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Desk less; A more active job can contribute to a healthier lifestyle

By Emily Hughey Quinn, Source: Tribune Media Services

If you vowed to lose weight in 2010, you might want to think about looking for a new job. Unless you’re a morning or evening workout devotee, the corporate world of tiny cubicles and long days at the computer doesn’t lend itself to a healthy, active lifestyle.

“It used to be that people at least banged on manual typewriters, and of course all the harder if you had to make a carbon copy,” says Laurence Shatkin, author of “175 Best Jobs Not Behind a Desk” (Jist, $16.95).

Today, he says, sometimes you have to get up to make a copy, but that’s about it. And heaven forbid you get up and walk over to someone’s office.

“All these things in an office that used to have a modicum of physical activity aren’t around anymore. Office jobs are more sedentary now than they’ve ever been. In so many ways our work lives have become more sedentary.”

Shatkin and the ONET database of the U.S. Department of Labor, which reports the characteristics of occupations, define sedentary jobs as high in “time spent sitting” and low in “general physical activity.” Active jobs, like nursing and teaching, for example, are the opposite: high in general physical activity and low in time spent sitting.

Sean Alaback, CEO of Metropolis Concessions, began his career bartending and working in restaurants — a non-sedentary profession — before he made the transition to working at a public relations agency, where he put on 30 to 40 pounds. While being around food all day in restaurants became unappetizing to him, in his PR job, actually getting up and leaving his desk to grab coffee and a scone became a refuge.

“Needless to say, I started putting on weight,” Alaback says. “I was never skinny, and I hadn’t been in shape since high school, but in the last few years I put on a lot of weight, to the point my doctor told me I needed to change my lifestyle in someway.”

And for good reason. Shatkin’s book reports one Australian study that found that men who sit at their desks for more than six hours a day are almost twice as likely to be obese as men who sit for 45 minutes, and also that women who worked a sedentary job for 14 years gained an average of 25 pounds more than the ones in less sedentary jobs.

For 27-year-old Alaback, though, simply going to the gym didn’t work.

“I tried to be a gym bunny, and I really failed at it. I got up to about six months or so where I was going to the gym every morning and I was feeling better, but I wasn’t actually seeing the improvements I expected,” Alaback says. “If I’m going to be going to the gym that much, I want to see six packs.” So he quit going to the gym. And, finally, partly inspired by the lifestyle change prescribed by his doctor, he quit his job as a vice president at the PR agency to start a concessions company for Broadway and off-Broadway theatres in New York.

“I’m not at a desk for more than 10 or 15 hours a week,” Alaback says. “Much of my life is now spent running around the city from venue to venue, pitching new business, checking in on operations, picking up product from Costco and working up a sweat.”

To Shatkin, there’s something to the idea that certain people are built for a life less deskbound. He became interested in the topic after observing his sister and his daughter.

“They both are a little antsy, and they both don’t really want work where they have to sit behind a desk all day. So many good jobs today are what I’m doing, just sitting in front of a computer,” says Shatkin, who gets his exercise from regular time at the gym. “A lot of people would rather have (activity) as part of their work. They want jobs that have some getting up, getting around, getting outdoors.”

Sara Carter, a 46-year-old from Waynesboro, Pa., who describes herself as “not an exercise person,” secretly always wanted to be an underwater welder.

“My mother said, ‘The hell you are. You’re taking typing.’ And I became a secretary,” Carter said. After years of thriving in the secretarial field, her fibromyalgia became too painful from being overweight and sitting at a desk all day, so she lost 105 pounds on the Atkins diet and then quit her job. She now makes her living doing physical labor such as mowing lawns and cleaning out foreclosed homes around her community.

“It’s amazing. I wouldn’t go back behind a desk now. I couldn’t imagine doing it. I really couldn’t,” Carter says. “There’s too much freedom and too much ability just to be out and about.”

While Alaback hasn’t lost weight yet, his business is off to a great start and, more importantly, he feels worlds better having physical activity in his workday. “I was getting to the point where it was hard getting up in the morning,” he says. “I’m definitely feeling the energy of getting up and being energized. I just feel like I’m so much more active.”

© 2010, Tribune Media Services