Jim Hill: Welcome to Weight Loss And, where we delve into the world of weight loss. I'm Jim Hill.

Holly Wyatt: And I'm Holly Wyatt. We're both dedicated to helping you lose weight, keep it off, and live your best life while you're doing it.

Jim Hill: Indeed, we now realize successful weight loss combines the science and art of medicine, knowing what to do and why you will do it.

Holly Wyatt: Yes, the “And” allows us to talk about all the other stuff that makes your journey so much bigger, better, and exciting.

Jim Hill: Ready for the “And” factor?

Holly Wyatt: Let's dive in.

Jim Hill: Here we go. Okay, listeners, I want you to imagine this. You've been sitting for hours, scrolling through your phone or working at your desk, and you feel like you're barely moving. What if we told you that these seemingly harmless habits could be silently sabotaging your weight loss goals?

Holly Wyatt: That's right. Today, we're going to uncover the hidden dangers of sedentary behavior, how our sedentary lifestyles are impacting our weight and our health more than you might realize. And to help us navigate this issue, we're joined by Dr. Keith Diaz, a leading expert in the field of behavioral medicine. He's here to explain why sitting might be the new smoking and what we can do to turn the tide.

Jim Hill: Yeah, Holly. Dr. Diaz is a renowned researcher. He's an associate professor at Columbia University Medical Center, and his research really focuses on how prolonged sitting may contribute to obesity and other chronic diseases. His innovative use of technology, like using wearable devices, helps us understand and combat sedentary lifestyles. He continues to be a leading voice in the fight against sedentary behavior and its associated health risks. I might also mention that he's a member of the New York Obesity Research Center.

We've talked about these centers, these NORCs before, because they're places funded by the National Institutes of Health that facilitate research in nutrition and obesity. And we are thrilled to have him here today to help us dive into this important topic.

Holly Wyatt: Yeah, so welcome, welcome. Great to have you here. We just like to start out by, can you share with our listeners what initially kind of drew you to this area, studying sedentary behavior? It's not something you think about all the time.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, happy to. So I'm an exercise physiologist by training. And so we exercise physiologists, I like to say, we sip the exercise Kool-Aid, and we think that exercise is the cure-all for everything. And so I come from that lens of perspective of thinking that exercise is something we should be advocating for everybody to prevent and treat every chronic disease. And so during my doctoral studies, I was studying exercise physiology and the science of exercise, and I came across a news headline that said something to the effect of sitting is the new smoking, even if you're a runner. And I was like, whoa, I'm a runner, you know, and I'm doing a healthy thing, getting my aerobic exercise in every day. And I saw this headline, I was like, there's no way.

Like they painted it like sitting is the kryptonite to exercise. And so I set out to study this because I didn't even believe in it. And I wanted to debunk this whole headline and just be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, can overcome. And so that's brought me down this rabbit hole that I'm, you know, 10 plus years in now and still going further down and learning.

And what I can say is that my mind has now been changed and realizing that I think I naively, and I I many in our failed to recognize that exercise is just the tip of the iceberg of what a healthy movement profile really looks like.

Jim Hill: Wow, I love it. Holly, this is a man after my own heart. Keith, I talk oftentimes about how, you know, I have sort of one foot in the nutrition community, one in the exercise community, and the nutrition people get all focused on how everything's food and the exercise people, everything's exercise. And man, the two fit together so well. So this is going to be fun. I have so many questions, but maybe start by telling our listeners when we say sedentary behavior, what do we mean?

Keith Diaz: Yeah, it's anything you do in a sitting or lying posture with the caveat that there are a couple of things that you can do sitting, lying, where you work up a lot of energy expenditure or calorie burn. But for the most part, with the exception of things like active video gaming where you're moving your arms vigorously, it's just anything you do while sitting, lying down. So to give some examples of things like watching TV, sitting at a computer, driving your car, those are all things that would count as sedentary behavior.

Jim Hill: Do we know if sedentary behavior has increased over time?

