Weighing the Evidence on Exercise - NYTimes.com

[archerships]

In a completed but unpublished study conducted in his energy-metabolism lab, Braun and his colleagues had a group of volunteers spend an entire day sitting. If they needed to visit the bathroom or any other location, they spun over in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, in a second session, the same volunteers stood all day, “not doing anything in particular,” Braun says, “just standing.” The difference in energy expenditure was remarkable, representing “hundreds of calories,” Braun says, but with no increase among the upright in their blood levels of ghrelin or other appetite hormones. Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. “Just get rid of your chair.”

via nytimes.com

Via Naomi Most.

Posted via web from crasch's posterous

Comments

[perich.livejournal.com]

Interesting but, as Gawker puts it, never take fitness advice from the New York Times:

Who the fuck wants to be thin? Besides anorexics, for whom the NYT apparently tailors its fitness coverage? We are presumably discussing fitness (or, euphemistically, "wellness," which just means health, and since we are talking about physical health achieved through exercise, we are talking about fitness). Take a moment to reflect upon what is implied by the fact that this language is used so casually and without qualification in the very top of a lead story in one of our nation's most respected news magazines.

Now I will answer my own rhetorical device: what is implied by the author, perhaps unthinkingly, is that everyone knows and accepts that being thin is the sole worthwhile goal of a fitness program. It is not even something that the NYT magazine finds worthwhile debating or explaining. So we will do so here.