"It's time for the soul of the nation to rise."

Sometimes I can't believe I have a job that requires me to sit at a desk all day. It feels absolutely antithetical to my state of living in the world. Some days I'm not even sure how I ended up in this situation. After all when I think back on all those career questions that you ask yourself to explore your job potential, I would never have answered "yes" to the ones that keep my ass glued to this seat.

Would you rather work in a corporate environment or somewhere less structured?
Less structured.
Would you prefer to sit behind a desk all day or be constantly moving around?
Constantly moving around.
Would you balk at the idea of saying you work in a place with cubicles or not?
I'm balking right now.
Does the idea of sitting on your butt all day as a prerequisite for your job seem relaxing or horrifying?
Horrifying.

Oh, it's times like this when I have to reflect deeply on where I am and how I got here. My mom recently told me that of my 18 or so maternal and paternal cousins that I was the one who was the most active. If there was a magazine rack in a waiting room, I'd be the kid throwing every magazine to the ground. Apparently  I was that kid standing in a checkout line bouncing up and down, moving throughout the line always distracted by something new, shiny or loud. I was probably ADD before the term was so trendy. Although my mom would have never diagnosed me like that. She said I was active and I was always looking for (imitating Cookie Monster here) inpuuuut.  I think it was frustrating for her but she also saw me as a little explorer ready to take on the world. She said my her saving grace was when I learned to read. Once I could read, I could finally sit still. In fact I read so much that she actually had to ground me from reading. She actually took my books away and forced me to socialize and play outside.

Hmmm, maybe this does explain my current position a bit. I do love to read and explore. However, now I'm exploring the world through the Internet instead of from a captain's chair on a boat. Oh, how I wish I was on a boat right now, or at the gym, or traveling. There is so much world to see, smell, taste, and touch.

It's just that when you sit, I think you atrophy. At least your butt does! Have you heard the term "bus driver's butt"? It exists for a reason. Jason told me he started driving a bus in Alaska with another young girl. He said after a few months she was still skinny but her butt just expanded. How many hours a day do most people spend sitting in their car, sitting at their desk, sitting in the bathroom, sitting while watching TV or eating. We are becoming a nation of butt place mats!

New research has recently confirmed how detrimental sitting is for your health. I'm not talking about its pernicious affects on your looks but on your actual body chemistry. A New York Times article asked the question, Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

The posture of sitting itself probably isn’t worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching “Wheel of Fortune.” But for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

There are so many health-related problems that arise from inactivity. There are measurements for obesity, earlier death, diabetes, etc. The worst though is probably how sitting has a pejorative effect on your outlook. Read this last paragraph and try not to cringe. Then get up and and stay up for the rest of the day.

Dr. Levine was in a philosophical mood as we left the temp agency. For all of the hard science against sitting, he admits that his campaign against what he calls “the chair-based lifestyle” is not limited to simply a quest for better physical health. His is a war against inertia itself, which he believes sickens more than just our body. “Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”