Churchill smoked a lot. He also drank a lot. He also did not "exercise". But he kept fit and healthy for a ling time being PM in his 60's in WWII.
Why was he so healthy? Link here and HT Rob Lantz
In his time, he was celebrated as much for his literary achievements – 77 volumes, thousands of speeches and essays – as for his statesmanship. (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.) Remarkably, using a wood lectern attached to a wall in his study at Chartwell, his beloved manor home in Kent, he wrote and dictated much of this work standing up, often striding about the room, as one historian put it, “in a cloud of cigar smoke.” He regarded writing as a physical as well as an intellectual exercise. But he frequently combined it with bricklaying and grounds work: “200 bricks and 200 words a day.”
Churchill’s example now appears relevant again because of the remarkable findings of James Levine, a medical researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. For the past five years, Dr. Levine has sought the answer to a simple question: Why do some people, who consume the same calories as other people and who exercise the same, gain more weight than those people? The answer, as revealed in a series of experiments using highly sensitive motion sensors to track subjects’ moment-by-moment movements: The people who didn’t put on weight moved more than the people who did.
In a New York Times report on Dr. Levine’s research, writer James Vlahos noted that the difference wasn’t the result of exercise. In these experiments, subjects wore motion sensors from morning to night, at home and work – and the rules prohibited conventional exercise of any kind. The people who did not gain weight had merely moved around more in their daily routines: walked more, took the stairs more, got up from their desks more, fidgeted more and, most significantly, stood more. On average, Mr. Vlahos said, the subjects who gained weight sat for two hours a day more than the subjects who didn’t. Movement matters. Indeed, the mere bending over to tie a shoelace helps control weight – and helps prolong life.
Sitting all day is emerging as one of the worst thisngs that we can do.
Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”
The good news is that inactivity’s peril can be countered. Working late one night at 3 a.m., Dr. Levine coined a name for the concept of reaping major benefits through thousands of minor movements each day: NEAT, which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. In the world of NEAT, even the littlest stuff matters. McCrady-Spitzer showed me a chart that tracked my calorie-burning rate with zigzagging lines, like those of a seismograph. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of the spikes, which indicated that the rate had shot up. “That’s when you bent over to tie your shoes,” she said. “It took your body more energy than just sitting still.”
In a motion-tracking study, Dr. Levine found that obese subjects averaged only 1,500 daily movements and nearly 600 minutes sitting. In my trial with the magic underwear, I came out looking somewhat better — 2,234 individual movements and 367 minutes sitting. But I was still nowhere near the farm workers Dr. Levine has studied in Jamaica, who average 5,000 daily movements and only 300 minutes sitting.
Dr. Levine knows that we can’t all be farmers, so instead he is exploring ways for people to redesign their environments so that they encourage more movement. We visited a chairless first-grade classroom where the students spent part of each day crawling along mats labeled with vocabulary words and jumping between platforms while reciting math problems. We stopped by a human-resources staffing agency where many of the employees worked on the move at treadmill desks — a creation of Dr. Levine’s, later sold by a company called Steelcase.
Dr. Levine was in a philosophical mood as we left the temp agency. For all of the hard science against sitting, he admits that his campaign against what he calls “the chair-based lifestyle” is not limited to simply a quest for better physical health. His is a war against inertia itself, which he believes sickens more than just our body. “Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaiseabout being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”
