weekly average like a scientist. A scientist isn't freaking out over day to day fluctuations.
Speaker 1:On an experiment, they expect day to day fluctuations. It's like them doing it's like them tracking the weather and being mind blown that every day the weather's changing, and it should be exactly the same. And someone says to them, hey, buddy. I don't know if you know this, but the weather does change every day. It's not exactly the same every day.
Speaker 1:And you go, nah, you're joking. Like, are you what? Obviously, look. The facts are there, the stats are there, the data's there. You're collecting the data yourself.
Speaker 1:You realize this yourself. So if you're going to freak out about it, it's down to your own decision. So when life gets tough and you're going to be hit with some big things, there's no doubt about it. And I hope it's not things you can't handle and it's not devastating. But some things are devastating.
Speaker 1:Some things are tough. The tough days are going to come. Well, tougher days will come, and then you have easier days. And then you wish, oh, wow. Remember those easy days when the only thing I worried about was if I gained 0.4 pounds of water weight, knowing it wasn't water weight.
Speaker 1:But then I freaked out all morning, turned my stress response on, made everything about my weight all morning, worried, didn't enjoy my morning walk with a cup of coffee, didn't enjoy my day because of it. Know, that's your life you're throwing away to things that shouldn't be thrown away for because you know the truth. So please, we have to act sensibly now. We have to be reasonable. We have to have some wisdom in these things we're doing because there's only so much more time you can waste on past diet culture conditioning.
Speaker 1:A very common concern or viewpoint is like, it's so hard because I've always done it this way and thought this way because of Weight Watchers, because of Slimming World and stuff like that. Well, the question for you is, can you change today and not act in the same way? Is it difficult? Yes. Is it possible?
Speaker 1:Yes. It's up to you. You know, it's very frequent. You don't have to abide by the old rules that you thought were true. You made the right decision at the time.
Speaker 1:You were given poor information, but you thought it was right, and you made decisions based on that thinking it was right, you didn't do the wrong thing. But now with this new information, this new looking at this kind of analysis of this data, and it's not sexy, know, it's not something you can package up and sell easily like other things. The facts that come out of these studies and meta analysis, looking at all the other studies, taking conclusions from them, is the outcomes are not sexy, they can't be sold so easily. Or what you're saying is there's no diet that's actually better for fat loss if my calories and protein targets are hit and you say no. Even when they did diets specific to people who prefer to eat carbs and fats still the same, it's up to your personal preference obviously if you want to go high carb low low carb, but you can do it alternating days.
Speaker 1:One day you can go low carb, one day you can go high carb depending on what type of foods you like to eat. Just keep protein and calories the same, but that's not sexy, it's hard to sell that. What's easy to sell is that you've been missing something. You've been missing a certain hormone that you didn't know about, or you're missing a certain food that triggers a certain hormone that triggers a certain supplement. Do you know I mean?
Speaker 1:That's easy to sell. I could sell it to you now. You haven't lost weight, you know why? This hormone that the big health do not want you to know about. This big big health, I've not told you about this hormone because if you found out about it you could tackle weight loss at the core, and you would lose weight so easily.
Speaker 1:And then they would lose all the problems they get from people overweight. So they haven't told you about this hormone. And if they did, they were doing their business. But I'm gonna tell you now. A whistleblower told me it's this hormone, and you can buy it.
Speaker 1:It's the cheapest product in the supermarket, and that's why it goes under the radar. But you have to mix it in a certain way. So you buy it, and you mix it. You mix it with green tea and add a bit of magnesium, and you can activate this hormone, and it will melt your fat away in three weeks. You can do shit like that all day.
Speaker 1:It sells easily. I've done marketing courses, obviously. Running my own businesses, you have to learn about marketing, but then have to learn about what's ethical and stuff. And you look at what these marketers are able to do, and they're masters of manipulation. So really, you have to understand the games they play to understand how they played on you.
Speaker 1:But the boring stuff doesn't sell, so it's an uphill battle. So it's up to you guys. Do you wanna freak out over things that are actually not true now and you know this? And you're gonna crack on with your day, folks, and what's in your control, which is your actions, and letting the results speak for themselves down the line without pressure on the results when and where they will come if you put the action in today. That's really it.
Speaker 1:That's the secret is to just take action today, do it day after day, folks in one day at a time and it all comes together on happy days. So get on with your day, sit up more, stand up more, walk more, enjoy your day, eat the food you like, hit your protein, make sure you don't go over your calories. But if you do, it's fine. You can pull it back a bit tomorrow or maybe you accept a bit higher calories and start thinking about when you're going to add one or two strength workouts in a week to your routine because they're important. And that's it.
Speaker 1:Have a good day. Speak to you all tomorrow.