Keith Diaz: Oh, yeah, absolutely in a big way. So let me give you some stats to break it down. And I'm going to compare it to the 1950s because that is what we consider like the technological boom really took off in the 50s and 60s. So in 1950, the average amount of television viewing a person did in the home, actually the average amount of television viewing that a household did in the 1950s was four and a half hours per day. Today we're up to over nine hours per day per household. Work-wise in 1950, 16 million individuals were employed and will consider a sedentary occupation. So that'd be mostly sitting at your desk. Today over 60 million U.S. adults work in a sedentary occupation. It's over half of our workforce is now in a sedentary occupation.

And how we get to place this is also changing. So 1950, the average U.S. adult spent 15 minutes per day in their car driving. They have to spend eight hours, eight miles per day. Today the average U.S. adult spends 55 minutes a day in their car.

Holly Wyatt: Wow. So I'm going to get to it. How much sitting or sedentary behavior or sitting? I think that's what I think about because I do sit a lot. How much sitting is too much?

Keith Diaz: Well, still learning. There's not a solid likeness, definitively, is the answer. I'd say the best evidence that we have from meta-analysis of wearable device data suggests that after about nine to 10 hours, your risks for premature deaths start to exponentially increase. So the short answer is between nine and 10 starts getting too much.

Now let's put that in a little bit of perspective now. How much does the average U.S. adult spend sitting? The average U.S. adult, some of the evidence we have from devices suggests that about 11 to 12 hours a day in the average U.S. adult sits.

Jim Hill: So half the day sitting.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. So the majority of U.S. adults are past that nine to 10 hour threshold.

Jim Hill: Why is sitting bad, Keith? I know that your research has really looked at this. So tell us a little about what you've learned in your research and that from others.

Keith Diaz: We're still learning and trying to uncover this. I think the key question is always, why is it bad and how is it separate from exercise? And what we're learning is that muscle activity is really important for our body's homeostasis, for just our regular health. That muscle contraction regularly throughout the day is critical for things like managing your glucose levels and managing your lipid levels or your fat in your bloodstream. And so what happens is what we don't use your muscles. The muscles are not pulling glucose as best they should out of the bloodstream.

They're not helping to break down lipids and removing them from the bloodstream. And so it's really detrimental when you sit and don't move for hours at a time that your muscles aren't doing those jobs. And then so that's part of it has to do with just your muscles contracting regularly throughout the day is actually really critical to your body's health.

But the other part of this is that the sitting posture itself is now we're learning can be particularly harmful. And so we like to think about it, just picture your blood vessels as a hose. And when you're standing there nice and straight, but when you sit, you're putting a kink in the hose, right? You're bending those blood vessels and particularly in your legs that you need. And it's thought that when you put that kink in the hose that causes really turbulent blood flow and that turbulent blood flow and then it can cause your blood to pool in your legs and then to pull in your blood and that turbulent blood flow in your legs is actually really harmful and can cause damage to your blood vessels and can lead to the development of plaque or atherosclerosis in your blood vessels, particularly your lower limbs.

Holly Wyatt: Does it play into inflammation or is it just that it's changing the vessels or how is it doing that?

Keith Diaz: It's a whole cascade that from the turbulent blood flow, the blood pooling, signaling to the cells in your blood vessel to create this inflammatory response, that inflammatory response is a contributor to plaque development. And so this is whole cascade that just comes from the disturbance in blood flow.

Holly Wyatt: Wow. So it kind of starts to make sense a little bit then how you could still be doing some physical activity for one or two hours or running like you said, but then if you're 12 hours, you're experiencing this turbulent blood flow and all that, it starts to make sense how they could be independent of each other.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, absolutely. So that's what we keep telling people now. It's not enough to like you exercise in the morning for 60 minutes. It's not enough to say, check that off my to-do a little bit then I'm done and I don't need to move the rest of the day that we're seeing that we've seen there's laboratory studies have studied this and shown that like you exercise for an hour and then sit the rest of your day and then compared to this non-exercising for the rest of your day, like the glucose response is still the same, that you actually, you need regular movement throughout the day in addition to exercise. And so, and that's an important distinction. Some people can twist the message and be like, oh, exercise doesn't matter.

No, it still matters. It's one of the most important things that you can be doing. But if you want an even more healthy profile, it's exercise plus sprinkling in regular movement breaks, movement snacks.

