Beyond
Walking

By Ronda Gates, MS

Ronda Gates, MS, is a pharmacy grad who traded her white coat for a pair of athletic shoes and never looked back. Her health promotion business, LIFESTYLES, provides motivational speaking, program development, and fitness assessment services to support people making a lifestyle change. She has developed health promotion programs for many organizations nationwide.
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An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

— Henry David
Thoreau

Get Up and Go

When I was young, at the end of my school day, I was expected to do my chores and homework, then “play outside” until supper. I lived up the street from a vacant lot where I typically gathered with my peers to kick a ball around (no organized soccer leagues), play baseball with sticks and tennis balls, or launch a game of hide and seek.
I played with worms, climbed trees, caught crayfish in a local creek, and made castles out of sand and mud. If I wanted water I turned on the garden hose. It never occurred to me it might be dangerous to share a soft drink with a friend.

I owned a bicycle — my vehicle for escape to adventures in places that I thought, until I returned as an adult, were far away. My friends and I raced around obstacle courses we figured and reconfigured with a variety of rocks and branches. We attempted balancing tricks that seem impossible as I look back. (I did not have to wear a helmet — there were no helmets.)

In short, I was fit. That fitness set the stage for a lifelong pursuit of health that has stood the test of time. Although I’m a fan of So You Think You Can Dance and other television programs, play Wii with my young friends and spend a couple hours a day working at my computer, I also manage to play a daily game of tennis, hike, cycle, and live an active life. My waist to hip ratio remains within normal range. Although I have a genetic predisposition to unusually high cholesterol levels, my activity, combined with a relatively healthy diet has, up until now, kept my arteries clear of plaque despite an inability to tolerate statins.

So, you ask, what’s the point? The point is that I’m not the norm for adults my age. Studies continue to report that thanks to computers and other modern conveniences many of us who were active as youngsters have become more sedentary as we age. Statistical studies reveal we (and our children) are less active than at any time in history. Too many of us spend too much time sitting in our car, at our office at a computer and in front of the TV. When we retire and have more time to resume activity, there’s a tendency to lapse into a less, versus more, active lifestyle. We work, shop, talk on the phone and email for hours without standing, predisposing us to osteoporosis, heart disease, and lower metabolic rates. So, despite the health advances that allow us to live longer than our ancestors, those of us who have a “sitting lifestyle” have much higher mortality rates than people who don’t.

According to epidemiologist Peter Katzmarzyk, this also applies to adults who may be physically active during another part of their day. Katzmarzyk reports, “because long periods of sitting at a desk or in front of a TV cannot be compensated for with occasional leisure periods of activity, our ‘sitting lifestyle’ predisposes us to metabolic syndrome — a constellation of risk factors that includes a large waist and elevated blood pressure, blood sugar and blood tryglycerides.” Turns out that muscles that are inactive change the way they metabolize compounds and affect the regulation of insulin and glucose. Janet Rubin, a professor of metabolism at University of North Carolina, believes inactivity may drive the body to make more fat cells — an extraordinary change from the long-standing belief that we are born with a certain numbers of cells that may swell or shrink, but remain the same throughout life. Last, but not least, lipoprotein lipase, the body’s natural fat absorber, works only when we are standing or moving around. That’s when lipase promotes the absorption of fat and cholesterol into muscles for use during the activity. When we sit, lipase stops working, causing fat to circulate in the blood until it comes to rest on our belly, hips, or our arteries (even if it was earlier released from fat stores).

I recently pointed out to a client with a home-business lifestyle that if she wanted to lose weight she needed to look at some numbers. As she sat at her computer doing business, she was expending about three calories a minute. An hour at the computer would “burn” 180 calories. Suppose, I suggested, she commit to actively moving around at least ten minutes every hour. If the pace was a seven-calorie per minute activity, she could add 70 calories to every hour. Assuming she did that only five times a day her calorie expenditure would increase by 40 calories per hour or 200 calories per day. After 18 days, that small effort could yield the loss of one pound of fat (assuming she didn’t increase calorie intake). We made a list of short activities — walk around the block, dancing in the living room, or gardening, for example, and that effort, combined with her daily 30 minute walk, soon added up to a shift in shape that made her smile.

If you are, as I am, serious about living long and living well, take a lesson from the numbers and make it a priority to live a “get up and go” lilfestyle. Instead of encouraging your children to be more active, ask them to join you in a way of life that will let them live long and well too. It’s a prescription for happiness.