(~4 minutes to read)
Have you heard the latest health freak war-cry?
“Sitting is the new smoking.”
Yep – you read it correctly. But viewed in isolation, with no context, what does it mean?
Is sitting a cool new addiction that kids want to get into? Are we to imagine hordes of tweens skulking behind the bike sheds (or whatever the modern equivalent is) having a crafty sit?
Is it a fashionable activity that makes you look dashing and attractive to potential partners?
Is it something that can develop into an eighty-a-day habit?
Before I answer those and other rhetorical questions, let me tell you how I came to be thinking about it.
Several months ago, I was developing a training workshop for MS Outlook users, and my presentation skills mentor suggested I include something about checking email while standing up. She then said words to the effect of, “Haven’t you heard? Sitting is the new smoking.” She went on to explain the meaning of the mantra. It sounded like a good thing to include in the presentation I was developing, so I did.
Fast-forward to the past few weeks, in which I’ve had to work in a standing position at my desk due to quite severe back issues. As my condition has improved, I’ve been working longer and longer hours again, but every minute of those long hours…
Okay –the hours aren’t getting longer and longer. They still have only sixty minutes per. And yes, the minutes are still sixty seconds per. It’s an idiom—“longer and longer hours” means “more and more hours.”
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
…But every minute of those long hours is spent in the vertical position. (Standing, for those who don’t understand that idiom.) And now, instead of excruciating back pain, I have aching feet, ankles and calves.
In order to work in a standing position, I had to raise my monitors, keyboard and mouse by about fifteen inches. Lacking the necessary to purchase the Rolls Royce of adjustable-height desks, I’m slumming it with four cardboard boxes, a 30” x 24” sheet of plywood, and a duplicate copy of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary.
The Rolls Royce of adjustable desks will change heights at the flick of a switch. My arrangement requires two people and several minutes to effect any change.
I guess the boxes and plywood could be removed with gasoline and a match, but (a) I’d have to find some new cardboard boxes and plywood each time I want to work in the standing position, (b) I’d probably have to buy a couple of new monitors and a new keyboard, and (c) it’s just possible I’d burn my house down.
Viewed in that light, the Rolls Royce of adjustable-height desks would be a bargain. (This could be how I convince Mrs. H. to let me buy that desk!)
If sitting is the new smoking, my, feet, ankles and calves can make a pretty good case for standing being the new sitting.
But enough of this whining about cardboard boxes and aching ankles. Back to that health freak war-cry, and what the heck it might mean.
Having advanced three theories, permit me to ponder further.
Restaurants, bars and workplaces have, for many years, been smoke-free. Are they to become seat-free at some point in the future? If so, I foresee a rosy future for foot, ankle and calf massage therapists.
Will La-Z-Boy become the Benson & Hedges of the furniture industry? Have they been consulted?
What does the mantra mean in relation to babysitters, house-sitters and dog-sitters?
Is the government planning to tax sitters (both amateur and professional) in the same punitive way that smokers have been treated? If so, will sitting MPs be subject to the tax, exempt, or zero-rated?
The answer to all the above questions is irrelevant—they’re rhetorical, remember.
The intended message of the mantra is that sitting is not conducive to exercise—but of course you’d guessed that, hadn’t you. Exercise promotes health; healthy lungs, healthy circulation, healthy musculature… I could go on, but my mail-order medical qualifications don’t entitle me to dole out such expert advice. Nevertheless it’s clear that sitting is detrimental to all those fine ideals.
Just like smoking.
But unless there’s research out there that I missed (quite possible—if it doesn’t have lots of pictures, I won’t read it), sitting doesn’t greatly increase the chances of you getting lung cancer, emphysema or chronic bronchitis, not to mention the foul-smelling breath, hair and clothing.
I suspect that this really is a government-initiated… initiative?… to get us used to the negative impacts of sitting so that when the General Sitting Tax is introduced, health freaks everywhere will rise as one, exclaiming, “And about time too!”
I won’t be among them though; I’m no health freak. And being a lifetime non-smoker, I’m darned if, at the ripe old age of over-55, I’m going to become a non-sitter. I’m too set in my ways. And in any case, there’s at least one situation in which sitting is unavoidable for me.
That’s when I’m driving the car to the swimming pool to exercise.