Jim Hill: So I know that your own research has looked a lot at how we might address the problem of sitting. What have you learned? Tell us a little bit about some of the studies you've done there.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. So right now the current guidelines for sitting say sit less move and that's about it. And the people who about make those guidelines would acknowledge that too, they couldn't do anything more than what we had at the time with the evidence. And so, we really want to come up with something that we could tell somebody about, well, how do we combat our sitting habits? What do we do about it? How do we offset its harms? And so, what we and others have found is that regular movement breaks or movements next sprinkling in throughout the day can actually offset a lot of the cardiometabolic harm that is caused by sitting all day. And so, when I say movement breaks, either say things like move for one minute every hour or move for five minutes every half hour. That's what movement breaks are. And so, what we've been doing in the lab is trying to figure out what's the least amount of movement in terms of these movement breaks that one has to do to offset the harms of sitting. And there's no like one answer right now.

It's a little bit of there's multiple, I think, strategies one can take. What we found that was the most effective movement break is moving every half hour for five minutes. And so, doing that, what we found would lower one's postprandial glucose, your glucose spikes after you eat, that you would reduce that surge or spike in your blood sugar levels by almost 60% if you took these movement breaks every half hour, five minutes. Those are akin to reductions you'd see if you put a person of medication to manage blood sugar levels.

Jim Hill: That's really amazing. That's a big effect. And that doesn't seem unfeasible to take a five-minute break every hour. What I'm thinking is, how do we begin to build that into our day? So, do you program your computer? So, after 55 minutes, it goes blank for five minutes. I mean, you could think about people could come up with some cool ways of sort of helping people make that a habit.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. Actually, Jim, unfortunately, I've heard from a lot of people that they don't think moving every half hour for five minutes is feasible.

Jim Hill: Wow. That's all in how you approach it. We do the same way when we tell people to exercise an hour a day. They say an hour and I say one out of 24. It's all in how you approach it.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. And so, I do want to say for the naysayers out there who say, no, every half hour is no way, which I would agree. I struggle doing every half hour as well. We found that for blood pressure, you move every hour for just one minute. Lower your blood pressure by about five points.

Holly Wyatt: So, when you say move, what do you have to do? So, like I was just thinking, can you just stand up for five minutes or you actually got to be walking? Like, let's get details there.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. Let's dig into that a little bit. So, one, in our lab studies, we have people do light walking two miles per hour, which is for them their typical walking pace. So, it's a really light walk. So, we're not having people like, sprinting up and down hallways or up and down stairs. Like, nothing that would break a person's sweat in the office. So, light walking, but I want to dig into the, is standing enough because we're seeing this whole like the standing desks. Lots of people have them now.

Lots of companies are providing them. Unfortunately, standing being a healthy alternative to sitting is not great. There's actually really mixed evidence. Some data suggests it actually could be harmful if you do it for long periods of time.

And it goes back again to some of the mechanisms we talk about. When you stand still for hours at a time, blood is going to pool in your legs. And that goes back to some of the mechanisms that we talk about that blood pulling in your legs is not necessarily healthy for you if you're doing it for hours at a time. So, unfortunately, I think the standing desks manufacturers in many ways have helped convince American consumers that standing is a healthy alternative to sitting when the scientific evidence actually does not well support it. There are some cities that say maybe it does help. It's inconclusive right now. So, if one asks me, like, should I stand or should I move? definitively hands down, we know moving is better than sitting.

Jim Hill: So, take a one-minute walk rather than just stand up for one minute.

Keith Diaz: Exactly. Yeah.

Holly Wyatt: Well, and now you have the, do have the treadmills, right, with the desks that you could conceivably still be, you know, because I do think there are people who probably say, I'm on the phone or I'm doing meeting. I literally can't leave for five minutes every 30 minutes to go walk the halls, but potentially you could stand up if you had a mechanism to walk a walking pad even, maybe.

I don't know. The thing I was just thinking of, so when you stand up, you remove the kink you were talking about. So, that may be not enough. It's got, you got to remove the kink, the bend, and you've got to use your muscles to pump stuff around. It sounds like maybe.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. You need to pump movement. And also, we go back to the other mechanism we talked about that regular skeletal muscle contraction is really important for your body's health and for some of the important mechanism we talked about for glucose or blood sugar management, lipid management. There's not much by way of muscle contraction going on during standing. There's some, there's more than sitting, but it's still not a sizable amount. So, the movement breaks is really what we're honing and encouraging that if you're worried about your sitting habits, we have good evidence to suggest that the movement is, it can help.

