Friday, April 15, 2011

What Magic Underwear Tells Us About Sitting Too Much

“Magic underwear” contains sensors that measure your body’s movement.. A researcher trying to discover why some people get fat while others don’t, even though they eat and exercise the same, has found that some of us move around more than others  By using magic underwear. (I think this is old news; when I was a kid, adults always told me to sit still and not fidget. But fidgeting is good for us.)

“’We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,’ explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. ‘The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,”’Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t”

One way to prevent extra poundage that’s mentioned in this article, is the treadmill desk. Here it is.

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