This one isn’t for the hard-core fitness types, it’s for those like me who are concerned they are sitting too much. In the first post, I reported on a Lifehacker story that suggested you could avoid some of the negatives of too much sitting by:
- Getting regular breaks during sedentary activity
- Getting about 30 minutes of activity a day
Here’s a litte more detail from the study Lifehacker referenced:
Participants were aged 45-65 and were either overweight or obese with a body mass index of 31.2 kg/m2 (overweight or obese). Each participant was required to participate in three separate daily sitting schedules with a break of six days between each of the days. In the first trial condition, each participant sat for 5 hours with no break. In the second experiment, they walked on a treadmill at a light-intensity pace for 2 minutes every 20 minutes. And in the third trial condition, they walked on a treadmill at moderate-intensity pace for 2 minutes every 20 minutes.
Importantly, the researchers found that the benefit of walking at a light intensity pace was almost identical to walking at a moderate intensity pace, suggesting that it was not so much the amount of effort put into the break that was critical but the act of standing up and moving and thereby reducing sitting time was intrinsically beneficial.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health & food policy. And cats! 
As someone who sits at a computer for a living, and then often for fun, never mind books, and TV, the wave of headlines about sitting is raising my anxiety. Hopefully in a way that I can react to healthily. I’ve already been dipping into the “Pomodoro” method as a form of attention-focusing/anxiety reduction (20 minutes no interruption on one task, short break, another 20 minutes, break)-I guess I just need to use some of those breaks to take a quick lap around the building!
Liz, I’m with you! Besides the breaks, I’m going to start being more diligent about wearing my pedometer and working my way back up to 10K steps a day.