Holly Wyatt: I got to add one thing because this is my late-night TV, sometimes I can't sleep and I happen to watch it and they show these little things that you can sit in a chair and move your feet, you know, the little bitty things and I'm always, and they're like, even exercise, they even have one that does it for you. And I'm like, no, no. And, and now I'm wondering, oh my gosh, maybe they do, do you think that would work?

Keith Diaz: Yeah. I mean, we haven't tested it in theory and principle. It makes sense. If we're talking about the mechanism as we need muscle contraction, then absolutely that seems to be potential viable solution. I can't say definitively yes or no, because we haven't tested it. It makes some sense in principle. It also goes to like, we've seen studies on fidgeting. And so, going back to that, we talked about the blood vessel damage that can happen when you are in the sitting posture, that fidgeting can offset some of the harm that comes from the blood vessels from sitting with just fidgeting, not moving, just fidgeting. So I would say any type of muscle contraction that you can do is better than not and perhaps can help. The scientific evidence base still needs to catch up to my hypotheses here, but it makes sense in principle.

Jim Hill: You know, Keith, technology is a wonderful thing in many ways, but it really is largely responsible for the fact that we don't need movement to get through our day. You know, one of my friends used to say, we used to pay people to exercise because you had to exercise at work. Now we're all sitting in front of a computer at work. And even in our leisure time, our leisure time, there are so many sedentary, really attractive things to do.

Games on your phone, your computer, or you can go on the internet. So this is a huge powerful force moving us to engineer movement out of our lives. How do you counter that? Going to get worse, we aren't going to have fewer TV channels, we're going to have more and more computer games.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, I wish there was a simple answer. I don't think there is. This kind of, this rising tide of technology making us just become more and more, a society of couch potatoes is a huge problem. And I think we've long seen that, you know, these technologies, first we're used to make our lives more efficient and to carve out more leisure time. I can have a vacuum self-cleaning the floor, dishwashers washing my dirty dishes, and laundry things washing my dirty clothes.

Somebody's out shopping for my groceries right now. All of that is minimizing the movement I need to do. But what are we replacing it with when we get that extra time? What are we doing with it? And we’re defaulting to Netflix, right?

We're sitting on the top. These technologies were meant to free us up to be able to do these more leisure pursuits. But because now the leisure options, I mean, Netflix is great.

Like, don't get me wrong, there's lots of great television and things to watch. And so people get more pleasure out of those things than they do from kind of the more active pursuits. And that's where the challenge becomes, like, we've gotten too good at the technology we've developed and the entertainment that we've developed, that people get more reward out of the leisure entertainment that's out there than they do from being physically active. So that's the struggle that I think we're finding as a society, or just as behavior scientists, of how do we change behavior when we are heeding these two creatures who do things that bring us pleasure? And when we get more pleasure out of binge-watching a TV show, then we do what of going for a bike ride.

Jim Hill: I think there's value in movement that's over and above these other things. I think there's a quality of life aspect to movement that we're missing out on. And given the powerful forces promoting more sedentary behavior, I don't know how we counter those. But I think as a society, this is a problem that we need to think about.

And who knows, maybe technology that created the problem can solve the problem. Maybe we get Bill Gates and Elon Musk together to figure out how to do this and come up with some ways to increase physical activity.

Keith Diaz: So we did a study last year in partnership with National Public Radio, where we had 20,000 people take movement breaks for two weeks just to try it out and to see, like, could they do it in their real life? And we collect a lot of feedback from our participants on, like, did they like it?

Did they hate it? Is it possible to do in the real world? And I was overwhelmed by the response from our participants who said that taking this movement breaks for them was life-changing, but not from a, like, I lowered my blood pressure or my blood sugar, like, none of that. It was... Man, I just, I wasn't in a brain fog anymore. At the end of the day, like I felt like I had energy. I didn't feel fatigued. Like I just liked how I felt at the end of the day and I liked disconnecting from my screen throughout my day.

