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- January 15, 2010
News Flash: Reducing TV time can help your waistline
Sometimes researchers do studies, like the one I'm talking about today involving the relationship between TV-watching and energy expenditure and you think - "Did I actually have to pay for this study?" In this particular study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers studied 36 adults who watched about 3 hours of TV each day and had BMIs that fell between 25 and 50 (considered overweight/obese). 20 participants got a lock-out system which shut their TVs off after they'd watched about half of their normal TV time. The result? According to armbands which measured their physical activity, those with lock-out systems burned 119 more calories a day. This is probably a surprise to no one, since watching TV involves couch potato-ness in a way no other activity does, but an interesting point in the study caught my eye: Researchers surmised that the average adult watches almost 5 hours of TV a day. Wow - that's a lot of TV-watching and I would bet most of us aren't running on the treadmill while we're doing it. Watching TV is just one of the sit-on-your-butt activities we all do, along with sitting at the computer and sitting in the car, and it's also a hard habit to break. Not only is TV entertaining, it's a way some of us relax after a hard day and it's oh so easy to do. What are your TV habits? Do you worry that you watch too much TV or do you take steps to limit how much you and your family watch? Leave a comment and tell us how watching TV affects your waistline. Source Otten J, Jonas K, Littenberg B, et al. Effects of Television Viewing Reduction on Energy Intake and Expenditure in Overweight and Obese Adults. Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(22):2109-2115. News Flash: Reducing TV time can help your waistline originally appeared on About.com Exercise on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 06:00:35.Permalink | Comment | Email this
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