Suddenly, I was spending up to 10 hours a day, five days a week, sitting in an office chair. (A particularly uncomfortable office chair — let’s not even talk about how sore my back got and how my posture deteriorated.) The weight gain promptly followed.

Now, studies are saying that it doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the day sitting, you’re putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death, reports the New York Times. That’s right: No matter how vigorously you exercise, sitting for long periods is bad for you. Healthy people who exercise regularly but also sit for most of the day have larger waists and poorer blood pressure and blood sugar than those who sit less. Not only is sitting one of the most passive things you can do — even chewing gum burns more energy — but research is suggesting that there’s a “physiology of inactivity,” that your body does things that are bad for you when you’re chair-bound for hours.

Think you’re doomed?

You may think you have no choice about how much you sit. But this isn’t true. Suppose you sleep for eight hours each day, and exercise for one. That still leaves 15 hours of activities. Even if you exercise, most of the energy you burn will be burnt during these 15 hours, so weight gain is often the cumulative effect of a series of small decisions: Do you take the stairs or the elevator? Do you e-mail your colleague down the hall, or get up and go and see her? When you get home, do you potter about in the garden or sit in front of the television? Do you walk to the corner store, or drive?

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

Do you spend all day sitting in a chair? How do you counterbalance all of those hours of inactivity?

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