FitTip FriYAY: Taking a Stand: Overcoming the Sedentary Lifestyle Challenge

Imagine spending just 2% of each day to improve your health and well-being dramatically. Sounds impossible, right?

But wait till you hear what I have in store for you. This captivating discussion explores the detrimental effects of a sedentary lifestyle, akin to a ticking time bomb. We dig deep into the chilling statistics that reveal how sitting is the new smoking and how it can drastically put you at risk of life-threatening diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and depression.

But it's not all about the dire consequences of sitting. In the second half of our discourse, we focus on how you can incorporate effective strategies to add more movement into your day and shift away from a sedentary existence. From standing desks to workouts, I share my journey and the initial challenges of adapting to this healthier lifestyle.

For those seeking a supportive community, I introduce the 2% Collective Community, where we offer free workouts, tips, and strategies to help you stand more, sit less, and supercharge your health. So, are you ready to take charge of your health? Please tune in, and let's embark on this life-changing journey together.

👉👉 If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, share, and leave a 5-star review on your favorite podcast listening platforms.

🌟 AND be sure to JOIN the 2% Collective - a free community where you can connect with like-minded whole health champions and get many free resources, challenges, action guides, and much more. Go to www.2percentcollective.com  

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hello, hello, my favorite listeners, diamond Well here, your host of the 2% Solution Podcast, and I'm excited. This has been one heck of a tumultuous week, at best, as you can imagine, with the launch this previous Monday, lots of cool stuff happening, lots of great connections, lots of great comments, great feedback. It's been a heck of a week and on top of that, it's been my 47th birthday. I know I'm 47, can you believe it? I can't believe it. 47 laps around that sun of ours.

Speaker 1: 0:41

As you know, every week on Mondays, there's Monday Motivation. We usually release an episode on Wednesday, which might be a solo episode or an interview with an amazing guest that's going to be dropping wisdom bombs. So all of us can take away new strategies on how to best leverage 2% of every 24 hours to create dramatic results in the changes that we want to see in our whole life, health and well-being. Whoa, it sounds like a mouthful, doesn't it? But anyways, today's Fit Tip Friday, and I've got something I want to share with you, specifically around this idea of sitting. I mean, let's look at our life nowadays we spend a lot of time sitting, and if you haven't heard of the term sitting disease, it was something that was put forward probably about a decade ago Actually, it might be a little bit more than that. It was right when standing desk really becoming very popular. There's lots of products like Berrydash independent desks that have these workstations that adjust automatically and there's been a lot of actual studies and research coming to speak to the benefits of standing versus sitting or, more so, trying to find balance between the two modalities throughout our days. So here, to get right to the point, sitting is the new smoking. The more you sit, the more your health will suffer. We love to sit as humans, don't we? Whether we're in our car, we're at the desk, on the couch, even at the game.

Speaker 1: 2:12

New research shows that sitting and inactivity are linked to increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and depression. Stated simply, our bodies are designed to move. A recent study showed that if we spent less than three hours a day sitting, our life expectancy would increase by two years. Furthermore, reducing TV time to less than two hours per day can increase your life expectancy by 1.4 years, as a total of three and almost a half years more of your life just by not sitting. So much. Does that not make you want to stand up and read or move or do everything from a standing place right, even just while pacing around the room, maybe listening to this podcast? Do it now, stan. When I first started reading up on inactivity and especially the amount of time North Americans spend sitting, I immediately bought a standing desk. Much of my book, the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto, was written while I stood at my desk.

Speaker 1: 3:14

When you sit for long periods, your body adapts to the reduced physical demand by slowing down your metabolism. This means you burn fewer calories and that extra energy is stored, typically as fat. Men who sit more than six hours a day have an 18% increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 7.8% increased chance of dying from diabetes, compared to someone who sits for three hours or less per day. Today's North American 10-year-olds are the first generation expected to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. According to the American Medical Association, just 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week ongoing is enough to drastically reduce the risk of sedentary lifestyle illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Globally, 20% of early deaths are preventable with moderate exercise and, for the first time in history, inactivity-related illnesses killed 5.3 million people worldwide.

Speaker 1: 4:14

More than smoking, many health experts are thinking of inactivity as an illness, with some doctors in the US pushing to make lack of exercise and medical diagnosis. And the US adults sit for an average of 8 to 10 hours each day. This makes the American lifestyle one of the most sedentary in the world. After long commutes and hours at our desk, we can hardly blame ourselves for taking a load off. But getting more exercise is a lot easier than most of us, especially when we really adopt this idea of 2% everyday, non-negotiable self-care. Right, because about this, non-negotiable, you know really taking charge of your day and saying listen, I matter, my health is important. I want, not a matter of need, but I want to dedicate some time to moving my body with purpose. Now, again, I'm not going to be so quick to prescribe what you have to do.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Of course, we're going to be providing lots of examples. If you haven't joined the 2% collective community yet, please go ahead and join 2%collectivecom. And if you want to find the link, also, if you go to the podcast page or my website, diamondwellcom, you will also find links to join that group. And in that group we've got lots of free workouts and workout examples as well as different strategies for, let's just say, sitting a little bit less, standing a little bit more and moving our body with a little bit more purpose daily, because that's one of the easiest ways to tap into our total mental, physical, emotional, spiritual well-being Movement. So don't worry so much about quantifying it. Think about qualifying it. Quality over quantity. Every single day. To get started, you watch. It'll probably be hard to stop, because as you create that momentum for yourself, you're going to start to see positive things happen as you adapt to this healthier way of being.

Speaker 1: 6:16

Once you start feeling better, you're going to start thinking differently. And as you think differently, you're going to start to adapt differently. This is how change manifests. So with that, remember, everything starts with one step or, in this situation, one squat right, one step, one squat up from our chairs, get into a standing position, try to alternate back and forth between standing and sitting throughout the day.

Speaker 1: 6:40

You may want to take a page from my book, not literally. Well, I guess you could, if you own the book, go ahead and tell her no, but from metaphorically speaking, think about it this way If you can maybe stand 20 minutes and then sit for 40, that might be a great way to begin, because I do know that when I first started standing at my desk, there was a lot of adjustments and adaptation that my body had to go through because I just wasn't used to standing so much. So don't worry, there will be an adaptation period. Stick with it. Start with smaller chunks every day, so maybe every hour you're standing for 20 minutes, sitting for 40 minutes, and then slowly increase that week after week until eventually you get to maybe 45 minutes standing, 15 minutes sitting. Either way, you're going to find a nice little balance. You're going to gain a lot of health benefit. You're also going to see your metabolism stick to the level that it should be at, less slowing down. With that, have a great weekend.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Enjoy, get out there and move the purpose, and I'll be talking to you soon and real quick. If you found value in today's podcast, please like, share, subscribe and I would love, absolutely love, it. I'm just getting started down this journey. I know how important the reviews are on Apple, spotify or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. If you don't mind leaving a five-star review, it certainly helps me out. It also fills the awareness of this podcast, so other people will start discovering it too. I get to thank you, honor to be part of this community, part of this tribe, part of this group. All about energy 2% every day. Take care of your best lives. Touch you soon.