Drop Dead Healthy

The Butt

The Quest to Avoid Sedentary Life

FOUR MONTHS IN, I’VE DECIDED it’s time to declare war on Sedentary Life. It’s not a war I want to fight. I’ve never had anything against the Sedentary Life. It suits me just fine. Before Project Health, I sat happily for ten to twelve hours a day. My Aeron chair and my butt were soul mates. I remember complaining to Julie once about the idea of the standing ovation. Is it really necessary? Can’t we express our approval for Wicked while comfortably seated? Maybe we could raise our arms or bow our heads or stomp our feet.

But the more I read, the more I realize an unfortunate truth: Sitting and staring at screens all day is bad for you. Really bad, like smoking-unfiltered-menthols-while-eating-cheese-coated-lard-and-screaming-at-your-spouse bad. Michelle Obama is right. We need to move. Chairs are the enemy. Sitting puts you at risk for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and some types of cancer, including colon and ovarian.

We weren’t built to sit. Never before in history have we been so immobile. 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 Globe Theatre.

“There are plenty of seats,” the usher whispered to me.

“Thanks, I’m good.”

I listened to the soothing whir of the projector as he kept a wary eye on me.

Speed Writing

And then . . . there’s the desk. The desk is where most of the Crimes of Excessive Sedentary Behavior occur.

Something needed to be done. For a week, I switched to working while standing. I raised my laptop by loading up three cardboard boxes onto my desk. Then I’d stand and peck out e-mails. I heard once that Nabokov wrote his novels standing up, so I was hoping my e-mails would have a Pale Fire quality to them.

It didn’t go badly. I shifted and rocked a lot. I kind of looked like an Orthodox Jew praying at the Western Wall, but with a MacBook instead of a Torah. I kept a stack of two encyclopedias at my feet so that I could rest one foot on it at a time, a key to comfortable long-term standing.

But the real breakthrough came when I combined the desk and movement.

I kept flashing back to the Execusiser in Woody Allen’s Bananas. It was a brilliant invention: a desk combined with a workout station. The phone receiver was hooked up to elastic bands, so answering a call resulted in a biceps curl. That kind of thing.

I couldn’t find any real-life Execusisers online. So I found the next best thing: an idea from Dr. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic. He thinks we should all have our desks in front of treadmills. We should all walk as we work. Levine has gained a small but loyal following of treadmill desk jockeys. They trade tips and stories on the websites, and coin terms like “deskercise” and “iPlod.”

You can buy professionally made treadmill desks for four hundred dollars. Or you can jury-rig your own. I chose the latter.

I did so because I already have a treadmill—the one lying fallow thanks to the complaints of my neighbors below. If I walk on my treadmill, my neighbors can’t protest. It’s so civilized, so quiet. I stroll at barely one mile per hour.

I balanced my laptop on top of a wooden box, and I slung a long pole across my treadmill to rest my elbows. This arrangement, by the way, came after about a half-dozen collapsed versions involving dictionaries, filing cabinets, and masking tape. But it works.

I’m on it right now. This chapter has taken about 1.5 miles to write. I want this book to be the first book written mostly on a treadmill.

There are some skeptics. My aunt Marti chided me. She said it’s multitasking. She told me I’m not in the moment. Very un-Buddhist. Julie asked me, “Isn’t it distracting to type and walk?”

But overall, I’m liking it. In the beginning, it was a little odd. You have to get over the initial hump, that siren call of the chair. But now I found walking while working actually helps hone my focus. When I’m sitting, I’m fidgety. I’m always tempted to stand up and get a snack, use the bathroom, water the plants—anything to avoid working. With my treadmill desk, I’m getting rid of all my nervous energy. Plus, when you’re walking, you can’t fall asleep. No small thing.

I wonder if the Tread-desk has changed my writing style. Are my sentences more energetic? I can’t tell. I do know that I feel more confident and positive when I’m striding along, more likely to answer e-mails with an emphatic “Yes! I would love to go mountain biking in Connecticut, despite the forecast of thunderstorms.” So I have to be careful.

Standing in the Presence of the Elderly

I spent some time standing at my grandfather’s apartment today. It felt almost natural not to sit. The Old Testament commands us to stand in the presence of the elderly, so it was a nice callback to my days of living biblically. I stand behind my grandfather’s cushy brown recliner.

I’m visiting on movie day. My grandfather’s former colleague is over, and wants to see a documentary in which my grandfather appeared. My aunt Jane—a lawyer visiting from Maryland—slides in the DVD and presses play. The documentary is about the artist Christo and his Central Park Gates. These, as you might remember, consisted of a forest of metal poles draped in orange fabric that appeared in the park in 2005. My grandfather was Christo’s lawyer.

I’ve seen the movie before. But it’s a joy to watch it with him. He gets such a kick out of his younger, brasher self.

