Meet Jack. Jack is a master in the art of idleness. He’s a slouch without a cause,
a slug without a place to go. Jack doesn’t want to move, and with a phone full of apps to address his
extreme laziness, he doesn’t really have to. But what’s going to happen to Jack over time?
Well, things are going to go very badly for him. The horror will emerge slowly,
but in time, he’s going to suffer all kinds of unimaginable things. As for the end,
it won’t be easy to watch for those around him. We very much doubt there’s ever been a person
like Jack that just decided one day that he was never going to move from one spot again.
Nonetheless, there have been plenty of people in the world who ate so much, a crane and a
bulldozer were required to get them out of their house. Food did this, but also a lack of movement.
We’ll come back to some of these people later. You wouldn’t necessarily turn into a Jabba the
Hutt type character if you decided not to move for quite a while, but the fact is if you had
a regular diet, the total lack of exercise would very likely result in weight gain.
How fast you would put on weight would depend on a number of factors. That is,
it's not only about how much you eat but what you eat and also some genetic factors.
With an unmoving person, in time, their metabolism would slow down, so if they kept eating at
a normal rate, it just makes scientific sense that they’d get bigger. The reason is that if
a person moves more, the mitochondria within their muscle cells increase. One scientist
called mitochondria “power plants”, and it is these plants that keep burning up energy.
But in the absence of much movement, those plants would slow down so much that the energy wouldn’t
get burned. It really depends on how much you eat. Thanks to something called the “appetite
regulatory system”, we receive signals when our body wants food. These signals are
basically hunger, but for some reason, that system is a bit hyperactive in some folks,
and so they feel hungry easier. Let’s say Jack has now been not moving
for around 10 weeks. As the saying goes, he’s as happy as a pig in poo.
He’s some way into achieving his lifetime ambition of watching every movie available on Netflix, and
with the help of his eternally suffering sister, his number ones and twos have been taken care of.
But because Jack has been putting very little stress on his muscles, his body
has done the right thing and decreased the amount of nutrients and oxygen it sends to those muscles.
His muscles are slowly wasting away. There would be an opposite reaction if
Jack decided to pump weights every day instead of watching movies. More activity in this case would
make his body send more oxygen and nutrients to his muscles and his muscles would grow.
Jack doesn’t really notice that he’s in a stage of muscle wasting. Of course, he doesn’t. He’s only
on week 10. Things are going to get a lot worse. This is not to say Jack can’t help himself.
There are various forms of resistance training he could do on his bed. You might see such exercises
after people have been injured or suffer from a disease that binds them to a bed or a chair.
As you’ve probably guessed, though, Jack’s not interested in being a good non-mover.
Something Jack is also not concerned about is what’s happening or what’s going to happen to his
skeletal system. Not only is he already packing on the pounds – his new thing is the Scottish
delicacies of deep-fried pizza and deep-fried chocolate bars – but his bones are getting weaker.
Make no mistake, Jack’s body needs him to move. Don’t use it, and you lose it, as the saying
goes. Non-movement will, over time, mean his bones are not getting the nutrients they need.
As a consequence, his bone mineral density will be negatively affected. That means his lack of
movement will make his bones a bit weaker. There’s now a double-whammy effect for Jack.
His excessively sedentary lifestyle has led to his bones becoming a little weaker,
but remember that he’s also lost muscle mass. Now he’s got what looks like aging bones,
and he doesn’t have the muscles to protect them.
There are a number of stories in the media in which medical professionals talk
about sedentary lifestyles leading to a rise in brittle bone problems, aka, osteoporosis.
This condition is not uncommon for older folks, but since we entered the era of sitting on our
behinds all the time, there’s a worrying trend of this happening to people in their 30s.
It takes time to happen, of course. Jack is still happily mainlining Netflix, but it won’t be long
until he’s the star in his own horror story. So, his muscles are wasting away, and his
bones are on their way to becoming weaker. As for Jack’s heart, he can still feel it pounding away
in his chest. What he doesn’t know is his heart is pounding on the door of his consciousness,
screaming, “Get off the bed, you lazy piece of doo doo.” Major organs would never use bad language.
