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Comment by csmeder | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time believing I could start smoking 1 cigarette per an hour if I stood at my desk instead of sat, and the bad (smoking) would be balanced out with the good (standing)?

Is sitting really that bad? Or is smoking really not that bad?

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Sitting really is that bad.

I have a script on my work computer that runs once every hour, reminding me to get up and making suggestions on things I can do: make some tea, do some situps, do some pushups, do some leg lifts, go up and down the stairs, take a walk around the block, and so on.

I lack self-discipline but am very obedient, so it has been extremely successful for me.

Mind sharing your script? I'd love to have something similar.

For Ubuntu, try this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/63999/how-can-i-install-typin...

Thanks! I found a good free one for OS X as well:

http://www.dejal.com/timeout/

I'll post it in the morning when I'm back at work. It's just a dead-simple Tkinter app in Python that tells me to take a break. My work computer is Windows and I scheduled it using the Task Scheduler. At home I'd add it to my crontab.

Here it is: https://gist.github.com/4451731

Great - thanks!

> Sitting really is that bad.

Does anyone have any references for this? All I can find are some articles reporting on one study.

Mayo Clinic page with four references. Many results at Google Scholar as well.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sitting/AN02082

Thank you.

Sitting for the prolonged periods of time that's expected in today's desk jobs with no intermittent stretching/getting up for a few minutes every hour or so is what's most dangerous.

Or are they just not comparable or additive.

Not sure why you are being downvoted - this type of comparison fails spectacularly as you are not dealing in concrete events. From statistics, we know that on average over a large number of deaths, smokers tended to live slightly shorter lives. This is largely because of emphysema and similar which shortens the lives of smokers in aggregate.

Exercising every day is not going to keep you alive if you die from emphysema, so there is no 'cancel out effect' in practice.

On the one hand, isn't that bad. People have survived 50+ years of smoking multiple cigarettes a day (some of them will have smoked 200,000+ cigarettes)

On the other hand, smoking not only shortens your life, it also makes (part of it) less enjoyable. Statistically, smokers are ill more often and get chronic health problems earlier.

Also, I bet the 'sitting is bad' meme will see some nuance added to it in due time. Even ignoring that, this message talks of sitting for two hours, without break. That, IMO, is very rare. Lunch, coffee, toilet breaks?

I found myself sometimes sitting for 4 hours without realizing it. When you get sucked into what you're working on, don't have meetings in the morning, and are sitting on an Aeron like any proper tech worker, it's not so hard to imagine.

Here's a tip: keep yourself very well hydrated. My goal is always 1L water before lunch, 1L after. No software tricks needed!

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