With all the research that’s been done lately around obesity, it should come as no surprise that a sedentary lifestyle is very harmful to your health. These days, the average American sits for about nine hours every day, longer than the time they spend sleeping each night.

When you sit for more than an hour at a time, the fat-burning enzymes in your body seriously slow down. This decrease in metabolism increases the risk for weight gain and Type 2 diabetes. In fact, your life expectancy gets shorter each time you sit for a while without getting up and moving around.

Perhaps the most striking bit of evidence that has come out of all this research is that sitting all day has the same negative health consequences regardless of whether or not you consistently spend one concentrated period of time exercising. For example, if you were to spend every day of the week sitting at a desk and then going for a 45 minute run when you got home, that run would not be sufficient to offset the harm of the sitting you had done earlier. Rather, it is small, incremental amounts of movement interspersed throughout the day that matter the most. (Ideally, of course, everyone would be physically able to have periodic exercise in their day with an additional, more strenuous workout as well.)

So what can you do to get up more throughout the day?

Like most healthy behaviors, it’s best to do a small amount as often as you can. Try taking a short walk every hour, even just for a minute or two. Just getting up to stand once an hour is better than not getting up at all. If you have the time and the physical means, taking longer periodic walking breaks for 10-15 minutes a few times a day is a great way to get your metabolism restarted when sitting begins to slow it down.  Try getting off the bus a few blocks earlier to fit a walk into your daily routine, or stand up and do some stretching every now and then. Be creative in finding ways to be just a little more active.

It’s also important to note that most of the research out there about sitting is written with the assumption that most folks are spending their days doing desk work, when clearly that is not the case for everyone. The bottom line is that whatever job or activity your daily life entails, long periods of sitting is harmful, and the more you can move periodically throughout the day the healthier you’ll be.

For more information on the harmful effects of sitting and ideas on how to move more, see these two articles: “Sitting is the Smoking of Our Generation” and “Obesity expert says daily workouts can’t undo damage done from sitting all day.”