His heart really wants Jack to get moving, for the reason that in time it
knows that Jack’s lack of movement, along with his newfound fondness of Scottish fast food,
will lead to a build-up of fatty material in his arteries.
Like a hosepipe full of sausages, this will restrict the flow of blood to Jack’s heart. Too
much fatty blockage could lead to a heart attack, and if blood flow to the brain is restricted, that
could lead to a stroke, although Jack doesn’t have to worry too much about these things just yet.
Remember though, he’s intent on living out his days like this. There have been numerous studies
that say in the long-term, a sedentary lifestyle can lead to a higher risk of various diseases
such as heart disease and diabetes. The long and short of it all is that not moving
much for many years will almost always result in someone having a shorter life.
No doubt you’ve all seen those headlines, “Sitting is the new smoking” or something to that effect.
They might be somewhat hyperbolic, but there’s enough scientific evidence to show that a severe
lack of physical activity is very likely going to have a profound effect on someone's health.
What Jack is blissfully unaware of is the fact that because he’s hardly moving at all,
his body is producing less of something called lipoprotein lipase. This is an enzyme that
breaks down fat in the blood. If you move around a fair bit, you’ll produce enough
of this stuff. When you are sitting, the production level drops by about 90 percent.
Before Jack decided not to move again, his favorite two movies were Spice World and anything
from the Transformers and Fast and Furious franchise. We don’t want to upset anyone here,
but we’re going to say that Jack’s taste in movies could be indicative of his
being lacking in intelligence. Jack thought Game of Thrones was based on a true story.
Anyway, he is not the sharpest tool in the proverbial toolbox. But what he doesn’t know
is that he’s getting dumber. The lack of movement has led to a decrease in something
called the brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, and this stuff grows neurons in the
brain. Scientists say it is related to learning and memory, so it’s good to keep it flowing.
Just keep moving, and it should. There’s also some evidence that
lack of physical activity can lead to reduced cognitive function overall.
You could argue, though, and you’d be right, that if instead of watching Spice World on repeat for
an entire week, Jack endeavored to get through “A History of Western philosophy”, and if he went on
doing stuff like that, his brain and intelligence would likely be ok. That’s true, but it doesn’t
mean that the lack of activity wouldn’t affect how he understands difficult books.
There’s a paper in the Journal of Comparative Neurology that discusses what happened to the
brains of rats when they were forced to do what Jack did. The other group of rats ran around
on wheels and generally had a good ole time. Ok, humans aren’t rats, and no two rats are alike,
but the scientists believe what happened to the sedentary rats can be used as a model
for humans. The result was that the Spice World-loving rats had something called an
overactive sympathetic nervous system. This can be bad and has been known to be a cause
of heart disease and high blood pressure. In short, the absence of much movement at all
is very likely not great for your thinking organ. It’s also terrible for your blood-pumping organ.
Your lungs won’t love you for it, either. There’s tons of evidence that says sitting
around all day gives a person more chance of developing a clot in the lungs. This is
called a pulmonary embolism, which means a clot somewhere in the blood travels up to the lungs.
In one study, it was found that people who sat for six or more hours a day for 18 years
had double the chance of developing a pulmonary embolism. Ok, maybe you think
sitting all day is worth the risk of such a clot, but we should tell you that they are
pretty serious. If not treated, 30 percent of sufferers will die. Even when treated,
eight percent of sufferers will die from one. Now we have come to another juncture. We are going
to fast-forward in time and imagine that Jack has put in his ten years of not getting off his bed.
While Jack is fictional, sadly the web provides ample stories of people who lived like Jack,
and so we can assume that what happened to them could easily happen to him.
Let’s take the story of a British man named Paul Mason.
