As entrepreneurs, it’s safe to say that no 2 days are alike. Your days are most likely filled with brainstorming sessions, client calls, copywriting and meetings. Entrepreneurs have exciting, but long days. Even though our days can feel exhausting and jam-packed, it’s likely that many of those days are spent sitting.
As a health writer, I love researching the latest studies and writing about them for my fellow women entrepreneurs. However, when I started learning about the dangers of sitting too much, I seriously questioned my profession. As much as I love to write, sitting at my computer all day is simply too dangerous to my health.
Excessive sitting has been called the new smoking, because study after study is showing how dangerous it is. No one is safe from sitting disease. Yes, that’s a real thing! It doesn’t matter if you are completely sedentary or training for a marathon in the evenings. If you spend the majority of your day sitting, it’s affecting your health. If you’re concerned you’ve been sitting too much, don’t worry. It’s easy to reverse the health effects with a few simple tweaks.
Why Sitting Too Long Is Dangerous
The majority of us underestimate the amount of time we sit. We sit down to eat breakfast, sit in the car on the way to work, sit at our desk – at work or home, sit at lunch, sit at meetings, sit on the drive home, sit during dinner and sit while watching TV in the evening. Even if you add in an hour workout before or after work, the majority of the day is sedentary. While working out is of course beneficial, it can’t outweigh the dangers of sitting too much. In fact, a January 2015 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported that prolonged sedentary time, no matter how much you work out, caused health problems.
Unfortunately, excessive sitting has become the norm in today’s culture. According to the World Health Organization, physical inactivity is the 4th leading risk factor for death among adults around the world. Sitting for long periods of time causes physiologic changes in our bodies that can’t be undone with working out a few times per week. A sedentary lifestyle has been linked to increased risk for heart disease, cancer and poor bone density. Sitting for 8 to 12 hours per day increases the risk of type 2 diabetes by a whopping 90 percent!
Read my full article about the dangers of sitting disease inside HER Magazine. Access January’s issue by downloading our magazine in iTunes or Google Play