Jim Hill: I love that. I love that because that gets to quality of life issues. And I think at the end of the day, those are important issues for people.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. And so that for us was just recognizing that like just harnessing like the mood and the energy and the mental health aspects of movement throughout the day and technology breaks. I think we have to, and there's probably some policy level stuff that needs to happen for us to realize like the addiction that comes from these technologies and how do we combat that and help people break away from the screens and realize that like, actually it's really good for my mental health. It's really good for my work productivity to take breaks. It's not good for me to work for eight hours straight on a computer.

Holly Wyatt: Yeah. It sounds like what needs to happen is everybody needs to experience it. That, you know, to tell someone, we're big on experiential assignments and, you know, figuring out, gathering your own data, which is kind of what you're saying. It's like, you may not realize how good this could feel for you unless you try it. It's almost like challenging people to do, you know, a weak challenge of doing this and just gathering their own data and seeing what they, you know, what it feels like is something that I think would be, would be good for a lot of our listeners maybe to try.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, absolutely. I would encourage everybody just to try to see what works. I mean, we had people do it every half hour, but you just try it for whatever you can do. And what we found was we asked people to tell us, like, what was the hardest thing?

Like, what was your biggest barrier to doing this? And the number one thing people told us was they forgot that they didn't realize how much they're sitting and like two hours flew by and they're like, oh my gosh, I didn't move for the last two hours. I didn't, like, we heard a lot of that. And I think getting people to change their mindset and tune into like, oh, I didn't realize how much I spend sitting. So that resonates with me, Hollywood, you're saying of like, I don't think people realize just how much they sit and for how long they sit without moving. And we just have to tune them in a little bit more to their sitting habits and having that self-awareness more of how much they sit in a day.

Jim Hill: They need some prompts to remind them because it sounds like if you could do that, oh yeah, I can get up and walk for a minute. I just forgot that I needed to do that.

Keith Diaz: Yeah.

Holly Wyatt: And then it's like, oh, I want to continue doing it because I like the effect. So it's like prompts to do it and then their own experience to say it was worth doing it. Because I did feel different.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. So let's talk about the prompts for a little bit. People in the long-term hate prompts. So we talked about prompts from like your Apple Watch or your Fitbit or you do your phone. And so people get really tired of those prompts really quickly. But we heard from so many of our participants, they were like, why didn't you give us something to like not just or prompt us? And for us, it was like, oh yeah, of course. Like we need something to help them build the habit first.

Get them into that mode. Oh yeah. This is like how often I should be moving. I forgot that I was sitting for this long a time. Like we have to build them up to that because it's so ingrained that we just ignore how much we sit. But I think what we ultimately would want to leverage prompts or not just is to help build habits over long term.

Jim Hill: Oh, I think you're right. We talk a lot about that Keith. Most of our behavior is automatic. We have these paths in our brain that we don't even think about it. And it's hard to disrupt those and create new ones.

But if you can create new ones, then you don't have to think about this behavior all the time, you just do it. So I love that idea of how do we actually create a habit of getting up periodically to move.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, tying it into your day. So tying it, so some of the stuff that we're working on and I think some examples to give listeners are things like, when you finish a work task before you jump into the next one, go take a movement break. When you finish a work meeting, before you do the next thing, like as soon as your cue should be work meeting and I go for a movement break, right? And so tying it into natural rhythms in your work day are going to be far more effective than just relying on this thing that bugs me every hour in times when I don't want to be bugged, when I'm in the middle of a meeting when I'm in the middle of writing something and I'm just really focused right now, that doesn't help. And so tying it into your natural rhythms with these kinds of natural cues in your day are ways that I think are going to be far more effective in the long run.

Jim Hill: A lot of our listeners are trying to lose weight or manage their weight. And I think one of the things that we need to help people understand is you talked about sitting or centering times sort of doubling. That's a lot of calories there that you would be burning alternatively. And again, not so much in weight loss, but in weight loss maintenance, the goal is to be able to eat as much as possible without gaining weight. And we're big fans of exercising, but we also talk about reducing sedentary behavior as two separate strategies and you need to do both because both can increase your total energy expenditure, which at the end of the day means you can eat more calories without regaining weight.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's kind of like the secret new strategy to help augment weight loss or help with weight maintenance is that it's not just exercise. This is an extra opportunity to lose weight.

