It is now know for sure that desk jobs are really not good for you!

We are now generally a more sedentary nation – many people are sat at computers for their work – and millions more at tv, home computers etc.

We are known to have generally, 50 – 75% of our time sitting. We are largely inactive!

Unfortunately, sitting still for hours at a time is a major health risk – even if you are good at going for a run, going to the gym at the weekend, or even doing a workout every day.

Stunned? Yes, me too.

People who watch up to 6 hours of TV for instance in a day, or sit at computers can expect to die 5 years earlier than those who don’t!

WE ARE BUILT TO MOVE ABOUT, TO BE PHYSICALLY ON THE GO, TO BE ACTIVE.

Inactivity releases a huge number of metabolic changes eg, muscles turn into atrophy and lose the mitochondria (where we make our energy in the cell), and the ability to be endurance-type muscle.

These also burn fat – eventually the blood becomes very fatty, and it (fat) also gathers in muscle (remember heart is a muscle!), liver and colon – where it isn’t supposed to settle.

We become insulin resistant, and glucose will gather in the bloodstream as in diabetes. In 3 days we can produce insulin resistance – so we don’t use up the glucose, it is laid down as fat.

Ok, so exercising say up to an hour an day is beneficial – that’s every day! But what we DO need to do  is keep moving. Fidget even, stand up, walk about, go get a drink, do the dishes, stand up to write an email – move around 5 minutes in every hour – that makes an astonishing difference to the glucose in your bloodstream.

The message really is this: ( from Alpa Patel of the American Cancer Society in Atlanta who analysed data from a 14 year long study of 123,000 adults of middle age)  – “anything is better than nothing. Just getting up and moving at all is taking a big step in the right direction.”

Am afraid the otherwise result is the possibility from the study results that 37% higher mortality rate for women, and 17% higher rate for men – just for sitting still!

(NO, we don’t know why yet, the difference between the genders exist.)