TORONTO - Modern life is replete with an ever growing list of little shortcuts, each of which we gratefully embrace as it comes over the horizon of consumerism.
Baby carrots that don't need peeling. Pre-washed herbs and salad greens that don't need spinning. The garage door opener that eliminates the need to bend and tug. The leaf blower and sit-on mower that make yard work a breeze.
These blessings, we frazzled folk believe, steal back for us small bits of that most precious of commodities, time. What we fail to recognize is what they steal from us.
Modern conveniences are robbing us of opportunities to actually move. They are stripping from our daily lives movements that could add to our flexibility, mobility, balance and strength, that could help us battle weight gain and forestall the effects of aging.
Obesity and fitness researcher Mark Tremblay thinks we ought to start taking back some of those chances to bend and flex and burn a few calories. And he has an idea of how to do it.
People should introduce a dash of inconvenience to their days, advises Tremblay, director of healthy active living and obesity research at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario's Research Institute in Ottawa.
"The list of conveniences is very, very long and we're very easily seduced into thinking that these conveniences are good things," Tremblay says, pointing as an example to the latest time saver to hit his radar.
"I saw on the television last night that podcasts are now broadcasting church services to the home so that parents with young children don't have to go through 'all that bother."'
"And it's 'all that bother' that is what we need to recapture. Because all that bother is part of what keeps us healthy, active, limber, mobile and at a healthy body weight."
Diane Finegood figured out the inconvenience trick when she set out to lose weight a few years ago.
Finegood had fought a long-time battle with her weight and was up to about 250 pounds when she decided enough was enough. But having lost and regained on diets, she decided to change the way she lived instead.
That meant embracing activity. But the pedometer she wore to calculate how much she was moving in the course of the day revealed she was nowhere close to the 10,000 daily steps she was aiming for. So she looked for ways to inject extra steps into her daily routine. Inconvenience was a key.
She started deliberately parking her car in the furthest possible spot from the door when she drove to a mall or to work. It's now such an ingrained habit she can't bring herself to park close, even in bad weather.
"In my job, I don't move. I sit on airplanes a lot. I sit at my desk a lot," says Finegood, who is director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes.
"And that's what's led me to behaviours like parking my car as far away in the lot as I can, whether it's going to work or going to the mall. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator and recognizing that those stairs counted and were valuable to me.... Purposefully getting up and going to the farthest coffee place across campus to get that coffee in the morning or something like that."
"Those kinds of activities were really helpful," says Finegood, who has lost 75 pounds.
This is the type of thing Tremblay is advocating. He isn't trying to turn everyone into triathletes. Adding small bits of movement at multiple points in the day would be a welcome start.
Things like getting off the bus-subway-streetcar a stop or two before your destination and walking the rest of the way. Climbing more stairs. Standing more often. Chopping your own vegetables or preparing your own food. Raking leaves.
"Every little bit helps. And every little bit is a muscle contraction that facilitates the function of that particular part of the body, whatever it is," Tremblay says.
"We've been reducing steps. Reducing arm movements. Reducing lifting. Reducing climbing.... Just little bits here and there. But enough that add up to the positive caloric balance that we find ourselves in that just causes the whole population's weight to incrementally increase and increase and increase."
Parents of small children, manual labourers and fitness fanatics excepted, many of us barely move in the course of a regular day.
We drive or ride to work, where an elevator or an escalator carries us to our floor. We then sit for hours on end. The occasional walk to the washroom or a fevered burst of typing may be the big exercise hit of the work day.
Come quitting time we drive or ride home, where we may pop some prepared fare into the microwave, load the dirty dishes into the dishwasher and then plop ourselves in front of the TV, exhausted.
We have burned so few calories we are almost in a state of hibernation. When it comes to balancing calorie intake to energy output, we don't have a chance.
"I don't think we can possibly condition ourselves to eat as little as we need to to get into energy balance when we're . . . doing absolutely nothing most of the day" Tremblay says.
Those of us who make a little time for the gym or a run or a Pilates class may feel superior, but we could be fooling ourselves. A 30-minute run is a worthy accomplishment, but if it's followed by 23.5 hours of almost complete inactivity, we still have a problem.
Studies have actually shown we're losing valuable - and relatively easy - opportunities to burn calories and keep limber by embracing modern conveniences a little too enthusiastically.
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., showed that "domestic mechanization" cut about 111 calories burned from daily energy output. And those researchers were only looking at manual versus mechanical dish and clothes washing, stair climbing and transport to work.
Others have studied Amish communities which eschew modern conveniences and technology. The Amish log many times more steps per day than non-Amish, and spend many more hours on heavy and moderate activity. Not surprisingly, obesity rates among the Amish are a fraction of those in the population at large.
David Bassett, an exercise physiologist at the University of Tennessee, has studied old order Amish communities in Southern Ontario. He thinks their activity levels reveal much about how inactive modern life has become.
"Modern technology has made our lives much too convenient. Things like automobiles, garage door openers, elevators, household appliances, power lawn equipment and remote controls have taken away precious opportunities for physical activity," he says.
"The cumulative effect of all these little changes is quite large, and I think that inserting physical activity back into our lives by walking to destinations, baking homemade bread, gardening, and hanging laundry out to dry is commendable."
Getting everyone to run or ski or use in-line skates or play team sports on a regular basis isn't going to happen, experts in the obesity and fitness field know.
"When you talk about a sort of gym membership kind of approach, well there's just a number of hurdles, right? You've got your financial hurdles for some groups. You've got the realities of a single parent getting daycare. You've got the cost of things. The equipment that goes along with it. The necessity of a built infrastructure and so forth," Tremblay says.
Reclaiming incidental daily movements won't painlessly produce sculpted abs and rippling biceps. But every little bit of movement helps.
"The body and its systems are rather rational," Tremblay warns. "So if you don't use it, you lose it. Whether that's flexibility or strength or power or endurance of whatever muscle group you're talking about, it will diminish and get weaker."