Jim Hill: Yes.

Keith Diaz: And so just to give an example. So we talked about how I mentioned the treadmill desks or the walking paths. Now I'm not saying you should be walking for eight hours. Like nobody, I don't wanna do that. That's a long time to be walking. If you walked at a lot pace on what he's walked, walking paths with these treadmill desks, if you walked for two and a half hours over the course of the day, not straight, but just two and a half hours over the course of your work day, you'd burn an extra almost 500 calories.

Jim Hill: Wow, that's significant.

Keith Diaz: I mean, what a simple strategy of just like, if I'm going to work, if I have two work meetings during my day that are hour long, I've just gotten two hours in, I didn't even have to worry about like trying to tight while working, I'm just tuning into my work meeting. Right, like, I think it's a really an effective, simple strategy for those of us who are chained to our desk to just build in an extra weight loss strategy while I'm working.

Jim Hill: And while you're talking on the phone. I mean, there's no reason why you couldn't walk on a treadmill while you're talking on the phone. I actually can focus better if I'm walking.

Holly Wyatt: Well, that's one that I do now. Anytime, especially if I'm just talking to friends or family, my rule, and it's my habit now, I just do it now without thinking is I'm standing up and I'm walking around, I'm just walking in my house, wherever I, you know, somewhere safe, but just walking, I may not be on a treadmill, but it's just, and I've gotten kind of used to it. I now associate a phone call with standing up and walking, which-

Jim Hill: A new habit, Holly.

Holly Wyatt: I know.

Keith Diaz: I'm a big fan now, I've been doing a lot more walking meetings instead of sitting meetings. It doesn't work for every type of meeting, but like if I'm having one-on-one meetings, like, why do we have to sit here in these two chairs? Let's go walk outside for a little bit and we can chat about those things we need to do. And right, like, again, extra weight loss, if that's your focus, your goal, but those are extra calories, you can just sneak into your day with just why do we always sit when we do things?

Jim Hill: One quick story about that, Holly and I used to be in Colorado and we promoted a lot of the walking meetings and there was a CEO of a healthcare company in Colorado who started once a week going for a walk and any employee could walk with him and complain and talk. And he said it was the best thing he did for morale because people felt like they had a direct input to the CEO, but they had to walk with them. So you accomplished two things at once.

Keith Diaz: I love that. And that kind of echoes like, how do we change this? Like leadership. Yes. And oftentimes can start with leadership, setting the tone, not an organization. And what a great way to set the tone for an organization. When you're doing the example for your employees right then and there.

Holly Wyatt: I love that. You're not telling them what to do. It's be the change, right? You're just, you're doing it. And then that's the best way to get other people involved. We don't like to be told things, you know, as a society to say that you have to do this, you know, or that you're required or legislated. We push back against that, but you see other people doing it, you think that's a good idea, you naturally join in. That's really how to, I think, spread it, get a lot of people doing it.

Jim Hill: So Keith, what exciting research do you have coming down the pike that it can get our listeners excited about what they're going to learn?

Keith Diaz: We are branching into, I've spent a lot of time in the lab. And we'd have people sit in our lab for hours and we study what happens to them when they sit. It's time for us to get out into the real world. And we're trying to figure out how to get people to take movement breaks in the real world. And so we're trying a lot of different strategies to help people do it. And our goal is to figure out what works best for people.

And we're learning along the way. And I think so many things that we thought would work don't. And we're learning from our participants what really works.

But a lot of things like, we're hearing from a lot of people like what helps them is, things like we call them somatic check-ins, but essentially they're just, we're getting people to tune into their bodies more. And I think what happens is we, and I saw this with my kids when they transitioned from like not in school, they were just like balls of energy all over the place all the time. And they never sit still for more than a half hour at a time. Like they just naturally bounce all over the place. And, but then when they went into kindergarten and first grade, second grade, like it became like you sit still, you sit in that chair and don't move and you listen. And then through that adult, right? That's what we're told.

