Saturday, February 8, 2020

Life with Chronic Conditions: Adopt the NEAT approach to exercise


Yes, being “neat” and adopting NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenes)  have something in common. When you spend time cleaning the house, doing yard work, laundry and in general “neating up,” you are contributing to your NEAT score.

Research has shown that the more you regularly move throughout the day, the healthier you’ll be. Working out at the gym and then sitting all day doesn’t provide the same benefit.

This past May(2019) new research in the Journal of the American Medical Association is shedding some new light on just how active we need to be. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health, decided to test this out by observing step totals and mortality rates of elderly American women (16,741, mean age 72). “The basic finding was that at 4,400 steps per day, these women had significantly lower mortality rates compared to the least active women,” Lee explains. If they did more, their mortality rates continued to drop, until they reached about 7,500 steps, at which point the rates leveled out. Ultimately, increasing daily physical activity by as little as 2,000 steps—less than a mile of walking—was associated with positive health outcomes for the elderly women. The Atlantic

Interestingly, the longest lived people in the world don’t pump iron or go to the gym. Instead, their environments constantly encourage them to move so that the “healthy choice” is the easy choice.

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