Your Chair Is Killing You. Here’s What You Need To Do To Stop It
by Brian Carmody | Oct 7, 2015 | Advice
We actually like to mix our own experience with the thoughts and expertise of workplace health thought leaders. Here’s one of the latter, from OCTOBER 06, 201511:31 AM ET, reported by Lynne Shallcross on NPR’s “Health Shots” health news website.
Your Chair Is Killing You. Here’s What You Need To Do To Stop It
Shallcross interviews Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic, perhaps THE leading researcher in the field of sitting disease. Here are a few teaser-quotes from Dr. Levine:
“However, something you do at the end of the day for one hour, three evenings a week, doesn’t actually offset the harm for what you do 15 hours a day, seven days a week: sit. These are independent variables – excess sitting and the presence or absence of exercise. Doing exercise is great if you do it. But that doesn’t offset the harm, even in the few people who do it, from excess sitting.”
“When you have the annual staff meeting, [put] up your hand and [say] look, it’s obvious that sitting is really harmful. What are we going to do as a company to give us better productivity and better health?”
“There are 150,000 unanswered questions, and I think what we could do is delay action for 15 more centuries and do absolutely nothing. But that would be the greatest tragedy of all.
At this point in time, today, we have enough information to share with individuals, companies, schools and cities that we need to get people up off their bottoms, on their legs and off their chairs. That information is sure. And I think there’s a lot more research to be done, but we do not need to wait a second longer.”
“In 20 years of building programs for companies and working with patients, I’ve never had a single person contact me to say this hasn’t made their life better. Every person thus far I’ve interacted with [tells] me that their lives are better in some way. The surprising thing is that this advice comes with a money-back guarantee. I guarantee that if you get up and move more than you do, if you escape the chair sentence, you will be happier for it in some way.”