"Excessive Sitting is a Lethal Activity"

It turns out being sedentary is a health risk. Period. It’s up there with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, even smoking, according to a 2010 article in the Journal of the American Heart Association. In fact, fitness level is a “more powerful predictor” of survival than traditional risk factors, the journal says. That means an active person who’s overweight can have a better prognosis than a thin, sedentary person.

Exercise can:

 • Reduce your risk of getting, or dying from, certain cancers; 

• Delay or avert Type II diabetes, as well as reduce your mortality risk if you have diabetes;

• Help maintain your cognitive function into old age.

Studies — including one by the American Cancer Society — have shown that sitting itself can take years off your life. It’s not just that you’re burning fewer calories. It’s that certain bodily processes go silent — processes that do things like regulate your insulin and get the fat out of your bloodstream.

“Excessive sitting,” a Mayo Clinic researcher told The New York Times, “is a lethal activity.”

-from "Exercise Will Change Your Life, and Here's Why," by Maureen O’Hagan of the Seattle Times, as published yesterday in the Miami Herald.

For Carol and me this  year, our involvement in the intense exercise regime of Crossfit has changed us positively as nothing has since our moving into the vegan world in April 2009.