I’m all about being active, upright, and moving. This article highlights why we need to make the shift back to a more active lifestyle.
“What we need to do is change the default,” Levine says. “I want us to have to find excuses to be sitting down.” Imagine that. Maybe standing really could be the new sitting.
And another bit from a BBC article below: “If you want to put that into activity levels,” Dr Buckley says, “then that would be the equivalent of running about 10 marathons a year. Just by standing up three or four hours in your day at work.”
More from the BBC article below: There was also evidence, from the heart rate monitors that they were wearing, that by standing they were burning more calories.
“If we look at the heart rates,” John Buckley explains, “we can see they are quite a lot higher actually – on average around 10 beats per minute higher and that makes a difference of about 0.7 of a calorie per minute.”
Now that doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up to about 50 calories an hour. If you stand for three hours a day for five days that’s around 750 calories burnt. Over the course of a year it would add up to about 30,000 extra calories, or around 8lb of fat.
“If you want to put that into activity levels,” Dr Buckley says, “then that would be the equivalent of running about 10 marathons a year. Just by standing up three or four hours in your day at work.”