Is Losing Weight As Simple As Standing Up? | By @Ben Ryan@Modern Medicine @ Pharmative.com
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how sitting is a silent scourge against health. As desk-bound Americans, we commit this supposed affront to our bodies an average of about seven hours a day.
Now for the first time, a group of scientists has pooled the results of numerous studies in an effort to quantify just how much more energy the body expends if you replace sitting with standing. The estimated difference is modest, but at least in theory could lead to weight loss and benefit individual health in a myriad of ways.
“Standing not only burns more calories, the additional muscle activity is linked to lower rates of heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes, so the benefits of standing could go beyond weight control,” said Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, chief of preventive cardiology at the Mayo Clinic.
Lopez-Jimenez is the senior author of a new paper published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, for which he and his colleagues scoured scientific publications for studies that measured the difference in energy expenditure between sitting and standing. They wound up reviewing 46 studies including acumulative 1,184 participants.
Sixty percent of the participants were men. The members of the cohort were 33 years old on average, had a body mass index (BMI) of 24 (just below the threshold for being overweight, which is 25) and a weight of 143 pounds.
The study authors concluded that standing does indeed involve more energy expenditure than sitting: an estimated 0.15 extra calories per minute, or a respective 0.1 and 0.19 extra calories per minute among women and men. Men likely burn more calories by standing up because of their greater muscle mass.
For a 144 pound person, substituting six hours of sitting per day would at least in theory burn enough extra energy to prompt a loss of 5.5 pounds of body fat in one year and 22 pounds in four years.
Here’s the problem with such calculations though: As anyone who’s gotten home from an intense workout and been compelled to pig out can attest, burning more calories can stimulate the appetite. So burning more energy by working at a standingdesk could very well cause individuals to eat more and ultimately maintain essentially the same weight.
That said, according to Lopez-Jimenez, the new paper’s estimates of how many extra calories we burn by standing rather than sitting “might be an underestimate because when people stand they tend to make spontaneous movements like shifting weight or swaying from one foot to another, taking small steps forward and back. People may even be more likely to walk to the filing cabinet or trash bin.” He and his fellow study authors concluded that more research is needed to test the effects of switching people from standing to sitting and to see if this does indeed prompt long-term weight loss as well as other health benefits. Another pressing question is whether asking people to give up their desk chairs in favor of staying on their feet for hours a day is even practical. Will people really do this en masse?
According to Lopez-Jimenez, questioning the love of the chair is imperative for those seeking to improve their health. “It’s important to avoid sitting for hours at a time,” he said. “Standing is a very good first step—no pun intended—to avoid this mindset of sitting interminably without moving. Who knows, it may also prompt some people to do a little more and take up some mild physical activity, which would be even more beneficial.”
Sources: (1) eurekalert.org/pub_re..918.php; (2) journals.sagepub.com/doi..2186
#WeightLoss #Standing #Pharmative
Losing weight and eating healthy are all about three things: 1) burning more calories than you consume on average; 2) increasing your daily exercise; 3) gradually change your daily behavior to incorporate more healthy choices. I'm working on it! So, throw away your diet pills and focus on these three areas. Stay healthy!
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how sitting is a silent scourge against health. As desk-bound Americans, we commit this supposed affront to our bodies an average of about seven hours a day.
Now for the first time, a group of scientists has pooled the results of numerous studies in an effort to quantify just how much more energy the body expends if you replace sitting with standing. The estimated difference is modest, but at least in theory could lead to weight loss and benefit individual health in a myriad of ways.
“Standing not only burns more calories, the additional muscle activity is linked to lower rates of heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes, so the benefits of standing could go beyond weight control,” said Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, chief of preventive cardiology at the Mayo Clinic.
Lopez-Jimenez is the senior author of a new paper published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, for which he and his colleagues scoured scientific publications for studies that measured the difference in energy expenditure between sitting and standing. They wound up reviewing 46 studies including acumulative 1,184 participants.
Sixty percent of the participants were men. The members of the cohort were 33 years old on average, had a body mass index (BMI) of 24 (just below the threshold for being overweight, which is 25) and a weight of 143 pounds.
The study authors concluded that standing does indeed involve more energy expenditure than sitting: an estimated 0.15 extra calories per minute, or a respective 0.1 and 0.19 extra calories per minute among women and men. Men likely burn more calories by standing up because of their greater muscle mass.
For a 144 pound person, substituting six hours of sitting per day would at least in theory burn enough extra energy to prompt a loss of 5.5 pounds of body fat in one year and 22 pounds in four years.
Here’s the problem with such calculations though: As anyone who’s gotten home from an intense workout and been compelled to pig out can attest, burning more calories can stimulate the appetite. So burning more energy by working at a standingdesk could very well cause individuals to eat more and ultimately maintain essentially the same weight.
That said, according to Lopez-Jimenez, the new paper’s estimates of how many extra calories we burn by standing rather than sitting “might be an underestimate because when people stand they tend to make spontaneous movements like shifting weight or swaying from one foot to another, taking small steps forward and back. People may even be more likely to walk to the filing cabinet or trash bin.” He and his fellow study authors concluded that more research is needed to test the effects of switching people from standing to sitting and to see if this does indeed prompt long-term weight loss as well as other health benefits. Another pressing question is whether asking people to give up their desk chairs in favor of staying on their feet for hours a day is even practical. Will people really do this en masse?
According to Lopez-Jimenez, questioning the love of the chair is imperative for those seeking to improve their health. “It’s important to avoid sitting for hours at a time,” he said. “Standing is a very good first step—no pun intended—to avoid this mindset of sitting interminably without moving. Who knows, it may also prompt some people to do a little more and take up some mild physical activity, which would be even more beneficial.”
Sources: (1) eurekalert.org/pub_re..918.php; (2) journals.sagepub.com/doi..2186
#WeightLoss #Standing #Pharmative
Losing weight and eating healthy are all about three things: 1) burning more calories than you consume on average; 2) increasing your daily exercise; 3) gradually change your daily behavior to incorporate more healthy choices. I'm working on it! So, throw away your diet pills and focus on these three areas. Stay healthy!