You’ve got to hand it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for their attempts to convince even the most chronically inactive among us that good health is never entirely out of reach.

The simple act of putting one’s hands together and applauding the health organization’s efforts, it turns out, may actually be a good first step on the road to recovering from a lifetime of sloth.

And if clapping seems too strenuous an activity for the incorrigibly indolent, they can always follow the suggestion of the CDC and exercise their bodies by sitting their butts in a whirlpool bath. The more ambitious types might consider pumping up their workout regime by also taking crayons into the whirlpool bath and coloring as they soak.

I really don’t mean to disparage the good intentions of the esteemed CDC, which is trying as hard as it can to make millions of woefully lazy Americans understand the health-inducing benefits to be found in all kinds of physical activities.

We are a dangerously overweight nation, after all, and getting fatter by the year. Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the most definitive assessment of Americans’ weight, reveal that a whopping 64.5 percent of adults, or more than 120 million people, are overweight or obese.

Maine has a greater percentage of overweight people than any New England state, health experts say, and ranks fourth in the nation in the incidence of lifestyle-related illnesses and disabilities.

As the U.S. surgeon general has pointed out, there really is an epidemic of obesity in this country.

But when I read of some of the suggestions that the CDC now lists in its “light activity” category – yes, coloring and sitting in a whirlpool bath are included, believe it or not – I can’t help but think that we may be lowering the bar just a bit too much for anyone’s good.

According to an Associated Press story this week, the CDC, convinced that exercise studies of the past inaccurately measured Americans’ fitness by focusing only on strenuous activity, generously broadened its definition of exercise to include such everyday activities as light housework and gardening.

Even based on those looser standards, however, a CDC poll found that 55 percent of adults still don’t get nearly the recommended minimum of 30 minutes of exercise a day, at least four days a week.

Not only do more than half of all Americans neglect their bodies completely, the poll would seem to suggest, their houses are sorry messes, too.

So to encourage this tragically idle segment of the population, for whom even washing the dishes is presumably too exhausting to consider, the CDC offers a list of “light activities” so physically undemanding that only the comatose would find them challenging.

Want to get your blood moving without even coming close to breaking a sweat? Try “making photocopies,” the CDC suggests cryptically. If that’s too much like work, and you’re already tuckered out from all that rigorous coloring in the bathtub, why not pull up a chair and play a video game?

Perhaps you could throw darts, shoot a pistol, fish (while sitting down, of course), or even do some light office work that requires nothing more taxing than moving your hands and fingers. By the way, floating in water is also on the CDC list, along with an extremely low-impact activity called “purposeless wandering.”

People new to this exercise business, though, might want to have plenty of BenGay ointment on hand, just in case.