But marathon running is not your typical exercise.

A person who stays at home instead of getting out and regularly running is not going to be exposed to as many dangers. What does mortality mean in this study - death from a variety of causes or only a certain set of illnesses?

Exactly why I exercise. I would have been one of those lazy people 10 months ago. Now I would prefer the walk, and I do much more of it now. Can you say that makes me healthier? That's sort of hard to quantify. I think it's more natural than wanting to get in my car and ride somewhere.

I lost about the same amount of weight in about the same amount of time 5 years ago. The only really big difference this time is that I'm exercising. I haven't lost weight any faster. But back then I could barely make a short hike without turning purple. Now it takes me MUCH longer to turn purple. I'll take it.

I made my hormonal situation worse with exercise. Just like Schwarzbein writes. I just added to the situation with too much high intensity exercise, which is very easy to do when vastly overweight. (As soon as you move fast or heavy, up goes the intensity because you're starting from a base of adding 150 pounds to the frame... you get the idea).

Nowadays I move so it feels good, period. There are physio systems that need movement - like lymph and getting nutrition into joints. Seems silly to eat so carefully and then not have the nutrients get around.

I also dropped "lazy" from my vocabulary as I have "greedy." Lazy is no more a cause of fatness than greed is.

rant!
People who sit are not automatically couch potatoes - there is that hidden and subtle class-ism that Taubes wrote a footnote about. Scholars, artists, moms who chauffeur 5 hours a day and have a desk job, also sit.
Can't justify the connection in my mind but I somehow connect this to an athletics bias that is so pervasive to the health-fitness-wellness world.

But like many exercisers, they think they're very healthy. This particular category we now know has some health issues that their sedentary counterparts don't have. It could be a spectrum or perhaps it only affects a subset of exercisers, we just don't know.

In any case it is good to see another sacred cow getting some closer scrutiny.

Whatever way the chips fall, we want the truth, right? And we can't even start to do that if we believe it is so wonderful as to be unquestionable.... like the flu vaccine.

That's from the study Kdill posted. Increased mortality rates from heart disease with increased sitting, but not for cancer. I think heart disease is more likely to cause exercise avoidance than cancer is.

I get all these arguments (marathon running is in a special category - I think most marathoners know they are taking risks and most are not prepared for the distance anyway)

But what about sheer survival? As an adult and a parent, I feel like it is a huge part of my responsibility to be able to function in case of emergency - to lift my kids and carry them to safety, to swim to rescue them if they fall in deep water, to get out of my own house in case of a fire even if it means I have to climb or jump.

I was swimming off a tourist boat about six years ago and I was the only person who had difficulty pulling myself back onto deck. If it was an emergency, I'd be out of luck or reliant on someone else being stronger and more capable than myself. I vowed to increase my upper body strength at that point.

At work, I lift very heavy boxes and often other women tell me I should not do it and they cannot because it's too heavy. Who then? Somebody has to be strong enough to do it - why should I foist the reponsibility on someone else?

My parents live 12 miles from me - in case of emergency I want to be able to make it to their house as quickly as possible, even if the streets are clogged with panicked traffic. That means running that distance. I recently read a memoir of a woman from NYC who lost alot of weight but she was still very out of shape. She took up running. The day of 9/11 her train was underneath the WTC when the first plane struck. She survived because she was able to get out and run from the collapsing towers.

I'm not saying I'm paranoid and tragedies are around every corner (some of you might read this and see it that way), but I would hate to think a fireman out there is busting his butt staying in shape so he can carry me out of my house and I didn't bother to make sure I was fit enough to get out myself. There are so many with true needs and physical limitations, why would I want to be an extra burden when it's entirely under my control?

Well I don't know what heart disease is like. But sometimes if I've been eating poorly or barely moving for days I really feel it in my heart which feels easily tired, and just leaning over to get something out of the fridge seems like a major body stress. I was talking to a friend about how I found it interesting that in general I ignore or overdo all kinds of things and myself under all kinds of conditions, but anything heart-related stops me like a clock. It actually comes with a body-level of fear. Over the years I've come to suspect that the body has a sort of 'override' going when it comes to the heart, as if protection of that muscle is #1 priority. I have also experienced, in a few rare moments of high blood pressure, that the utter exhaustion of being 'winded' just from standing up would stop any motion cold (one can barely walk to the bathroom without resting a few times before reaching it). So I imagine that heart disease does slow people down.

A very informative and entertaining program, Hellistile. Thank you for posting the link! How did you find this audio? (I found the program right away when I googled "phinney" at kgnu.net, because I wanted more information about the show. But first I googled "low carbohydrate diet" together with "obesity" and "exercise" (all terms must be on the same page) and I got 56,000 hits!)

Any tips for improved search results? Is it just trial and error? Or had you previously heard the program?

I think it is obvious that are bodies need to move. I think that because of modern inventions we don't move are bodies on a daily basis the way people used to. So, now we must purpose to exercise in order to help strengthen or improve our muscles, heart, lungs, metabolism, cellular health, mood, and probably many other things that I don't know about.

Okay dude, I am willing to be open minded and throw everything I know about diet and fitness out the window, but I agree with the conventional idea that we get a good work out (as in moderately strenuous physical activity) a lot LESS nowadays than before. Yes, "exercise" is a fairly modern concept, but it came to be at least partly to make up for the fact that we DON'T move around otherwise, right? I mean, you say people waste their time doing boring exercises and it takes the place of more fun activities that give us just as much of a heart rate boost er whatev, but don't you think most people say... watch tv or play on the internet if they weren't using their free time for exercise?

What's wrong with sitting or lying down? We lie down for a large part of the day, then we sit all day long at work at school at the cafe in the car in the bus in the train at the theater at a basketball game at the ski-lift at the show by the fire at home or elsewhere, what's wrong with that? We've been doing this for ages. What would suddenly make it bad for us? A priori, there's nothing wrong or bad or immoral about sitting or lying down. In other words, there's everything right about sitting and lying down. So take that out of the argument, and let's get to the real reasons people must exercise.

Get stronger? Yes. Faster? Yes. More agile, more enduring, quicker, more alert, more coordinated, more skillful? Yes and yes. But more healthy, as in healthy versus ill? No. Bed rest used to be the prescription to combat illnesses. Why would it now be the cure-all to combat lethargy? It's costly energy-wise to exercise, so is it to heal. Lethargy isn't a result of lack of exercise, it's the other way around. So what causes us to be lethargic? I mean, isn't that the real question? I bet it's something in the food. Maybe it's the food itself. Maybe it isn't food at all.

Maybe what causes us to avoid exercise, also causes heart disease and cancer.

I make a strong distinction between sitting and lying down. We've been lying down for our entire history, but how long have we had chairs? When we had to go somewhere, we would walk or run instead of sitting in a car or a bus. I can tell you, when I borrow my in-laws car to go somewhere, there is nothing more physically devastating than sitting in the driver's seat for hours. It's an unnatural position to begin with, and you can't adjust your position much to vary it.

Walking a little every day may be the only exercise you need, but there's a world of difference between that and sitting at a desk or in a car all day.

I think the spectrum idea is closer to the truth. Like many things, including food, water and oxygen, Goldilocks rules -- there is too little, too much , and just right.