Blogging is killing you.

I don’t mean the stress of cranking out deathless prose or even the coffee you gulp by the gallon.

Blogging is killing you because you sit hunched over your laptop. All day long.

Science has spoken: Sitting will be the death of you — and me.

None of this is news, of course. We’ve known for a while that even if you faithfully get to the gym, all that sitting wipes out any benefit from the measly few minutes you spend huffing and puffing on the elliptical.

Dr. David Agus puts it bluntly:

[Sitting for more than 5 hours a day is] equivalent on a health basis to smoking a pack and a quarter of cigarettes.

Yowza.

Chair time is associated with all the heavy hitters: heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, and obesity. (That’s because sitting doesn’t make you less hungry. Darn.) This 2012 report on inactivity from the National Center for Biotechnology Information makes for especially gloomy reading.

I don’t know about you, but my first reaction was a kind of paralysis. (Ironic, right?)

Move? When I’m under deadline? Sure, those are those rare times I get out of my chair to go to the bathroom or get more coffee. But how can I move more when I earn a living hunched over a keyboard? (We’ll talk about your posture another time…)

It’s not just a 9-to-5 problem; after sitting at work, most of us rush home (or in our case, step away from our laptops) to plop down on the couch in front of a screen of one size or another. Not exactly helpful.

Being a writer, I decided to research my options before having a coffin fitting. 

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