Don't Sit On It

Pop quiz: How many hours a week do you think you spend sitting? Twenty, 30, 40? Well, according to a poll of nearly 6,300 people by the Institute for Medicine and Public Health, people spend a whopping 56 hours per week on their backside.

While it may be obvious that we don't burn as many calories sitting as we do standing, new research published in the journal "Diabetes" shows that gluing yourself to a chair for hours on end is doing more extensive harm to your body than you may think. Parking yourself on the couch, or in your office chair, for the day negatively affect your body's ability to work off calories by shutting down the enzymes responsible for burning fat. What's more, sitting for longer periods without getting up can also lower HDL, or good, cholesterol and lead to a slower metabolism.

Your job may require you to sit all day, so maybe you think you can just counteract the negative by-products of being chained to your desk with a workout. Wrong.

According to research, 30 minutes a day at the gym may not be enough to offset the effects of eight to 10 hours of sitting, Genevieve Healy, a research fellow at the Cancer Prevention Research Centre of the University of Queensland in Australia, told MSNBC. Healy's research found that regardless of how much exercise a person did, those who stood up more throughout the day had a smaller waist circumference, lower triglycerides and healthier sugar levels than those who sat the most.

Many Americans have jobs that require them to be sedentary nearly eight hours a day, which makes it difficult to cut down on those 56 hours a week. However, being deskbound doesn't mean you should have to shoehorn yourself out of the chair at the end of the day. Simply standing up to grab a glass of water or even heading to the bathroom every half hour can help combat inactivity.

The best thing you can do, though, is train yourself to sit up straight. Not only does slouching at your desk prevent proper blood flow to your brain, which results in a foggy mental state, it also can lead to back pain. Sitting up straight with your feet planted on the floor engages abdominal and back muscles and also helps restore proper blood flow to the body. If you want to take the next step in office wellness, try switching it up by sitting on an exercise or Swiss ball for a few hours a day.

Get more ideas on how to engage muscle and burn calories at your desk.