Fidgeting latest fad in weight loss

When I was a kid, my mother was always yelling at me and my four siblings to quit fidgeting.

“Could you all please stop bouncing off the walls for a minute and sit still,” she’d bark at us wearily. “You’re driving me nuts.”

Now, according to a study published this week in the journal Science, I find out that not only was my poor, exasperated mother wasting her breath all those years, she might actually have been unwittingly jeopardizing our physical well-being. Had I tried to be an obedient son by denying my natural inclination to bounce off walls at every opportunity, I might have grown up to be an adult with serious weight issues.

In case you missed this latest news from the health front, which was played up in newspapers across the country, here’s the sketchy version. The most detailed study ever conducted of the effects of mundane bodily movements has found that obese people tend to be less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still.

Run-of-the-mill fidgeting, it turns out, is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to about 30 lost pounds a year. If only heavy people could somehow become more restless, the research suggests, they could drop a significant amount of weight without even having to go to a gym.

“There are these absolutely staggering differences between people who are lean and people who are obese,” said James Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research team. “The amount of this low-grade activity is so substantial that it could, in and of itself, account for obesity quite easily.”

This could be great news, indeed, for anyone who thinks of the workout room at a gym as nothing less than a torture chamber where people pay to inflict pain on themselves. Instead of all that grunting and sweating, you have only to pace a lot around the house and twitch like a marionette all day at the office in order to melt those pounds away.

Maybe sign up for a low-impact fidgeting class at the YMCA, where you could spend three or four hours a week merely walking in tight circles around a room, restlessly tapping your feet on the floor or hopping up from a chair on occasion to change the channel on the TV.

Unfortunately, the researchers tell us, it’s not as simple as that. It never is. Overweight people who suddenly try to adopt a more fidgety lifestyle probably won’t be able to stick with their wriggling long enough to experience its health benefits.

“The bad news,” as one obesity expert pointed out in The New York Times, “is that you cannot tell people, ‘Why don’t you sit less and be a little more fidgety,’ because they may do it for a couple of hours but won’t sustain it for days and weeks and months and years.”

Some of us are born to fidget, the research suggests, and some are not.

But researchers agreed that the new study does provide strong evidence that introducing even the smallest physical movements into a woefully sedentary lifestyle can make a difference.

“We can begin to say to people, ‘Yes, it would be good if you went jogging and it would be good if you went to the gym.’ But it’s also good to keep getting up, moving around,” said a health expert about the study.

And who better to start that process than you mothers out there who are raising the next generation of potentially overweight couch potatoes? Whenever the kids are sitting still, demand that they get up and start fidgeting this very minute or they can forget about dessert. They’ll thank you for it one day.