He used to be the fattest man in the world at one point,
weighing 1120 pounds (508 kg). Mason had an eating habit that would
put an elephant to shame, but he had a reason in the way of a traumatic childhood and subsequent
depression. This led to outstanding binge eating in his twenties, which meant when he ballooned,
like Jack, he wasn’t able to go anywhere. Even when he went to the hospital,
he had to be hoisted from his bed. Not long ago, he lost much of his
weight after having surgery, but after that, he still spent much of his time in hospitals.
He had eight stomach hernias and had to have many operations on his knees and hips.
Unfortunately, we can’t find much more about other problems, but you can be sure there were many.
We know this because of what happened to many other people that were bed-bound.
For instance, look at what happened to the American woman named Carol Yager.
She died when she was just 34 years of age, but prior to her release from
life, she weighed as much as 1,200 pounds (540 kg). Much of her weight, by the way,
was fluid build-up, which is called edema. Because of her weight and her lack of movement,
she also suffered from extremely high blood sugar levels. She was out of breath all the time, too,
which was a result of there being so much fat in her chest cavity.
On top of that, even if she really wanted to move, she couldn’t. As you now know,
that’s because her muscles wasted away. So much sitting then put tremendous pressure on
her heart. In fact, all her organs were failing her, which is why on her death certificate were
the words “multiple organ failure.” You might be thinking, ok,
these are the most extreme cases and Jack wouldn’t end up in that state. But Jack,
as you know, is no shirker when it comes to being irresponsible. He just kept eating even though
he was getting larger by the month. Look at the case of Manuel Uribe,
who died from his extreme obesity in 2014. He was just like Jack.
When he was growing up, he lived in Mexico and had a fairly normal Mexican diet.
Although, that diet was far from being perfect when it comes to
avoiding obesity. He once said it included, “beans, rice, flour tortilla, corn tortilla,
French fries, hamburgers, subs and pizzas, whatever regular people eat.”
At the time, he weighed just 254 pounds (115kg), which made him only a bit overweight
since he was over six feet tall. Then he moved to the US, where he said all
his problems started. He embraced the infamous American fast-food culture with enthusiasm,
and his job, technician, meant he spent most of his time sitting. He once said, “Life in the
United States is like that, you just go from your desk to your car. I used to drive my car to and
from work, so I didn't get any exercise.” The upshot was that his weight peaked at
about 1230 pounds (558 kg). And this, he said, was just a
result of eating a lot and hardly moving, rather than trying to smash eating records.
When his mother was asked by the press what she most wanted for her son, she said, “That he
can get up and walk.” At that point, he could only get out bed with the help of a forklift.
He did try to lose weight, but in the end, his many extra pounds caused problems that
proved too much for him and he had severe heart problems. He also had liver damage,
which can happen to anyone who is obese. A form of it is actually pretty common
in the US. Called non-alcoholic liver disease, the organ first gets fatty.
That can lead to scarring of the liver (fibrosis), and over time this can result in irreversible
damage called cirrhosis. If you think that only happens to habitual boozers, think again.
About 24 percent of American adults suffer from non-alcoholic liver disease,
and you can bet your life that Jack would get it. In the end, it was said Mr. Uribe died after
suffering liver failure as well as multiple cardiac arrhythmias.
With these stories in mind, if Jack really didn’t move much for a decade
while eating anything he liked, he would almost certainly get very sick, and possibly die.
If he survived a decade, you can bet he wouldn’t last another without some serious kind of illness.
The good news for people if they really can’t move but want to, is that with professional help and
an exercise regime, coupled with a healthy diet, while they will likely suffer some related health
problems, they could at least keep the weight off. Also good news is that if you’re watching this and
you know you’re severely overweight and you don’t do much moving,
much of the damage can be reversed. There’s no time like the present to get off your butt.
Now you need to watch this amazing video “What If You Only Drank Coke (Soda) and Nothing Else?”
Or, have a look at “What Happens To Your Body When You Don't Eat (Fast).”