After a long day of sitting in front of your computer at work, do you go home to the couch and watch television, or sit with your iPad?
All that sitting is shortening your life.
A landmark study looking at the effects of sitting and inactivity on women’s cardiovascular health found that 10 hours a day or more spent on your duff raises your risk of these chronic diseases significantly:
1. Cardiovascular disease
That egg and cheese biscuit you had for breakfast, cruising through the drive-thru? The General Tsao’s Chicken for dinner?
When you sit quietly hour after hour, the cholesterol in those foods settles down along the walls of your arteries, forming plaques that grow thicker over time.
As your arteries narrow, blood clots can form. The clots can break loose and cause big problems.
In fact, for every hour women over 50 spent sitting, their cardiovascular disease risk rose by 2 percent, according to the long-term study of 71,000 women who participated in the Women’s Health Initiative, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
When clots break lose, they can travel up to your brain and block critical blood flow, resulting in a stroke.
If no blood can reach a section of your brain, those nerve cells die, and you could lose your ability to speak or walk, and face a long road to recovery.
3. Heart failure
Narrowed arteries can prevent your heart from pumping as much blood to the rest of your body your body needs. This can cause fluid to back up into your lungs, causing shortness of breath, and swelling of legs and ankles.
Angioplasty, stents, or even a pacemaker may be in your future.
4. Heart attack
It can feel like squeezing or pressure on your chest, or it may feel like jaw and arm pain. A heart attack happens when a clot blocks blood flow to the heart muscle itself, and that muscle begins to die.
5. Metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes
Prolonged sitting is associated with weight gain, especially in your belly.
That fat that accumulates inside your body, around your organs, is tied to a total disruption of your metabolism.
You can have increasing trouble making use of the sugars in your bloodstream, a condition called insulin resistance. As this syndrome progresses, a host of complications come with it. Kidney disease. Eye disease. Nerve disease.
And now the good news:
That same study found that for every hour per week of physical activity, there was a corresponding 1 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease risk.
So go take a walk!