The movie opens with my grandfather and Christo’s first meeting more than thirty years ago. You hear the comically loud clacking of typewriters, and watch as Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, enter my grandfather’s office. He’s on the phone sounding important (“Good,” “Okay” “Let’s make sure the record is correct”) and nods at the artists as they settle into chairs.

Eventually he hangs up, puts his index finger on his temple, and listens as this stringy-haired eccentric Bulgarian and his French wife tell him their zany plans. They want to install eighteen thousand gates in Central Park.

My 1979 grandfather practically does a spit take. My 2010 grandfather, watching in his recliner, laughs. “I had never met them before,” he says. “I’d barely heard of them. I thought they were nuts.”

At meeting’s end, he agrees to be their lawyer. He tells them the next step is to petition the Parks Department. My grandfather says, “You’ve got to think like [the Parks Department]. They’re thinking what can go wrong. What’ll the Jews say, what’ll the Irish say, what’ll the Poles say?”

My grandfather worked with the Christos for twenty-six years, seeing them through hundreds of meetings, committees, briefs, and fund-raising events. “I know it’ll happen one day,” he always said. And then, finally, there it was, this bizarre but beautiful ocean of tangerine-colored fabric in Central Park.

The documentary ends with the 2005 unveiling of The Gates. You can see my grandfather sitting between the Christos in the backseat of a car, touring Central Park. He’s more stooped than his 1979 self, less stooped than his 2010 version, but he still has the ever-present childlike wonder: “Wow. Wow. Wow,” he says as they pass by The Gates.

My 2010 grandfather smiles and says, “It only took twenty-six years.” It really is a remarkable statistic. It’s a real lesson in fortitude, optimism, and persistence. The Little Conceptual Art Project That Could.

I’ve often wondered if my grandfather’s unflagging determination and optimism is a key to his longevity. Some studies point to yes: A fifteen-year-long Duke study found that optimistic heart patients had a 30 percent higher chance of survival. Another fifteen-year study of three thousand heart disease sufferers showed that the optimistic patients lived 20 percent longer. Other studies say there’s no difference. The evidence is especially weak linking optimism and recovery from cancer. Despite the claims of pop psychologists and books like The Secret, you can’t think your way out of cancer with a positive attitude (more on that later).

Just as important, overoptimism is probably harmful. You have to be neurotic and realistic enough to go for regular checkups and take your meds. You need enough determination to attend to the details. A ninety-year longevity study by Howard Friedman, a University of California–Riverside psychology professor, found that a low but persistent level of worry about your health is correlated with longer lives.

So that’s what I’ll adopt: moderate optimism with a soupçon of anxiety. I can handle that.

As I leave, my grandfather plants his hands on the arms of his recliner and hoists himself up, over my protestations. He grabs Jane’s shoulder to steady himself. He’s bent over, his spine at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, his legs wobbly. “We will see you soon?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” I say.

Checkup: Month 4

Weight: 165

Miles walked writing this book thus far: 85 (My goal is to make this a thousand-mile book.)

Number of walnuts eaten this month: 790

Pounds lifted on squat machine (3 sets, 15 reps): 40

Glasses of goat’s milk drunk: 10 (Many of the longest-lived civilizations drink goat’s milk, according to The Blue Zones.)

Overall health: not good. I got a cold. Despite devoting most of my waking hours to being healthy, I got a cold.

Jennifer Ackerman’s book Ah-Choo!, a history of colds, has a great quote about colds from the nineteenth-century poet Charles Lamb. “If you told me the world will be at an end tomorrow, I should just say, ‘Will it?’ . . . My skull is a Grub Street attic to let.”

My skull is definitely atticlike. I can’t find any coherent thoughts in there. But unlike Lamb, I’m more annoyed than apathetic. How could my body betray me?

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It’s far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y’all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip. I get a half-dozen colds per year. Julie, on the other hand, rarely gets sick. My kids should thank me for marrying up the immune system ladder.

For this cold, I’ve tried all the cures and treatments with any half-reliable evidence behind them. Zinc supplements, gargling with salt water, sleep, and using a neti pot. (All the others—echinacea, Airborne, megadoses of vitamin C, hot-water bottles on your head—have, sadly, little scientific support.)

The neti pot was the one that surprised me most. In case you’ve never seen it, it looks like a teapot, but instead of pouring raspberry zinger into a cup, you pour salt water into your nostril. The water gushes up to the sinus, splashes around a bit, then streams out the other nostril. The idea behind it is nasal irrigation, which thins the mucus, making it easier to expel.

It’s a profoundly unnatural feeling, this meandering river inside the cranium. I coughed. I sputtered. I suppressed terror. I tilted my head in anatomically unsound angles. But in the end, it was far better than expected. It opened up my sinuses and cleared out the gunk. The inside of my head felt big and clear, a skull-size version of Montana. I plan to use my neti pot every day.

Julie used it, too. The next morning, not knowing what it was, she used it as a holder for Lucas’s soft-boiled egg. I was horrified. She shrugged. Which brings me to . . .