Standing up more often to avoid excess pounds?
The message is getting better and better: to lose a few pounds it is necessary to eat a balanced dietand practice regular physical activity. However, it is clear that this is not really self-evident! An alarming finding shows that adolescents in the twenty-first century are fatter than those in the twentieth.
Indeed, people of past generations weremore slenderthan those of today. That’s why scientists are competing with ingenious and novel methods to encourage young people, and everyone else, to lose weight. What if the lifeline was, quite simply, tostandfor about six hours in the day?
An informative report
It is a Canadian study from Toronto(1) that reveals that young people under 25 years of age would have more difficulty than their parents to stabilize their weight. It should be noted that consumers in 2008 weigh about 10% more than those in 1971 while the amount of food ingested remains the same.
According to Jennifer Kuk, one of the scientists of the study conducted, the explanation is neither our mode of consumption, nor the practice, or not, of a sporting activity. It would bemore environmental.
Indeed, according to the Canadian researcher, there are multiple recent factors that impact on the modification of body weight such as endocrine disruptors, drug use, pesticides and environmental pollutants, stress, chaotic meal intake, microbiota, genetics and too much exposure to artificial light. It is true that our environment is no longer the same and that a certain adaptation is emerging.
The teenagers’ bodies have changed. Young girls’ hips are wider, while young men have low testosterone levels. In short, it is all these modifications that make obesity more consistent today than in the past.
A trick not so easy
Thus, researchers around the world competein ingenuity to get the youngestoverweight people moving and raise awareness about healthy food.
American scientists in Texas thought that, rather than sitting in their work chairs, obese young people could show a little more inventiveness to lose a third of fat mass without, however, depriving themselves or starting to make extreme efforts(2). In fact, it is enough to stay six hours a day standing!
According to this recent study, it is more profitable to walk while thinking, eating or reading emails. Unprecedented, but since this way of acting seems beneficial, why not put it into practice at any age? From now on, the use of the computer will no longer correspond to the word “relaxation”.
In this experiment, subjects who thought about sitting less and standing up as soon as the opportunity arose, lost 35% of fat mass. In addition, the risk of obesity was lower, almost 60% lower, on average. This study published in the famous journal “Mayo Clinic Proceedings” is quite serious and confirms that a sedentary lifestyle is indeed at the root of so-called civilizational diseases such as diabetes, depression and certain cancers.
And rather than overwhelm our environmental and social system, we should just find an attitude more adapted to our conditiontag. We are not made to sit for hours at a computer workstation. As hominids we must remain active at the risk of evolving into a kind of soft ectoplasm without any consistency.
Stephen Paul is the lead author and founder of My Health Sponsor. Holder of a diploma in health and well-being coaching with more than 200 articles in the field of health, he makes it a point of honor to offer advice based on reliable information, based on scientific research, and verified by health professionals.