charityfundraiser
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The Surprising Shortcut to Better Health
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/the-surprising-shortcut-to-better-health/
Snippets:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/the-surprising-shortcut-to-better-health/
Snippets:
The first 20 minutes of moving around, if someone has been really sedentary, provide most of the health benefits.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing something really strenuous. Thats untrue and, I think, discourages a lot of people from exercising. If you walk, your body registers that as motion, and you get all sorts of physiological changes that result in better health. Gardening counts as exercise. What would be nice would be for people to identify with the whole idea of moving more as opposed to quote exercise.
There is a whole scientific discipline called inactivity physiology that looks at what happens if you just sit still for hours at a time. If the big muscles in your legs dont contract for hours on end, then you get physiological changes in your body that exercise wont necessarily undo. Exercise causes one set of changes in your body, and being completely sedentary causes another.
I really do stand up at least every 20 minutes now, because I was spending five or six hours unmoving in my chair. The science is really clear that that is very unhealthy, and that it promotes all sorts of disease. All you have to do to ameliorate that is to stand up. You dont even have to move.