Drop Dead Healthy A. Jacobs (good novels to read .TXT) 📖

According to Harvard professor John Ratey, our Paleolithic forefathers walked eight to ten miles a day. Our grandparents expended an average of eight hundred calories a day more than we do. According to the book The Blue Zones, the cultures with the longest life spans—such as those in Okinawa and Sardinia—move all the time, lugging food up steep hills. (For the first time in my life, I wish New York had more hills. It’s dangerously flat.)

The problem for Americans is that we’ve Balkanized our lives. We go to the gym for an hour (if we’re dutiful) and then sit for the rest of the day. Movement is sealed into an airtight container. When I was twelve, I had a strange fantasy about isolating all of life’s activities and batching them together. I wished I could brush my teeth for a month, then be finished with that for the rest of my earthly existence. I’d go to the bathroom for two years. Perhaps have sex for six weeks. We live in a less extreme version of my scenario. We sit and sit and sit, then have a burst of movement.

Studies show that even regular gym-going can’t fully undo the harm of sitting. So my plan is to tear down the wall between exercise and life. I’ve started doing what I call guerrilla exercise—or what my friend calls contextual exercise. I squeeze physical activity into every nook in my day.

I climb the four flights of stairs to our apartment. “Meet you up there,” Julie will say as she hops in the elevator. Once in a while, I’ll beat her to our front door and wait there, tapping my watch, looking impatient and trying not to hyperventilate. “Good one,” she says as she walks by.

I avoid the People Movers at airports. Yes, I move my own person. I actually roll my suitcase over the stationary ground. I know! Heroic.

I read one health article that recommended doing pull-ups from the “Don’t Walk” sign when waiting at the corner. I tried that. Even my five-year-old was embarrassed for me. So I stopped.

And, in my biggest change yet, I’ve started to run errands. Literally run them. In normal usage, “running errands” is one of the most euphemistic phrases in the English language. We don’t run errands. We walk errands. Or, more often, we drive errands.

But for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been on a mission of literalness. I run to the drugstore, buy a toothbrush, then run home. I run to the grocery, to the barber, to pick up my kids at school.

Granted, running errands has its downsides. I sweated through my shirt on my way to an Esquire meeting. (I now carry a stick of deodorant in my bag). It can take longer than doing an errand in a car or bus—though not always, especially if it’s a ten-block-or-under errand.

Also, it freaks people out. Grown men in street clothes aren’t supposed to run in public. The other day, I was running down the street—dressed in jeans and a big puffy coat—and a woman pushing a stroller stopped and shouted after me, “Is everything okay?” She probably thought a dirty bomb had just detonated.

Running errands takes an act of will. I have to force my recalcitrant legs to start pumping with a ten-nine-eight countdown. But oh, the upsides. For one thing, it eases the guilt if I skip the gym one day. The world is my gym, I tell myself. And the bags of cereal and orange juice are my dumbbells. And there’s a glorious feeling of efficiency—you’re multitasking, but in a low-tech and beneficial way that won’t frazzle your brain or cause four-car pileups. Running errands also burns more calories than walking the same distance. (Running a mile erases 124 calories for men, while walking a mile takes only 88, according to the studies.)

So that’s my new thing, telling Julie “I’m off to run some errands.”

Even if I’m not running, I try to avoid sitting. All this antisedentary research has had a weird and unpleasant effect on my psyche. I can no longer rest in peace. The longer I’m seated, the guiltier I feel. After half an hour, I have that same queasy sensation I get from bingeing on half a box of Chips Ahoy.

The problem with sitting, as biologist and author Olivia Judson explains, is twofold. The first part is obvious: We burn fewer calories when we’re sitting. The second part is more subtle but perhaps more profound: marathon sitting sessions change our body’s metabolism. A molecule called lipase is crucial to helping muscles absorb fat. When we sit, we don’t produce lipase, allowing the fat to go off and do naughty things like deposit itself as body fat or clog the arteries.

There are plenty of studies on sitting. To take just one: The University of South Carolina and Pennington Biomedical Research Center compared heart problems in men who spent more than twenty-three hours a week sitting, and those who sat for less than eleven hours. The big sitters had a 64 percent higher chance of fatal heart disease. And the bad news doesn’t end there. The sitters weren’t slackers. A lot of them went to the gym when they weren’t sitting. But their workouts couldn’t fully overcome the damage from their desk chair.

So when I’m not moving, I try to stand, which is at least something. As Judson writes, “Compared to sitting, standing in one place is hard work. To stand, you have to tense your leg muscles, and engage the muscles of your back and shoulders; while standing, you often shift from leg to leg. All of this burns energy.”

Julie and I went to see Star Trek last night, and after forty minutes, I excused myself to stand in the back of the theater.

I felt righteous. Sitting during entertainment? That’s for the effete and the weak. I convinced myself I was a descendant of the hardy groundlings, the folks who paid a penny to stand in the dirt pit at Shakespeare’s