Sitting: The New Smoking To Your Health w/ Ari Whitten | Natalie Jill

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Hi, guys.

Natalie, Jill here. Welcome back to Happy, Healthy and Fit. Today I'm here with my friend Ari, who's also my guru when it comes to metabolism, thyroid, and all these things you're not thinking about that might be getting in the way of fat loss. And today we're talking about how sitting. How sitting at your desk or at home, how that's getting in the way of fat loss. Right, right.

So I always kind of like to lead in with the whole, you know, bring things back to fat loss, diet and exercise, calories in, calories out. Okay? So when people talk about fat loss, everybody's really fixated on this whole calories in, calories out idea, and it's massively important. The main problem, though, is people fixate on diet and exercise as the two variables. We equate calories in with diet. You know, how many calories I'm choosing to eat each day. Calories out is how many times a week I'm going to the gym. Right. Okay. Well, I like to focus on lots of these other variables that most people have no clue about and never hear anything about, but are just as important, if not more important than diet and exercise.

Well, give it to us because we're all. Everyone's tired of, I have to do this, I have to do that. So what are these things?

Okay, so.

They'Re kind of three intertwined concepts. Sitting, movement, or movement deficiency, and what's called neat. Okay, so NEAT stands for non exercise activity thermogenesis. It's quite a mouthful. Okay, really what we're talking about here, it's very simple. It's all the movements that you do throughout the day that are not, you know, exercise. Okay? So if you're going to the gym to lift weights or jog or, you know, ride the bike or whatever, okay, that's one thing. That's calories burned via exercise. This is non exercise activity calorie burning, which is moving my hands as I'm talking right now, standing up, which we'll talk more about.

Texting.

Texting is one thing. It burns a very minimal amount of calories. But.

But it still burns, though.

It's movement. Okay. And, you know, walking down the street, walking around the grocery store, whatever, picking up your baby, whatever it is. Okay? So all of these little things that we do throughout the day are non exercise activity thermogenesis. Now, over the last 50 or 100 years, there has been an enormous shift in our society, like just this incredible revolution. And most people are unaware of how it affects this variable. We've gone from a society of people having to move, you know, even at our jobs, like working assembly lines, for example, to all of a sudden not having to move. Now we sit down all day in front of a computer. A lot of us at least work desk jobs. And, you know, this is about as much movement as we do for eight or nine hours every day. Yeah. Okay. And a lot of people who work desk jobs now have gotten to the point where they literally sit for 10 or 12 or 15 hours a day. They basically sit the entire day. Okay? So, you know, if they get in their car in the morning, they drive half an hour to work, they sit at their desk for eight hours, they sit during lunch for an hour, they go in their car again for half an hour. They get home, they sit at the dinner table, then they go sit on the couch, watch TV. You know, a lot of people really spend 14, 15 hours a day sitting.

Yeah.

And most people are not even conscious of it. If you really ask people to say, you know, and you say, hey, think about how much you sit, they go, wow, I can't believe that I actually sit that much. I never really noticed it.

So why does this matter? Well, it matters for a few reasons. It matters for our health and it matters for fat loss.

Or maintaining a lean body. So this shift that I just told you about, this dramatic increase in sitting and decrease in neat, has coincided pretty perfectly with the obesity epidemic. It is one of the major factors driving fat gain, driving the obesity epidemic. And again, most people are just fixated diet and exercise. Diet and exercise is the solution to fat gain and to fat loss, Right? Well, this is another third variable that a lot of researchers are figuring out is actually more important than exercise, more important than exercise, More important. So let me be very clear. This is absolutely 100% more important than, than the workouts that you're doing at the gym every day or a few times a week.

Unless they're my workouts.

Of course, unless they're your workouts or the Super Shred.

So why is it more important? Well, let's think about this. Let's say you go to the gym.

Four times a week, okay. You do a really intense 45 minute hour long workout. If you do an intense workout, you might burn four or five hundred calories over the course of three or four times a week at the gym. Okay. You're burning, what is that, let's say, 1600 to 2000 calories. Okay? Well, people 75 years ago on average burned about that much more every single day, okay?

So because by moving and not sitting.

Because of not sitting, shifting to a standing position and moving their body, having to walk, having to move stuff, having to engage in a type of activity, whether, you know, if you go back in time a long time, it's, you know, being a blacksmith, being a potter, being a farmer. Right. These are all active jobs that require you to move your muscles.

