I'll keep that in mind when I've got diabetes instead of ME, and I'm able to work again. Anyway, I break up my hours of sitting with laying down, bathroom breaks, getting food, etc. And of course, the TV watching study completely fails to establish causation. Even if they do die early due to sitting around too much, they may be sitting too much because they're too sick to do anything else. If that is the case and they die early, it's still due to the illness even if sitting around is somehow the more proximate cause of death.
I also recommend getting up every 20 minutes during the night, as lying down for eight hours straight is bad for your health.
I've seen a few things about the health problems of prolonged sitting recently. Oh oh. Not too sure how it relates to my own decisions... if I try to do any 'real' activity, like pilates exercises, then I'm often wiped enough to need to spend the rest of my time sitting/lying down. When I spend more energy pottering/standing, I'm too wiped to do another activity. I've been doing ever smaller amounts of pilates to find a happy medium, but it's all rather unpredictable and depends on what else I need to do that day. To a certain extent, I think it's unhelpful for me to medicalise my behaviour when so much is so uncertain, and it's better when I just do what I fee like... that could lead to longer term problems, but I don't know.
Correlation vs causation... (TV viewing is an excellent one because watching TV itself clearly doesn't cause death). The study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22374636 is interesting, but keep in mind it was amongst overweight/obese individuals, it would be interesting to see if such effects carry over to health weight individuals.
Some of us with ME also have low blood sugar problems. It is good to know that breaking up long periods of sitting with short bits of low-level activity will help stabilize blood sugar.
