Читать книгу Dai Manuel's Whole Life Fitness Manifesto - Dai Manuel - Страница 48

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eliminate your why nots

everybody you care about, and not in a good way. You owe it to yourself to be healthy, but you also owe it to those who are closest to you, and they should understand that.

When we’re not busy attending to our family’s needs we’re often at the beck and call of our employers. Perhaps you’re a person who thinks, I can’t take time for myself because my career demands so much of me. It’s true that getting the right work/life balance can be tricky, but short-changing ourselves where our health is concerned never pays off. Poor health can take a terrible toll on your job performance and career.

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Beware the “sitting disease”!

Sitting is the new smoking! The more you sit, the more your health will suffer.

We love to sit—in our car, at the desk, on the couch, and at the game. New research shows that sitting and inactivity are linked to increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and depression. Stated simply, our bodies are designed to move. A recent study showed that if we spent less than three hours a day sitting, our life expectancy would increase by two years. Furthermore, reducing TV time to less than two hours per day can increase your life expectancy by 1.4 years. That’s a total of 3.4 years more of your life just by not sitting so much! Does that not make you want to stand up and read this book while pacing in your room? Do it now!

When I first started reading up on inactivity, and especially, the amount of time North Americans spend sitting, I immediately bought a standing desk. In fact, much of this book was written while I stood at my desk.

When you sit for long periods, your body adapts to the reduced physical demand by slowing down your metabolism. This means you burn fewer calories, and that extra energy is stored as fat.

Men who sit more than six hours a day have an 18 per cent increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 7.8 per cent increased chance of dying from diabetes, compared to someone who sits for three hours or less per day.

Today’s North American 10-year-olds are the first generation expected to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

According to the American Medical Association, just 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week on-going is enough to drastically reduce the risk of sedentary lifestyle illnesses, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Globally, 20 per cent of early deaths are preventable with moderate exercise. And for the first time in history, inactivity-related illnesses killed 5.3 million people worldwide, more than smoking. Many health experts are thinking of inactivity as an illness, with some doctors in the U.S. pushing to make lack of exercise a medical diagnosis.

In the U.S., adults sit for an average of 8–10 hours each day. This makes the American lifestyle one of the most sedentary in the world. After long commutes and hours at our desks, we can hardly blame ourselves for taking a load off, but getting more exercise is a lot easier than most of us think.

Dai Manuel's Whole Life Fitness Manifesto

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