Too much sitting

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of this rather alarming article about health the other day. I already knew that inactivity was bad for your health, but this goes further in sugggesting that it doens't matter how healthy the rest of your lifestyle is (diet, exercise etc) - if you spend the majority of each day sitting down, you're over 50% more likely to die of a heart attack.

The researchers themselves don't seem to fully understand why this is, or whether it applies to just the act of sitting or to general inactivity, but I was shocked enough to want to do something about it.

The trouble is, as a writer it's hard to NOT sit down all day. The romance writer Nora Roberts has been quoted (on iGoogle's writing quotes gadget) as saying 'ass in chair' and it's well known as a sedentary job. I can't type standing up, and the only work surface that would be high enough to give me the support I need would be the ironing board, and I can hardly work all day on that. But I worked out that there are aspects of the job I don't need to sit down for. Making and taking phone calls. Reading through print copies of stories. Editing print copies of stories. Even thinking can be done standing up.

It's a start, and better still, it burns an extra 60 calories an hour which ought to benefit my waistline as well as my heart!