"...Sitting in a chair, working, is so unpleasant, you might as well be dead."

So says Dr. Joseph Stirt, an anesthesiologist in Charlottesville, Virginia, who estimates he spends eight to 12 hours a day working and walking on his treadmill in his home office.

Dr. Stirt is an advocate of NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which holds that people burn calories on mundane tasks. NEAT's popularity is being fueled by research done at The Mayo Clinic by Dr. James Levine who claims that for most people, NEAT is far more important for burning calories than is all-out exercise. I suppose this is because most people don't actually exercise properly or with enough consistency to have a long-term impact on their overall health; on the other hand, if people are engaged in relatively low-energy quotidian tasks which keep them on the move during their workday then they derive some benefit simply due to the consistency of the activity.

My paternal grandfather was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service and he walked a mail route for 25 years. He was in excellent shape (unlike most of his relatives in his own and succeeding generations) and I am willing to bet that his daily exercise probably had a lot to do with that.

I think Grandpa would have agreed with Dr. Stirt, as I do, that "...Sitting in a chair, working, is so unpleasant, you might as well be dead."

I wonder if the USPS is hiring?