Exercise Doesn’t Help Serious Couch Potatoes

It doesn’t mat­ter if you go run­ning every morn­ing, or you’re a reg­u­lar at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sit­ting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home, you are putting your­self at increased risk of obe­sity, dia­betes, heart dis­ease, a vari­ety of can­cers and an early death.

A new study from Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety researchers finds it’s not just how much phys­i­cal activ­ity you get, but how much time you spend sit­ting that can affect your risk of death. Researchers sur­veyed 123,216 healthy peo­ple (part of the Amer­i­can Can­cer Society’s Can­cer Pre­ven­tion II study in 1992) and found that peo­ple who spent their days sit­ting down have a higher risk of mortality.

Dur­ing a time period of 1993 to 2006, researchers found that women who sat down for at least 6 hours a day were 37 per­cent more likely to die when com­pared to women who sat for 3 hours a day dur­ing the time period stud­ied. For the same time period, men who sat down for 6 hours a day were 18 per­cent more likely to die than their stand­ing counterparts.

Women were 94 per­cent and men were 48 per­cent “more likely, respec­tively, to die com­pared with those who reported sit­ting the least and being most active.”

It sounds not that great, is it? Folks like me (and prob­a­bly you) who either enjoy our TV or com­puter time after work or work in front of a com­puter all day? Shall we all quit? Shall we give up on exer­cise because “it doesn’t help?” No, I don’t think so, it is unclear, if they said sit down 8 hours a day, exer­cise will not help you live longer, that make sense.

Accord­ing to Jon, the co-author of The 7 Minute Diet: Sim­ple Sug­ges­tions For Weight­loss,

… sev­eral researchers who were not directly involved with the study made some spot-on comments.

First, your body has to move fre­quently to reduce inflam­ma­tion. Inflam­ma­tion is THE number-one cause of heart dis­ease, and heart dis­ease is the number-one cause of death. Yet, move­ment need not be long and labo­ri­ous. In fact, long-duration exer­cise may actu­ally do more harm when it comes to inflammation.

Stud­ies show that long-duration exer­cise of an intense nature, such as hours of bik­ing hard, run­ning, weight train­ing for more than a hour etc can cause a sig­nif­i­cant spike in inflam­ma­tory mark­ers. C-reactive pro­tein increases as well as enzymes indi­cat­ing mus­cle and organ damage.

Another rea­son for this is the nature of blood fats called “triglyc­erides”. This is some­thing I know quite a bit about as my “trigs” (for short) have almost always been well above nor­mal. Only my diet­plan and a vit­a­min I use (upcom­ing) helped me lower trigs to normal.

With­out mov­ing around dur­ing the day our trigs can become ele­vated quickly. Trigs are also ele­vated through the con­sump­tion of excess car­bo­hy­drate. It does not mat­ter if these carbs come from brown rice or sugar: Trigs respond in many peo­ple by ris­ing from ‘any’ source of carbohydrate.

So what if you DO have a desk job? What can you do? Here are the 3 tips he sug­gested to use.

1. Get up every 45 min­utes and walk around for 5 min­utes or so. 10 min­utes is even bet­ter. You won’t notice those 5 min­utes, but they add up to 40 MINUTES of fatburning-style car­dio a day. That’s right: Walk­ing burns body­fat. The 45-minute trick works because your body begins to store and accu­mu­late triglyc­erides within an hour of con­sum­ing meals and for up to 3 hours post-consumption.

So, break­ing up the sit­ting with sim­ple move­ment tricks your body into using more of those fatty acids for fuel rather than for stor­age. The net result can be more body­fat gone AND improved health, despite the sitting-at-work handicap.

2. Focus on your meal plan­ning more than your exer­cise. Exer­cise is VITAL for a more shapely body, burn­ing off excess body­fat and keep­ing healthy. If you sit for more than 8 hours per day, adjust your car­bo­hy­drate down to about 80 grams per day. Start there. If you need more help, go here

3. If your trigs are high, talk to your doc­tor about using vit­a­min B3, called niacin. Niacin, ONLY in the form of nico­tinic acid, is very effec­tive at low­er­ing trigs, rais­ing HDL, and even low­er­ing C-reactive pro­tein lev­els. And it’s cheap as well. How­ever, NEVER take niacin (nico­tinic acid) with­out being under a doctor’s care as it can be very hard on the liver and cause some nasty side-effects in some people.

In con­clu­sion, do not let this lat­est study dis­cour­age you from exer­cis­ing. In real­ity, you should exer­cise by sim­ply mov­ing once every hour, along with intense but brief exer­cise 3–5 days per week for fat­loss and body-shaping results.