HIGH STATUS MAKES YOU FAT
If you can sit in an office all day and run a business without lifting a linger – you’ve made it. but you’ve also made it for getting fat.
These days, status is indirectly proportional to physical activity. The more important you are, the less you need to move. If you are a big shot, you get the parking spot closest to the door, and instead of walking up and down the building to see people yourself, you generally expect them to come to you.
Any movement a person in your position 30 years ago may have had to make has now been drastically reduced by technology. Computers, emails, remote controls, mobile telephones, faxes and videos have all reduced the need for physical effort.
Technology makes people passive and fat, and over the past decade Australians have grown steadily heavier. On average, they have each put on 1 gram a day, which adds up to 3.5 kg over
10 years. This has happened despite the fact that people are now eating less and are conscious about the need to reduce fat intake. The gain is largely due to inactivity.
To stop putting on that extra gram a day, they have to increase the other exercise they do enough to compensate for the exercise they have been robbed of by technology. In theory, this amounts to walking approximately an extra 700 metres a day.
If people want to lose weight, they have to move more than the equivalent of an extra 700 metres of walking a day. Provided their diet remains stable, any extra movement will help erode the excess fat. It is not surprising, therefore, that the latest public health message is that people should move more. Rather than seeing the need for movement as an inconvenience, the public is being encouraged to see it as an advantage: if the only vacant car spot is on the outskirts of the parking lot, the walk should be welcomed as an opportunity to move.
During the fitness boom of the eighties the message was that vigorous exercise was essential for good health: it was assumed that in order to benefit from exercise you needed to sweat and get your heart rate up. But since those days there has been a huge change in philosophy, and we now know that continuous light-to-moderate movement is far preferable to short bursts of vigorous exercise. It’s taken 20 years for epidemiological research that began in the seventies to mature, and this now shows that people who are active live longer and have less heart disease than people who are inactive.
The problem with the earlier belief was that it confused fitness with health; they are not the same. It is possible for a fit man to be unhealthy because of high cholesterol or high blood pressure. Similarly, a healthy man can be unfit.
A few years ago, the US Surgeon-General’s report urged a change in perspective. It said health is not about going to the gym and exercising vigorously. It is about moving. The report recommended people get out and move. The gym promotes the wrong image of exercise. People need to recover from this malaise of inactivity by taking back the things that machines do. Instead of using the remote to open the garage, they should do it manually. Instead of sending emails across the office they should walk. Rather than ringing an upstairs office they should take the stairs.
Research shows that white-collar men between the ages of 30 and 40 are sedentary because they believe they don’t have the time for exercise. They feel work is too hard, life is a struggle and they are fighting their way up. They comfort themselves with the belief that if they really needed to exercise, they would. Some actually say, ‘When I have my first heart attack I’ll do something about it!’
Men over the age of 40 feel it is too late to improve their health. Typically they wish they had done something when they were younger but think that now, with more competition at work, money being tight and their knees going because of old football injuries, the opportunity has gone.
The truth is that it has not gone. It is never too late to claw your way back to good health, and it needn’t take much time at all. The greater middle ranks of business are growing fat instead of building physical activity into their daily routine by incorporating activities as simple as walking to the shop. And it is worth remembering that one of the best ways to lose fat is to do something you are not good at because you burn more energy that way.
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