If sitting really is the new smoking then I am a sitting duck. On the scale of daily activity I’m inching towards inert. I sit on my 90-minute commute to write emails. I sit through meetings. I sit to research. I sit to write (in my defence, standing puts my derriere in awkward view of anyone who happens to glance up in our open-plan office). After sitting down for dinner, I flop on the couch.
The stats on what this king-sized dose of inactivity does to your health make me increasingly uneasy – one US study found that women and men who sit more than six hours a day are, respectively, 37 per cent and 18 per cent more likely to die before people who sit less than three hours a day. What’s interesting is that squeezing in a workout didn’t make much difference.
