Your Desk Job is Making You Fat
8500 steps per day and getting up frequently is crucial — the secret is timing.
An article published in Medicine Science Sports Exercise sheds new light on exactly how to improve fat burning.
This is fantastic news, especially for those who hate the gym.
Massive research shows sitting is terrible for us and the research explains why.
The 2021 study helps explain why “Blue Zone” people live so long. In some parts of Greece, Italy, Costa Rica and Japan (4 of the 6 “Blue Zones”) citizens age better.
Blue Zoners clean house, walk to the market, and, mostly — stay busy all day long. They keep doing chores and walking everywhere well into their 80s and 90s. They also tend to stay slim.
Their key to fat burning isn’t an intensive workout but slow and steady movement all day long. Although weightlifting and HIIT help boost metabolism, turtle still beats rabbit.
The authors put it this way:
“8500 steps per day protects against exercise resistance in fat metabolism. It seems that fat metabolism is influenced more by [sitting] than by [… one hour] of moderate-intensity running.”
We can’t burn fat without frequent movement.
Getting up and moving regularly throughout the day — and that means walking a minimum of 8500 steps, plus standing up at least once an hour, make all the difference.
But that isn’t the whole story. You owe it to yourself, if you are overweight, suffer from metabolic disease — or are likely to get old — to learn about why exercise alone won’t burn fat.
Tortoise Beats Hare
The authors of “Daily Step Count and Postprandial Fat Metabolism,” sought to understand how exercise lowers (1) next day triglycerides after a high-fat meal and (2) fat oxidation.
They chose triglyceride levels and fat oxidation (fat burning) because both reveal the body’s response to exercise.
Let’s break that down. Both triglyceride levels and fat oxidation are markers of “exercise resistance.”
Your goal is to be less exercise resistant. You want a body that responds readily and swiftly to exercise by burning fat. You want to be a fat burner.
If you are exercise resistant, all the sweating and puffing you do in the gym has little effect. It also turns out the older you are, the more likely you will be exercise resistant. But this isn’t from lack of gym attendance or “aging” — rather, it’s due to daily habits of sitting.
This result is predictable. The older you are, the more years you’ve spent as a desk jockey. Sitting adds up — like smoking. One pack of cigarettes doesn’t kill, but decades of tobacco use often does.
Low Fats in the Blood, High Fat Burning
Ideally, you want to keep post-meal triglycerides lower the day after a bout of exercise — that is one of the main benefits of a working out.
Triglycerides are the body’s primary fat storage system. They store unused calories to provide the body with energy. High levels can be the result of eating too much glucose (too many carbs), because excess sugar is stored as fat, but any influx of calories leads to fat storage.
Even if you don’t overeat, choosing the wrong foods — especially sugar — will raise triglyceride levels.
Too much triglyceride is a major risk factor for heart disease. People with cardiovascular disease, for example, are typically prescribed statin drugs to lower triglyceride levels.
Doctors recommend regular exercise, avoiding sugar, losing weight, choosing healthy fats, and limiting alcohol as the conventional way to lower triglycerides.
This advice is general, and when it comes to exercise, incomplete at best.
The researchers also measured fat oxidation. We burn (oxidize) more fat with exercise — no controversy there. But it turns out some people don’t burn fat as efficiently after exercise.
The topic of how to burn fat is, understandably, a massive subject of interest to nearly everyone.
Muscle magazines advise “slashing calories” along with reducing carbohydrates and eating lots of protein. The idea is to become shredded and ripped, but this advice isn’t practical for most of us.
It turns out there is an easier way: moving around.
Daily Steps: Low, Limited, and Normal
The authors measured postprandial (after meal) triglycerides and fat oxidation in three groups of research participants:
— Group 1 took “low” steps (2700)* during the day
— Group 2 took “limited” steps (4700) during the day
— Group 3 took “normal” steps (8500) during the day
After two days, participants had their postprandial plasma triglyceride measured. Both the low and limited groups showed higher levels by 22%-23%, compared with normal participants. This difference was statistically significant, meaning it did not occur by random chance.
In the low and limited step groups, their overall fat oxidation was 16%-19% lower, compared with normal group.
Interestingly, fat burning and triglyceride levels were essentially the same between the low and limited participants.
The Takeaway
The volunteers in this study were young and healthy. The results show that the effect of inactivity, i.e. sitting most of the day, is immediate.
Imagine the effects, then, of years or decades of sitting most of the day!
The good news is, standing up just once an hour and moving vigorously for 20 seconds — jumping jacks, jogging in place, bouncing on a mini-trampoline, or sprinting to the mailbox — reverses exercise resistance.
The better news is that moving throughout the day is at least as important than an hour-long sweat-fest at the gym five days a week.
The research by Burton and Colby is bolstered by many studies showing how bad sitting is for health. The research comes to the same conclusion: anyone immediately improve fat burning through simple methods.
NASA research also reveals aging is directly related to being sedentary. In fact, sitting all day mimics micro-gravity in outer space, leading to age-related problems like muscle loss, reduced blood flow, and poor coordination.
To improve overall fat metabolism and avoid “exercise resistance”:
- Get up every 20–30 minutes, do 20 seconds of a burst of movement
- Get at least 8500 steps in throughout the day
- Use HIIT or weightlifting to improve overall metabolism
Being middle-aged, old, out of shape, or hating the gym is no longer an excuse. You can transform your metabolism at any age by focusing on regular movement to counteract the effects of sitting.
Stand up and burn fat.
*Actual steps: 2675 +/- 314; 4759 +/- 276; 8481 +/- 581
Jean Campbell is a 4x top writer in fitness, humor, psychology, and crime. She sets her watch timer to stand up every 20 minutes, and you can, too!
