Professional Sitters
Computers brought a welcome reduction in the mind-numbing tasks we used to perform manually, but you might say technology is now numbing our backsides instead. Before the Internet revolution, for example, we might have traveled across town for a business meeting; now we sit in on a video conference call instead. Before the advent of email, we might have trotted upstairs to go over a draft presentation with a coworker; now we just zap her a copy electronically. The average worker at the turn of the 20th century put in about three hours of strenuous labor per day. One hundred years later, that number is down to just five minutes.
Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson may have put it best when he said American society had mistakenly “made fitness a fad rather than a way of life.”
Let’s face it: Most college-educated Americans in their 20s know that they should be physically active and eat healthy foods, but many seem to find the task too overwhelming. All the emphasis our society places on perfect bodies and dieting, experts say, may be intimidating people out of taking smaller steps toward good health — like taking a half-hour walk each day.