Demi
Sun, Jun-05-05, 02:38
Have just read this interesting article and thought I'd post it here, even though it's not really about low carbing.
The Times, London, UK
4 June, 2005
Nine-to-five treadmill
Is fidgeting at the filing cabinet the cure for obesity? Jerome Burne reports on the new fat-busting office
James Levine has seen the future of the office — and it walks. Instead of the familiar flat rectangular slab, his desk is a Plexiglas tower with the computer keyboard at waist height. Beneath it runs a treadmill, allowing him to walk at a steady 0.7 miles an hour as he types. It is, he says, just the right speed: “You don’t get sweaty. At about one step a second it’s very comfortable.” His workstation doesn’t have a landline phone, instead a mobile is holstered at his hip so he can pace around as he talks.
A report out last week warned that 90 per cent of British schoolchildren are at risk of obesity later in life because of their couch potato lifestyle. But what Levine is demonstrating is that they don’t have to leap up and play football to lose the pounds. It could be a simple matter of pacing around, it could be chewing gum while you watch television.
For meetings, rather than retiring to the conference room and slumping into a chair, Levine walks the talk with colleagues around the two-lane track that encircles the 5,000sq ft office floor. Along the way they whack rubber pucks at targets on the walls with hockeysticks. Others slide by on red plastic carpet-skates.
For an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Levine is in the curious position of also being a pioneering office designer. Several firms, including Ikea, are already making vertical desks, which have been sold to the Pentagon, law firms and the White House. One day all offices may be like this.
It’s all happened because Levine is the man who has scientifically established the weight-loss benefits of fidgeting, technically known as Neat (non-exercise activity thermogenesis). That covers all the stuff you do just moving around in the world: standing, walking, toetapping, shopping, stretching, even just shifting in your chair.
But while the average seated office worker burns up 15 per cent of their calories with Neat, those in the walking office can use up to 50 per cent, which may translate into burning 3st 8lb (23kg) a year. So is this the answer to the obesity epidemic? After all the billions spent on diets, health clubs, even operations, could the solution simply be: stand and fidget? In a recent study published in the journal Science, using some expensive high-tech equipment (see Calorie-crunching, below), Levine calculated the difference in Neat between one group of male and female volunteers who were slim and active, and another who were heavier and self-confessed couch potatoes. On average, the slim ones moved about for an extra two hours a day, which burnt off an extra 350 calories. Scale that up to a year and you’ve got a weight loss of 2st-3st.
“Our studies show that the calories people burn in their everyday activities are far more important in obesity than we previously imagined,” Levine says. As a result of daily walking the talk, Levine, who admits to having become a little chubby a few years ago, now declares that at 5ft 8in (1.7m) and 11st 1lb, he is in the “best shape of my life”.
His Neat-promoting office is the culmination of a lifetime’s obsession. As a precocious child brought up in England, he was fascinated by energy expenditure. “At 9 I was puzzled by what regulated the patterns of physical activity,” he says. “I used to sit up at night following the trails of snails in the family fish tank.” By 11 he was “deriving the thermodynamic equations to predict weight loss from lying in a cold bath — conductive heat loss is very efficient”. Then, studying for his PhD at the Royal Free Hospital, North London, he blew up a lab while building devices to measure rates of calorie burning.
The crucial question answered by the Science paper was: “Were the heavier volunteers overweight because they were inactive or were they inactive because they were heavier?” It turned out that when the slim ones were fattened up with a high-calorie diet, they still moved about as much as before, while slimmed-down couch potatoes didn’t become any more sprightly.
What this meant was that “high activity” is almost certainly programmed into the genes. “But this doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything about it,” Levine says. “We thought that if you create an environment that encourages movement and discourages sitting, it should be possible to get the natural couch potatoes moving.”
And that’s how the walking office was born. All the Plexiglas computer stands have treadmills or exercise bikes, but you can snap on a height-adjustable seat if you need to take a rest. In fact, Levine recommends that people build up slowly to full-time pacing by walking for a quarter of an hour and then resting, walking and then resting.
“Our patients have told us for years that they have low metabolisms,” says Levine, “but we’ve never really understood what that meant. Now we know they have low Neat. They have a biological need to sit more.” So far, he says, the response has been almost uniformly positive.
Abbie Davies, a statistics expert, says: “I groaned when I first heard about it. Typing and walking at the same time sounded mad. But now I don’t have that energy dip after lunch, and when I get home in the evening I feel much less tired than I used to. Best of all, the pounds are starting to come off.”
It’s true that there’s nothing new about fitting extra bits of exercise into your day. Fitness experts have been advising people for years to take the stairs rather than the lift, to get off the bus a stop earlier and walk. But all too often it turns out to be just another opportunity to fail. The walking office on the one hand makes a big demand — an extra two-and-a-half hours of walking a day, but it’s far easier because everyone is doing exactly the same all around you.
Fat v slim
Professor James Levine studied differences in Neat (non-exercise activity thermogenisis) between slim, active people and heavier, self-confessed, couch potatoes. He kitted out 20 volunteers in shorts and tops studded with sensors (called inclinometers and triaxial accelerometers) to record position and movement every half second, round the clock for ten days.
His data showed that the calories expended a day through Neat activites varied from 100 cals for couch potatoes up to 700 cals for active people.