Sure.

And engage with the world around you, not just sit and this. Right. So if you actually gauge the amount of calories, we're talking literally 1000, 1500, 2000 calories a day difference. Okay. So this is massive now.

Massive. That is. I mean, that can make such a huge difference for everybody just from shifting from that sitting.

Yeah. Okay. So just to go into the health side of things a little bit, there's new research emerging showing that every hour that you sit each day after the age of 25, every hour you sit decreases your lifespan by about 22 minutes.

I'm never sitting. AM. 22 minutes for every hour.

Yeah. And just amazing to contrast this with. With cigarette smoking. Right. Everybody knows cigarette smoking is so terrible for you. It shortens your life and gives you disease and all this stuff. Okay. Cigarette smoking. Each cigarette you smoke decreases your lifespan by only 11 minutes.

Wow. So this is more. This cuts more into your life than that.

Right. So every hour in front of the TV, 22 minutes off your lifespan. Wow. Okay, so think about it in those terms. Think about how sitting and. And not moving your body relates to the health effects of smoking. And that will help give you some internal guidance of like, wow, sitting really is bad for me.

Yeah.

Okay. So the other thing that's going on here is this. So there's, first of all, there's this drop in meat, Right. And that huge, huge decrease in the calories. Outside of the equation is this main variable that's affecting these things beyond just diet and exercise, that's really sabotaging fat loss for people who work desk jobs, for people who are inactive throughout the majority of the day. Okay. Now, there's a couple other elements that are really important to acknowledge here. One is that there's new research emerging showing that.

For people that exercise in the morning, okay. If you go and do an intense jog for an hour, every hour that you sit after that workout eliminates 8% of the metabolic benefits of that workout.

So you end up pretty much working out for nothing if you're gonna keep sitting.

Yeah. Do the math, Right. If you sit for 10 hours a day, you've eliminated 80% of that workout. If you're one of those people that sits for 12 or 15 hours a day. You're in the negative. Even if you work out an hour a day, you're still not accruing metabolic benefits.

Okay, so I'm sold. Obviously. I'm not ever sitting. I will never be sitting again. I swear. I'm going to drive standing up. But in reality, what do people do? Because this is reality. I mean, a lot of people have to sit. They have a job that requires them to sit in a cubicle, sit at their station, sit someplace. So what is that solution? How do you get around that? What would you suggest to people?

Well, there's a couple things, okay? The biggest thing we're talking about here is not necessarily sitting versus standing, although that's important. But the biggest thing really is movement.

Okay?

Okay. So what we wanna do is avoid periods of, you know, long periods of not moving our body, you know, being in a seated position where the only movement is this, okay? This is what's gonna wreck your health, okay? So introduce movement into your life. And the way to do that is.

Depends on your situation, okay? So the absolute ideal situation is to be working at a treadmill desk, okay? So you can walk at a very, very slow pace. We're not talking about exercise here. We're talking about walking at one mile per hour, two miles per hour, okay? Super slow. Like the slowest walk that you can do.

It'S not strenuous at all. You're just barely moving. And that simple act of just walking at 2 miles per hour, believe it or not, burns about 200 calories per hour. Okay? So just that if you add that up, you know, say you're working in front of the computers eight hours each day. Do the math. That's, you know, 15, 1600 calories every day difference from where you are now, okay? And the other thing is this movement also impacts our health. So we talked about the lifespan aspect of it before. Well, we now know that just an hour or two of sitting actually increases insulin resistance. It can contribute to type 2 diabetes. Okay? And literally, we're not talking about working a desk job for a decade. We're talking about sitting for three hours.

Yeah.

Okay. Causes insulin resistance. So, you know, basically what happens when you sit is all of the stuff that's floating around in your bloodstream, sugars and fats are not able to get into the cell, okay? So they start to sludge up in the bloodstream and they can't actually enter the cell. This is insulin resistance, okay? So the other thing that goes along with this is something called lipoprotein lipase, which is the main enzyme that is a fat burning enzyme in your muscle cells. Okay? And basically what its job is, is to break down the fats that are floating around in your bloodstream and allow those fats to go into the muscle cells where they can actually be burned. Okay? As soon as you go into a sitting position, your muscles go flaccid, and that enzyme, this fat burning enzyme, decreases in activity by 95%. Okay? So basically when you're sitting, to put this in simple terms, every time you're sitting down, fat burning has come to a grinding halt. There's no fat burning.

