The New Year is here. To ring in the occasion, many of us will have a few cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, stay out well past our bedtimes -- and vow to start eating right and exercising more in 2017. Some will abandon that resolution within a matter of days. Others will make it a few weeks. But few of us will stay true to our promise to get healthy. Overall, just 8 percent of people who make a New Year's resolution actually achieve their goal.
It doesn't have to be that way. Americans are overlooking an easy way to get healthy, one that can be accomplished with almost no additional effort. And that's simply standing more.
Shedding pounds has long been among the most popular New Year's resolutions. Four in ten of those who make resolutions focus on their weight. The vast majority will fail. It's not hard to see why. People spend most of their time completely still. The average American sits 13 hours every day. In other words, we're glued to chairs for more than half our lives.
A big reason for that is the nature of modern-day work. Since 1950, jobs where folks are tied to a desk have increased 83 percent. Today, only two in ten jobs are active -- well below the five in ten that existed half a century ago. That's not just impeding folks' ability to stay lean; it's threatening their ability to stay alive. Sedentary people are more than twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes and almost two-and-a-half times more likely to develop heart disease than those who maintain an active lifestyle. And prolonged sitting is behind up to 173,000 cases of cancer every year. Worse still, research shows that even an hour of rigorous exercise is insufficient to undo the damage of a day's worth of sitting.