Too Much Sitting

I've come to realize just how sedentary my job is and how sedentary I am at home too.  I do workout regularly (almost daily) but the rest of my day is pretty much sitting.  A while ago I wrote about my ActiveLink in a post called Moving More.  According to my ActiveLink I am an "occasional athlete".

I'm proud to report I have been moving more and more, but still have trouble battling my sedentary nature at work and home.  This week I did a little research about sitting and made some startling discoveries.  As it turns out, sitting is terrible for you.  Which I kind of knew already, but never gave much thought to just how bad it is.  Turns out, sitting more than an hour at a time can do major damage to our overall metabolism for the day (among other negative effects).  If you want to know more about that I suggest checking out these sites:

• LifeHacker - Sitting is Killing You InfoGraphic
• Video - Working Out Doesn't Overcome the Negative Effects of Sitting

Prior to this week a typical week for me looked like this:

The days in dark green are my workout days for the week.  You can see the gray area indicates my baseline for activity which I have to reach before I begin earning Weight Watchers activity points.  On a typical work day I barely reach 30% of my goal of 3 activity points.  Which leaves me a lot to make up for during my workouts.  

This week I tried something new.  For every 45 minutes of sitting I made sure to take a 5 minute break to stand or walk.  I actually found a piece of software for my macbook that helps with this (TimeOut by Dejal).  The software basically takes over my screen every 45 minutes and reminds me to get up and move around.  Here are my results for the week:

Just by moving a bit more every 45 minutes of my day, I have managed to reach 50% of my goal at work each day this week (with the exception of Friday - that is the day of my weekly team meeting and we spend the afternoon sitting in our office working with little opportunities for getting up).  Getting up more throughout the day combined with my workouts has helped me surpass my 3 point per day goal.  Seems like a small change to make for a pretty big overall impact!

I'm using the timer at home too, to help combat my sedentary evenings.  I leave it running on my computer while I watch television.  And every 45 minutes I spend the 5 minute (or sometimes longer) break doing little things around the house.  

I'm excited to have completed my first 12 week ActiveLink Challenge!  I'm choosing to maintain the goal of 3 points per day for now, but may do another challenge in June.

And now for this week's results...

 -15.6 (still trending down!)