Calorie-crunching
Levine’s experiments have pinpointed the calories burned up for every hour on different activities:
Chewing gum 11 cals (if you use six pieces at a go)
Watching TV 5 cals
Standing still 10 cals
Gesticulating while standing still 40 cals
Strolling 100 cals (at one mile an hour)
Walking briskly 300 cals (at four miles an hour)
House cleaning 100-150 cals
Cooking 80 cals
Shopping 100 cals
Shopping on internet 10 cals
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-1638749,00.html
The Times, London, UK
4 June, 2005
Nine-to-five treadmill
Is fidgeting at the filing cabinet the cure for obesity? Jerome Burne reports on the new fat-busting office
James Levine has seen the future of the office — and it walks. Instead of the familiar flat rectangular slab, his desk is a Plexiglas tower with the computer keyboard at waist height. Beneath it runs a treadmill, allowing him to walk at a steady 0.7 miles an hour as he types. It is, he says, just the right speed: “You don’t get sweaty. At about one step a second it’s very comfortable.” His workstation doesn’t have a landline phone, instead a mobile is holstered at his hip so he can pace around as he talks.
A report out last week warned that 90 per cent of British schoolchildren are at risk of obesity later in life because of their couch potato lifestyle. But what Levine is demonstrating is that they don’t have to leap up and play football to lose the pounds. It could be a simple matter of pacing around, it could be chewing gum while you watch television.
For meetings, rather than retiring to the conference room and slumping into a chair, Levine walks the talk with colleagues around the two-lane track that encircles the 5,000sq ft office floor. Along the way they whack rubber pucks at targets on the walls with hockeysticks. Others slide by on red plastic carpet-skates.
For an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Levine is in the curious position of also being a pioneering office designer. Several firms, including Ikea, are already making vertical desks, which have been sold to the Pentagon, law firms and the White House. One day all offices may be like this.
It’s all happened because Levine is the man who has scientifically established the weight-loss benefits of fidgeting, technically known as Neat (non-exercise activity thermogenesis). That covers all the stuff you do just moving around in the world: standing, walking, toetapping, shopping, stretching, even just shifting in your chair.
But while the average seated office worker burns up 15 per cent of their calories with Neat, those in the walking office can use up to 50 per cent, which may translate into burning 3st 8lb (23kg) a year. So is this the answer to the obesity epidemic? After all the billions spent on diets, health clubs, even operations, could the solution simply be: stand and fidget? In a recent study published in the journal Science, using some expensive high-tech equipment (see Calorie-crunching, below), Levine calculated the difference in Neat between one group of male and female volunteers who were slim and active, and another who were heavier and self-confessed couch potatoes. On average, the slim ones moved about for an extra two hours a day, which burnt off an extra 350 calories. Scale that up to a year and you’ve got a weight loss of 2st-3st.
“Our studies show that the calories people burn in their everyday activities are far more important in obesity than we previously imagined,” Levine says. As a result of daily walking the talk, Levine, who admits to having become a little chubby a few years ago, now declares that at 5ft 8in (1.7m) and 11st 1lb, he is in the “best shape of my life”.
His Neat-promoting office is the culmination of a lifetime’s obsession. As a precocious child brought up in England, he was fascinated by energy expenditure. “At 9 I was puzzled by what regulated the patterns of physical activity,” he says. “I used to sit up at night following the trails of snails in the family fish tank.” By 11 he was “deriving the thermodynamic equations to predict weight loss from lying in a cold bath — conductive heat loss is very efficient”. Then, studying for his PhD at the Royal Free Hospital, North London, he blew up a lab while building devices to measure rates of calorie burning.
The crucial question answered by the Science paper was: “Were the heavier volunteers overweight because they were inactive or were they inactive because they were heavier?” It turned out that when the slim ones were fattened up with a high-calorie diet, they still moved about as much as before, while slimmed-down couch potatoes didn’t become any more sprightly.
What this meant was that “high activity” is almost certainly programmed into the genes. “But this doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything about it,” Levine says. “We thought that if you create an environment that encourages movement and discourages sitting, it should be possible to get the natural couch potatoes moving.”
And that’s how the walking office was born. All the Plexiglas computer stands have treadmills or exercise bikes, but you can snap on a height-adjustable seat if you need to take a rest. In fact, Levine recommends that people build up slowly to full-time pacing by walking for a quarter of an hour and then resting, walking and then resting.
“Our patients have told us for years that they have low metabolisms,” says Levine, “but we’ve never really understood what that meant. Now we know they have low Neat. They have a biological need to sit more.” So far, he says, the response has been almost uniformly positive.
Abbie Davies, a statistics expert, says: “I groaned when I first heard about it. Typing and walking at the same time sounded mad. But now I don’t have that energy dip after lunch, and when I get home in the evening I feel much less tired than I used to. Best of all, the pounds are starting to come off.”
It’s true that there’s nothing new about fitting extra bits of exercise into your day. Fitness experts have been advising people for years to take the stairs rather than the lift, to get off the bus a stop earlier and walk. But all too often it turns out to be just another opportunity to fail. The walking office on the one hand makes a big demand — an extra two-and-a-half hours of walking a day, but it’s far easier because everyone is doing exactly the same all around you.
Fat v slim
Professor James Levine studied differences in Neat (non-exercise activity thermogenisis) between slim, active people and heavier, self-confessed, couch potatoes. He kitted out 20 volunteers in shorts and tops studded with sensors (called inclinometers and triaxial accelerometers) to record position and movement every half second, round the clock for ten days.
His data showed that the calories expended a day through Neat activites varied from 100 cals for couch potatoes up to 700 cals for active people.
Calorie-crunching
Levine’s experiments have pinpointed the calories burned up for every hour on different activities:
Chewing gum 11 cals (if you use six pieces at a go)
Watching TV 5 cals
Standing still 10 cals
Gesticulating while standing still 40 cals
Strolling 100 cals (at one mile an hour)
Walking briskly 300 cals (at four miles an hour)
House cleaning 100-150 cals
Cooking 80 cals
Shopping 100 cals
Shopping on internet 10 cals
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-1638749,00.html