Too Little Physical Activity is Killing You. Here’s What to Do

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.
Jerry Seinfeld

For the last 100 years or so things have changed significantly: we no longer get the exercise we need through our daily activities. Most of us sit in offices, watch movies, drive cars, travel, and the money is quite sufficient to sustain this way of life. Your health isn’t, though. Even if some of us spend an hour or two a day at the gym, we still lead a generally sedentary way of life. Because, as Marc Hamilton puts it, “sitting too much is not the same thing as working out too little.”

According to the 2009 study by Peter Katzmarzyk, the death rate of those who sit ‘almost all of the time’ is 50% higher than of those who sit ‘almost none of the time’, provided that leisure time physical activity, smoking status, and alcohol consumption are all at baseline. A 2010 study from Australia proves that each successive hour you spend sitting before the TV increases the risk of dying by 11%. This, among other things, means that the more frequently you interrupt your sitting, the better: your waist is slimmer, your body mass ratio is lower and your blood lipids are… well, lower too. This study, as well as others, demonstrate the following: it is healthier to interrupt your sitting and walk around as frequently as possible (even if you are out for a smoke, yes) than heavily working out for a couple of hours a day and then sitting through the rest of it with no interruptions whatsoever! Mind-boggling, we know.

As if that alone was not enough, here are some more harmful effects of little physical activity and too much sitting: spending just 1 day without proper movement reduces high density lipoprotein cholesterol (it is a ‘good’ one) and slows down triglycerides absorption.

While five days spent in bed increase triglycerides in blood plasm by 35% and insulin resistance by 50%! This is tremendously bad for our metabolism.

But what are we to do? Keep track of your physical activity, of course.

The only way to fight your sedentary lifestyle is to be constantly on the move; sports and active leisure are essential, too. However, the best result is achieved when you make things personal — you need to understand what your own body needs, how much of physical activity it needs and when exactly. Your age, sex, health and personal fitness are vital. Although it may turn out quite difficult to figure all this out: individual approach to physical activity requires constant systematic control of your body functional state and adjustment.

There are, of course, some basic gadgets (pedometers, G-meters, etc.) these days which provide backbone information on your activity. However, they are not able to keep and sustain the full account of your physical performance. If you are weightlifting, for example, pedometer has no way of telling you that you are currently getting any physical activity — and why would it, since you are standing at one place! In order to fully understand your physical performance, a complex approach is required. This is what the Healbe GoBe Body Manager is about.

Learn more http://healbe.com/

GoBe Healthy, GoBe You!