Jim Hill: I love it. I worked with, I don't know if you remember Jim Levine who used to be at Mayo Clinic. We designed the school at the future where there were no chairs. There were no chairs at all in the school. Why do you have to sit all day?

And, you know, lots of kids just, they go crazy and so we give them medication to calm them down because they don't want to sit all day. I love it.

Keith Diaz: Yeah. And so the premise here is like, as children, we have these kinds of like internal cues where like we start getting fidgety and anxious and we want to move around. But that we start, we teach our kids to tune that out when they enter the school district and we learn through it all the way to when we enter the workforce that like you tune out those bodily sensations, those urges and you keep grinding, you keep working, you keep sitting. And so what we're trying to know hardest now is getting people to tune into their bodies more.

Jim Hill: Love it.

Keith Diaz: Just like you don't have to take a move back every half hour but would like you to do is tune in every half hour. How are you feeling right now? Do you feel a little stiff?

Are you feeling a little lethargic? Like just getting people to retune into like when we were, as kids, we're like, I don't know, I'm going to change my activity.

Jim Hill: It's a little bit like the nutrition people are doing with like mindful eating and thinking about it, et cetera. So we do all this stuff. I mean, we'll sit in front of the TV and eat when don't even remember what we ate. So this tuning into your body is something that works both on the eating side and the movement side.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, that's where we're going. We're finding it really resonates with a lot of people of like, I'm just retuning into my body again. Like that's where we're going. This isn't about me getting too much of this creativity again. We just want you to tune back in. And when you tune it back in, you're going to want to move more.

Jim Hill: All right, Holly, it's time for some listener questions.

Holly Wyatt: I know, I'll start with, I think I have one here. So this question is from Bob. He says I sit at my desk for most of the day. How much physical activity do I need to do to offset all of that sitting? So can you do activity to make up for the sitting?

Keith Diaz: There's some balance. And so if you sit all day, what you don't want to be doing if you're sitting all day at work is don't then sit all day at home. And the ideal is that Bob, you'd be moving throughout your day doing the work. But if you can't, we hear from a lot of people over the course of our studies, like we hear from bus drivers and taxi cab drivers, like it's not possible for them to move during their workday, like they have to drive. Your goal at the end of the day is to accumulate enough activity that you're offsetting the inactivity that are not lack of motion that you did during your work day.

There isn't a magic number per se, we're still learning. But again, if we go back to what we talked about earlier, that about nine to 10 hours per day is probably about the limit that you should be getting in sitting. So if you did eight hours at work, you should probably be only sitting for maybe another two or three hours for the rest of your day. That's how I would think about it. If I'm trying to find this balance of like, okay, I want to shoot for maybe no more than nine to 10 hours and find movement throughout the rest of my day.

Jim Hill: Cool. So Linda asks, are there certain types of screen time or sedentary activities that are worse for my health than others?

Keith Diaz: Short answer, yes. And this is still, it's an emerging era of research we're finding that there's a difference between what we call mentally active and mentally passive sedentary behaviors. So a mentally active sedentary behavior is, I'm doing a crossword puzzle.

I'm doing Sudoku or I'm at my computer working versus I'm watching TV. So there's a lot of research now that suggests that like watching TV, those kind of like, your brain is not really on that much, that those are more harmful sedentary behaviors than the more mentally active from a mental health perspective. So things like more television being associated with greater risk for developing things like depression and anxiety, et cetera. So we're still learning more about this, but it does seem that some sedentary behaviors may be worse than others.

Jim Hill: All right, Holly, you know what time it is now?

Holly Wyatt: The vulnerability question.

Jim Hill: The vulnerability question. So I'll go first.

Holly Wyatt: Okay.

Jim Hill: So you just told us that you had kids. How do you make sure that your kids aren't going to get sucked into just being sedentary all the time?

Keith Diaz: Oh, I'd say struggle. We try to build it into natural parts of our day. So we walk to and from school instead of driving. And that alone, I think, can help us get a little bit more activity in. I mean, that actually ends up being about two miles of walking total from our kids. When we get out of school, we don't go straight home. There's a playground right at our school.

Go play on the playground for a little bit before we go home. And then the other things that we do is usually just kind of, we encourage outdoor time when they come home. Obviously, I would like them to be physically active when they're doing their outdoor time.

