It's hard to imagine exercise at work as helping you keep fit, after all, we spend hours at our desks, and there are usually plenty of calorie laden snacks about to keep you from suffering mid afternoon hunger pangs.
Still, a Mayo Clinic expert suggests that the office may, in fact, be an unrecognized (and as yet unused) place that can help us all stay fit.
Workplace productivity improves too.
The "healthy office" approach is what is known as non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT for short) and happens naturally as we use energy for all kinds of things.
For sedentary Americans, the amount of energy burnt off by active exercise (like the kind you get during a gym workout) is "negligible" compared to what's lost via NEAT which accounts for between 15% (for very sedentary people) to almost 50% (for very active people) of the energy spent over the course of a day.
The best part? Some simple lifestyle changes can up your daily NEAT by about 20%.
To prove the point, researchers launched a six month experiment using these NEAT concepts, helping 18 workers at a Minneapolis financial staffing company lose a respectable 156 pounds (143 of pure body fat), just by reworking the office and the workday itself.
The team started by re-engineering the office space of the company.
The desks and chairs were replaced with desks that came attached to treadmills.
Walking tracks were installed all around the circumference of the office space to allow for walking meetings at a pace of 1.
1 miles per hour...
slow and steady.
The traditional phones were replaced with mobile ones, there were spaces made for active games like foosball and Wii.
The staff were even outfitted with activity monitors and offered nutrition counseling.
At the end of the study, the average employee lost almost 9 pounds, 90% of it in fat.
Triglyceride levels dropped by an average of 37%.
Of the nine staffers who told the researchers they wanted to loose weight when the study started, the average weight loss was almost 15.
5 pounds.
There's even good news for the business.
All this fitness didn't cost anything in terms of productivity, in fact it helped.
After only three months in the re-engineered office, the staff had boosted corporate revenue by about 10%, and the firm registered its highest monthly gross to date.
Not too shabby.
Another unexpected finding to come from the work is that you don't need a gym membership to lose weight, but rather can make use of a steady level of movement to drop some extra pounds.
So to implement exercise at work try taking a phone call standing up...
have a meeting while you walk around...
take the stairs instead of the elevator...
park at the end of the lot...
move while you work in any way, and every way you can.
Changing the way we look at food is also important.
Experts suggest that thinking of food as fuel, not comfort, also makes quite a difference and helps with losing weight without trying.