Stand Up to Burn Calories

It may come as a s surprise to you that stand­ing rather than sit­ting each day may help your body con­sume around up to 30 more calo­ries per hour. Reduc­ing 30 calo­ries per day may seem triv­ial, but 30 fewer calo­ries per day means 3.1 pounds lost over the course of a year. For many of us, weight gain is a grad­ual process, a mat­ter of a pound or two per year. You can gain 3 pounds in a year if, each day, you con­sume just 30 calo­ries more than you burn. As lit­tle as one hour stand­ing on your feet and one less hour sit­ting can actu­ally spell the dif­fer­ence between remain­ing at your cur­rent weight or get­ting fat­ter. If you exer­cise for 1 hour each day, the 8 hours you spend work­ing and the sev­eral hours of leisure time each day can have a big impact on weight gain or loss. You can make health­ier deci­sions through­out the day. Will you take the stairs or ride the ele­va­tor? As lit­tle as 5 min­utes of stair-climbing burns 144 calo­ries. Do you rely on email rather than get­ting up and hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with your co-worker? Walk­ing, even at an easy 3 mph pace, burns 280 calo­ries per hour. When you get lunch, do you always have it deliv­ered, or could you eas­ily walk to get it? Just by tak­ing short breaks (stand­ing up occa­sion­ally to stretch or walk­ing down the hall) you be on your way to a slim­mer waist. In brief, by stand­ing and walk­ing more, and sit­ting less, you’ll be health­ier in the long run.