Opinion : Sitting to death: Get up.. but first sit down to read this

Sit down to read this column.

But hurry.

I don't you want to be sitting for long. And when you read this, you may decide to destroy your chair.

The people who count American jobs and the people who count American pounds have come to the same frightening conclusion:

We are sitting ourselves to death — mostly at work.

The Center For Consumer Freedom tells us every two hours spent sitting at work is linked to a 5-7 percent increase in obesity. And, says the Center, the number of Americans employed in low-activity occupations grew from 16 million in 1950 to 58.2 million in 2000. Roughly half of Americans sit while we work.

And no matter how intensely we work, or pretend to, we do all of this working and pretending while barely moving at all.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia can explain in medical terms why all this sitting is so unhealthy.

Assistant professor Marc Hamilton and his team have determined that sitting has negative effects on fat and cholesterol metabolism, and physical inactivity stimulates disease-promoting processes. Exercising, the research revealed, even for an hour a day, is not sufficient to reverse that effect.

Could that be true?

Are we killing ourselves at work before we go home to sit in front of our television and computer to continue the incremental suicide there?

Yes.

Professor Hamilton tells me that a “very long review going back to 1952” indicates that “in comparisons between vocations with high sitting (bus or subway drivers) to low sitters-high standers/putterers, the sitters worked just a few feet away from the puttering co-workers but died at twice the rate from middle age heart attacks!”

“Obviously,” says the professor, showing a flair for dramatic understatement, “the sitters were unaware of the hazards of sitting at work.”

But now that we have scientific proof of those hazards, we at Vinton Today want to help prevent you from sitting yourself to death.

And we must do this for you because the only two entities that are able to solve this sitting problem — government and business — are nowhere near a solution.

How can we tell that Iowa government has not identified this sitting problem? Easy: We do not have a chair tax.

At least not yet.

But many in the Statehouse would be eager to identify the sitting problem if they knew they could tax it.

And while the corporate world does realize there is a problem, it only addresses this problem with the same lame solutions it uses to solve other problems: Spectacularly Bad Ideas (SBIs) — the kind that only come out of long meetings.

If you Google “exercise at work,” you will find these surprisingly annoying and ineffective SBIs for exercising at work:

• Sit on an exercise ball instead of a chair. This will strengthen your abs and back and you'll work on your posture without even trying.

(This would have one very positive effect at work — raising office morale. Of course, this morale boost will come at the expense at the ball-sitting employee whom everyone else mocks, but at least your workplace will be happier.)

•Set an alarm to go off every hour to remind you to stand up and move around. Even if you just swing your arms or take a deep breath, you'll feel more alert.

(Most colleagues will resent you waking them up every hour. And if the guy next to you wakes up to see you swinging your arms too close to him, you may get a fistful of alertness.)

• Use the restroom on another floor and take the stairs.

(Then try to explain to your boss why your restroom breaks always take an hour.)

• Use a pedometer and keep track of how many steps you take. Aim for 6,000 to 10,000 steps a day.

(Please do not count out loud — you may interfere with a colleague who is figuring out how to pad his expense sheet.)

• Leave something important in your car — your lunch, briefcase, etc. — so you have to go out to get it — and take the stairs.

(Spending the afternoon in the emergency room being treated for food poisoning because you left your chicken salad sandwich in your car is a great way to lose weight, but a real drag on productivity.)

• Deliver documents or messages to co-workers in person rather than by email.

(This does not apply to those of you who are so annoying that we ONLY want to talk to you via email.)

• Get a headset for your phone so you can move around while you talk.

(The same annoying colleagues who insist on delivering things to you in person rather than by email will be the only ones who do this, talking even more loudly behind your cubicle than they do at their own desks.)

Those are just a few of the really, really bad ideas.

But what about good ones?

At last, there is a man in Iowa who is at least trying to improve the health of his workers without using any of those dumb ideas.

Dennis Hogan, the new fleet services manager for of the City of Cedar Rapids, requires his mechanics to begin their day with eight minutes of stretching.

Not all of the workers appreciate this, but they all do it. The new boss has made that a requirement for all of his subordinates.

This small beginning offers hope for us desk jockeys who have been wondering how we can lose all those pounds we have gained from simply doing our jobs (or pretending to).

And with some determination, we can make a big difference in our corporate and government policies.

We need to demand that our employers create gymnasiums, rooms or other open spaces where employees may go to stretch, shoot some hoops, do push-ups, throw a baseball, or engage in some other form of exercise during break time, or lunch, or before or after work.

Even more importantly, there should be corporate policies requiring that every meeting be replaced with an activity-based sharing gathering (ABSG).

During these ABSGs, instead of sitting around a table eating donuts and bagels, you and your colleagues could shoot a few hoops or play catch while talking about whatever time-wasting topic was on the agenda set by the goofs in your company’s SBI Department.

One of the great benefits of an ABSG is that this format offers much more in the way of feedback. If your supervisor starts droning on and on, you can just throw a ball at him a little harder than he expected.

Or in severe cases of mindless droning, much, much harder. Maybe even try out the curveball your teenage son taught you.

I know, I know: Workplace exercise facilities are not likely to become common anytime soon in America.

But they should.

We can start here in Iowa, using some of the $10 million per month the state receives from cigarette tax revenues (which Governor Culver promised to spend on health programs). Even $1 million per month would go a long way toward creating a commission and a grant program to promote healthy alternatives to sitting and to pay for exercise facilities at every office where sitting is the predominant posture.

I would even agree to volunteer to serve on that committee.

Especially if our ABSG takes place at Wrigley Field.

Just one more thing before you go

Beth:

There’s a forgotten law of nature from the long-lost days before technology began doing all of our hard work for us: The harder your body works, the more clearly your mind can think. Our society is in desperate need of both harder physical work and clearer thinking.

— Dad