If you are in a job that requires you to sit for most of the day then you are at risk of dying at a younger age. Sitters have an increased risk of premature death because of several health issues. The first and most obvious is weight gain. Call center workers, whose jobs require them to sit for long periods, gain an average of 6 kilograms (more than 13 pounds) in their first 8 months of work. They are not unique. Many workers today are sitting for all or large portions of the day.
While going to the gym and other forms of exercise help, they don’t help much. If you are spending 8 hours sleeping, 1 hour exercising or walking around as part of everyday life, and 15 hours sitting at a desk, in a car or on a couch then you are very much at risk.
Dangerous blood clots and some muscular skeletal conditions are also associated with sitting for long periods. Your risk of blood clots trebles if you are sitting for more than 10 hours a day. Your risk of a heart attack doubles from just two hours of sitting. This is because without muscle contraction, the body does not clear glucose and fat from the system. Additional effects from sitting include diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
A hundred years ago most people were employed in jobs that required them to move and often required reasonably strenuous exercise. Where once a man dug a ditch with a shovel, today a machine will do the work of many men, and all it takes is one person who is sitting in a cab.
We drive to work in our cars where once we would have walked. We spend our leisure time watching TV or chatting to friends online.
And then after a hard day of sitting, off we go to bed and lie down for a good night’s sleep.
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