That's not always the case, but if your kids they're outdoors, they're more likely to be moving throughout the day. And then I like to trick them into movement with video games. So we have like the dance video games. They think they get to play video games and I'm secretly like, ha, ha, ha, you're actually being physically active. So, getting video games that encourage movement is also a strategy that we like to use and incorporate.

But it's just play-based. Just get your kids outside and play. It doesn't have to be like, I don't make my kids run or something like that. We're not doing yoga to gym class or something. It's just go play.

Jim Hill: And if you play with them, you benefit too.

Keith Diaz: Yeah, absolutely. I think, so people are like, what strategy should I use to be more physically active? I'm like, either have kids or go get a dog.

Holly Wyatt: Yeah, definitely the dog too. That's been looked at. All right, here's one more. Now I don't know this, you may have thought about this one, you may not have. This is a good one. If you could design the ultimate active gadget to get people moving more throughout their day, what would it do? You had like a lot of money, you could come up with something. Use technology to make them more active. No pressure.

Keith Diaz: Oh man. It's probably, there's people already working on it. But like I've seen these machines where like, they like you put these pads on somebody's thighs and it just automatically gets their muscles contracting.

Sadly, that's where I kind of see this. We need like a fast food of movement, like a convenience store, like a fast food convenience store movement where it's quick, easy, I can get you movement quickly and behavior change is really hard. And so if I can get you the dose that you need of movement like quickly and easily with like a, I'll give you a huge stimulus of muscle contraction that overloads your muscles and you're done for the.

Holly Wyatt: Yeah. Now it's kind of like a pill or an injection, right? But a way to do that to your muscles. That's an interesting thought.

Keith Diaz: Just like give your muscles the contraction they need to do this. Give them the stimulus they need to do their job for the day and then you're good.

Holly Wyatt: Yeah.

Keith Diaz: Or maybe you need it throughout the day, but like it's part of my chair.

Holly Wyatt: And it wouldn't get rid of this. You still need the physical activity for other reasons, but it might help with the sedentary sitting part.

I don't know why. I think I'm, I just, I feel like that if we're going to combat the technologies and companies out there, we also need like a very convenient, easy-to-do form. I don't know. Maybe I'm sure one of my movement scientists out there are going to hate that answer.

Holly Wyatt: That's why it's called the vulnerability question because you wish now you hadn't said it. See, that's perfect. That's exactly what we want.

Jim Hill: So look for this device on Amazon in the near future. Okay. I'm going to wrap it up because we've learned a lot, Holly. First of all, we've learned that people are more sedentary than ever and it's not helping us. It's harming our health. And we're still figuring out what to do about it, but taking breaks, I love these movement breaks or movement snacks can really help as little as a few minutes every half hour or hour. And what you need to do is to develop a habit of doing that, of breaking up your sedentary time.

That can be hugely important. And again, we don't have exact numbers, but people should look at trying not to be sedentary more than about nine hours a day. So if you're sedentary a lot at work, you need to make up for it by being active at home. And being active, doing exercise, and being sedentary or separate, and we need to do both.

You need to put some planned exercise in your life, but you'll also need to reduce your sedentary time. It can help burn calories. It can help your glucose, your risk of diabetes. It can help many, many other things.

So really the fact that we're sitting and so much is really a health problem for us, and it's something we really need to work on. Keith, thank you. This has been delightful. I've learned a lot and really appreciate that and appreciate the work you're doing in this area.

Keith Diaz: My utmost pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jim.

Jim Hill: So we will talk to you next time on Weight Loss And.

Holly Wyatt: Bye, everybody.

Jim Hill: And that's a wrap for today's episode of Weight Loss And. We hope you enjoy diving into the world of weight loss with us.

Holly Wyatt: If you want to stay connected and continue exploring the “Ands” of weight loss, be sure to follow our podcast on your favorite platform.

Jim Hill: We'd also love to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, or topic suggestions by reaching out at weightlossand.com. Your feedback helps us tailor future episodes to your needs.

Holly Wyatt: And remember, the journey doesn't end here. Keep applying the knowledge and strategies you've learned and embrace the power of the “And” in your own weight loss journey.