Want To Improve Your Health? Be A Stand Up Girl!

We spend most of our day slouched in our chair and glued to our gadgets. It’s unnatural, unhealthy and increasingly uncool. Eva Pavithran reports on a new revolution that has more and more people standing at their desks

- Eva Pavithran

The human race struggled for centuries just to be able to stand upright. And then in just a couple of generations, we went from bipeds to couch potatoes. Today, we are unapologetically leashed to our desks and screens, evolution be damned. But what is it doing to us? Endocrinologist Dr Jagdish Rao, Bangalore, explains, “Sitting for long hours causes the body to shut down metabolically. When your muscles, which are meant for movement, are immobile, your circulation slows down and you end up expending fewer calories. This, in turn, causes weight gain, which starts affecting your hormones.” This also puts key bulgefi ghting enzymes, responsible for breaking down triglycerides (a type of fat), out of business. “If you sit for a whole day, you reduce the ability of these enzymes to function by 50 per cent,” says Dr Rao.

Be a stand-up girl

Now that we have pretty much established how sitting for long hours is bad, here’s a simple solution to all of those life-threatening problems: just stand up. In response to studies that warn against the ‘sitting disease’, people have begun to redesign their lifestyles, especially at work. Even corporates today see the wisdom in providing standing desks—it’s cheaper than all the sick days lost to backaches. Even if you change nothing else, just standing while you work can immediately improve your health. Here’s how:

BETTER POSTURE, FEWER INJURIES