Sitting Is The New Smoking

A co-worker of mine recently had his desk converted to a standing setup. Until this point, I hadn’t even realized that was possible, so I took to Google and found some rather disturbing news.

Sitting Is The New Smoking

You are (supposedly) better off smoking cigarettes than sitting in an office.

As if this and this weren’t enough reason to quit my office job, now I’ve got this, too. Granted, I have talked before about how doctors are just trying to make a “fair” dollar at the end of the day (and how they hate men), and don’t really care about patients, but let’s play along.

The way Dr. Levine describes it, sitting isn’t pretty. The body’s metabolic engines go to sleep. The muscles stop moving all together and the heart slows. Then, the body’s calorie-burning rate plummets to about one calorie per minute — a third of what it would be if you were walking.  Insulin effectiveness drops and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises.  Fat and cholesterol levels rise too.

“It is almost like sort of owning a really cool sports car and letting it idle all day long.  The engine gets gunked up. That’s what happens to our bodies. The body, as we know, simply isn’t built to sit all day,”  Levine said.

First off, the article doesn’t even reference or compare the two items of sitting and smoking. Great journalism, NBC, as always.

Continuing…

All of the sudden if you take that historical view of this, you realize we’re living a completely different way to how we were designed.  I mean it is inconceivable that we were ever going to be a group, a population, a species sitting on our bottoms all day long.  We’re just not meant to do that.  So is it a surprise that the consequences are devastating?  No,” Levine said.  

Now that is a good point.  I’ve harped on this before, how biology wants to run it’s natural course and kill the fuckers who deserve to die.

It’s a shame that the doctor completely discredited himself when he said this:

While Levine says there is unquestionably “ a very significant genetic component” to  obesity and that nutrition is very important, he also says:  “We all live in the same society. We all have desks and chairs and sofas and Lazy Boy armchairs and TVs.  We all have the same stuff.  We all live in the same environment, but half of us have a weight problem and half of us don’t.

Sorry, buddy. You. Are. Simply. Wrong. Obesity kills because people are lazy fuckers, who, like I said here, deserve to die.

Organisms reproduce more than the environment can handle.  There are a limited amount of resources that have to be spread across our society.  Money is at the root of all of it.  The people who are more intelligent, more educated, and better socially adept (often because they are physically attractive) are going to have more of it.  The people that don’t have money line up in the welfare line and take the money from the rest of us.  It’s a matter of scarcity, and everyone is competing for what we have. Unfortunately, the government has intervened with nature.  Biologically, our species wants the scum mooching from the rest of society to be buried six feet under.  They are contributing nothing to society except sitting on the corner asking for a handout, taking money away from the people who worked hard and earned it.

Survival of the fittest, baby.

But, let’s thing about it. I’ve had multiple co-workers suffer heart attacks while on their desk, and they were veterans of the cubicle world. Lots of people have hard at tacks every day, but it would be near impossible to prove sitting at a desk is the leading cause of most of those. On the flip side, smoking clearly is not good for you as per every elementary/middle/high school assembly and will likely result in a shorter lifespan.

Regardless though, I’ll be the first to tell you sitting in a cubicle all day is not good for you. I’ve lost some hair, weight is harder to keep off, and I’ve experienced wrist, back, and neck pain all from sitting eight hours a day at my desk. Like I said, one more reason to keep grinding away towards freedom.

Yet another reason to just skip college and go learn a real skill as Cappy advocates.

Read More: 13 Things Men Should Be Shamed For, Not Celebrated