I'm jogging every time that I do everything. No, but the point is, you can't sit anymore. You just can't sit for these long periods. And a treadmill desk would be ideal, but for people that can't do that, if that's not possible, you've got a cubicle, you've got an office, you've told your boss, you've told everybody, and you can't get a treadmill desk, what would you suggest for them?

Okay, so first of all, when most people hear the idea of a treadmill desk, like, probably a lot of your viewers right now are thinking, that's totally unreasonable. That's ridiculous. I could never get a treadmill desk. It's like, it just, it boggles their mind to ever think of doing something like that. It's the most ridiculous thing in the world. So a lot of people are gonna be resistant to it and say, look, I need to have my chair. I work a desk job. My boss would never let me get a treadmill desk. This is the way it is, okay? So there's a couple things that you can do. Standing desk, first of all. And you don't need to get a super fancy, you know, high tech standing desk that's electronic and adjustable. You can get a simple laptop stand for 50 bucks, put it on top of your desk. Instant standing desk.

Because standing will be better than sitting, right? The next next best thing if you can't do the movement.

Exactly. Okay, so standing, just the simple act of standing increases that. That enzyme lipoprotein lipase, so it switches fat burning back on.

Okay?

Okay. The other thing that you can do. So for some people, even getting a standing desk is unreasonable and it's just too hard for them. Whatever. It's not reasonable for them to do it. They need to be sitting. If you absolutely have to sit, what you need to do is get yourself an under Desk cycle. Okay. And these things can be bought for like 40 bucks on Amazon. Get yourself a little cycle you can spin around under your desk as you're working, but keep your muscles active, okay? That's what's keeping that fat burning enzyme active, alive and allowing your cells to take up fats, your muscle cells to take up fats and actually engage in fat burning. Okay?

So two questions. If they can't get the treadmill and the stand up desk and they can't find the cycle put underneath their desk, would just moving, moving your leg up and down, bouncing, would that help?

It would. However, most people would forget to do it.

Okay.

So they would become mindless because quite frankly, you know, neat this whole thing, Non exercise activity, thermogenesis is unconsciously regulated for the most part. So when we have to rely on twiddling our thumbs and tapping our feet, most people are just going to forget. That's the way it is. And they might do it for a week and a week later, then they've forgotten all about it.

So I can tell you from what I do, because we've had this talk before and I'm fascinated with the idea that I had no idea how much I was sitting until we had talked about this. I don't have a stand up desk and I don't have a treadmill desk and I definitely don't have the cycle thing underneath the desk. But I know for me to consciously be aware that it's hit 30 minutes or it's hit a certain time to get up and do some stuff, right?

And this is the other thing that you can do if for whatever reason a treadmill desk, a stand up desk and an under desk cycle are all not reasonable for some reason.

What you can do is get a little app on your phone that's a timer that goes off every 30 minutes. And every time it goes off, stand up, move around, go for a little walk, go and do a plank for 30 seconds, whatever it is, move your body a little bit, turn your muscles back on.

You have to make sure that you do that every 30 minutes. And we already have the research on this subject. This isn't a recommendation that just I pulled out of thin air. We have the research showing that sitting for longer than about an hour without getting up immediately starts to have negative metabolic consequences.

So literally, get off your butts. Get off your butts. Right?

Yep.

You have to. And it's not about going and beating yourself up and starving yourself or any of that. Of course, we're a huge fan of the Right. Nutrition and exercise. But just making that first change from not sitting as much makes huge differences.

Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, this is more important than exercise. And the reason that it's more important than exercise is, again, going back to that study. It's eliminating the metabolic benefits of the exercise you're doing. Okay, so 8% of that metabolic benefit of the exercise is being removed every hour of you sit. Now, if the exercise you're doing is lower intensity, it's even more. It's more like 16%. Okay, so if you're thinking, what kind of gym workouts should I be doing, should I be doing weights, should I be doing cardio intervals, whatever, you're really focused on that and working your butt off in the gym. But you sit all day, you're spinning your wheels, you're going nowhere. So you have to get the foundation in place first. Standing and moving your body throughout the day, at least moving your body, and then worry about your workouts.

So say no to sitting. Say no. No to sitting.

Thanks, Ari.

And you can learn more about Ari and all of his programs. He's got amazing programs. Check out the links down below where you can reach Ari and check out more of what he's got to offer. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.