Found: 8.9 Hours a Week for a Healthier Lifestyle

Can you guess one of the barriers people most often tell me they see keeping them from living more healthfully? One of the most commonly reported reasons that people don’t exercise, don’t prepare healthier meals and don’t plan meals ahead? Lack of time. Sound familiar? Would finding an extra 8-plus hours a week feel like you struck gold?

Is too much of this keeping you from a healthy lifestyle?
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Putting together the results of media surveys offers new insight into how we can find time to accomplish those health-promoting tasks that seem so elusive. The average American can “find” more than eight hours a week – the time the average American spends watching television commercials. Read this carefully: that’s not time spent watching TV shows, it’s time spent just on commercials.

What if you could find some way to take even part of that time and put it to work FOR your good health and happiness? I am not opposed to TV – far from it. But I know all too well from personal experience and from patients with whom I’ve worked over the years that it can be a “slippery slope” in which a little time can turn into hours you’d designated for other activities that somehow slip away. So this media data and some recent health studies prompt me to ask, and encourage you to ask, what alternative approaches there may be.

Problem #1: The Slippery Slope
According to the latest Nielsen State of the Media Report, in 2011 the average American spent just minutes shy of 35 hours per week watching television – that’s close to five hours a day. Television is not necessarily wasted time, since people use it to relax, learn and socialize. However, perhaps it’s worth considering the costs-benefits of how these hours are spent.

Two costs of time spent watching TV are worth thought:
~Lots of time watching TV may be hurting your health. Extended hours of sitting have now been identified as a health risk, regardless whether or not you get recommended amounts of physical activity.

• More time sitting is linked with 68 percent greater likelihood of both fatal and non-fatal heart disease. This is likely related to unhealthy links to waist circumference, weight, systolic blood pressure, fasting triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, and insulin levels and function.
• Some research shows a negative impact of extended TV time that’s even stronger than total sitting time (possibly because of effects on eating habits). Studies that follow large groups of people over time link each additional two hours of daily TV time with 20 percent increased risk of diabetes, 12 to 15 percent increased risk of heart disease, and 36 percent increased risk of heart disease death. In a study of colorectal cancer survivors, compared to those watching less than three hours of TV daily, those who watched 5 or more hours gained more weight over the next two or three years. This was after adjusting for starting weight, stage of the disease, and physical activity.

~Some “shoulds” are things you don’t really want to do, and “no time” is a good excuse. But what are the things that you’d really like to be able to do – things that would make your life easier or calmer, or add to your health and vitality?

• Planning meals so you can eat healthfully and know you have needed foods on hand?
• Packing a lunch to make healthy midday eating possible and affordable?
• Taking a walk, dancing or playing with your kids actively?
• Other important forms of activity focused on flexibility, balance or muscle and bone health?
• Time for emotional and spiritual health, like prayer, meditation or other forms of “centering”?
• Getting more sleep, if you are among the many Americans who fall short each night?

All these goals may seem overwhelming, but the average American could take less than a quarter of the time they now spend watching TV and accomplish ALL of the above!

Take-home idea:Take a week to keep a log – on paper you keep next to your TV-viewing spot(s) or on your smart phone — of how much time you spend watching. After each 30-minute interval, rate the past half hour on a 1 to 3 scale for how much it satisfied you. It only gets a “3” if you feel as relaxed and happy as you’d hoped. Consider if you took out 30 to 60 minutes of the least satisfying time, which things like those above that might really add value to your health and your life you might do instead. Are you ready to try it for a week or two and see how it works for you? My bet is you won’t miss the screen time you cut at all.

Take control of TV so it works for you
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Problem #2: The “Hidden Fat” of TV Time
When we talk about eating habits, we often note the problem of “hidden fat” – fat in foods in amounts higher than we realize that is adding excess calories. TV time may hold a similar problem: “hidden” sedentary time. National and local commercials now total an average of 15 minutes of every hour-long show. So based on the latest Nielsen data, the average viewer is watching well over an hour of commercials daily, or 8.9 hours a week.

Perhaps you are aware of how much time you spend watching TV, or perhaps you’re not. But few of us who sit down to watch TV say, “I think I’ll settle down and watch some commercials”. If lack of time keeps you from adopting some healthful habits, but you aren’t ready to reduce your television-watching time, what about reconsidering the way you spend commercial time?

Here are three different approaches you could take to use this gold mine of “found” time:

• Use commercial times to accomplish those health-supporting tasks you never seem to get done.

♦ Plan meals. Within an hour’s worth of television programming, you should be able to plan close to a week’s worth of meals, and perhaps even make the grocery list that will     allow you just one shopping trip for the whole week. This way you can grocery shop more efficiently and avoid the stress that comes when you haven’t given dinner a thought until 15 to 30 minutes before you hope to eat.

♦ Make tomorrow’s lunch or breakfast better. People often say that they would like to save money and eat better by bringing their lunch to work, but that they have no time to make it. Others find no time to wash the fruit they’d like to have with their breakfast. Commercials offer plenty of time to do these tasks, or even set out foods for breakfast or assemble ingredients for a fruit and yogurt smoothie in a blender to keep in the refrigerator overnight.

♦ Improve your fitness in small steps. In a single commercial break you could do several sets of crunches to tone those ab muscles, do other strength-training moves with hand weights or exercise bands stashed nearby, or do gentle stretches to improve your flexibility.

• Use commercials to take care of small general tasks that eat up the time you’d like to spend going for a walk or attending a fitness class. By using even half of commercial breaks to pay bills, do laundry chores, sort through mail and email messages, the average American can accumulate more than four hours of time saved every week. Suddenly, yes, you do have time to walk each day, take that dance or yoga class, or join a tennis group.
• Technology offers one more option. If you have digital recording technology, you can record television shows and fast forward through commercials. You can finish four-and-a-half hours of television shows in a little over three hours. The trick, however, is to use the extra time to work for you, instead of to watch yet another show.

 Take-home idea: If you’d like to try out turning commercial time from wasted time or time to get a snack into time that works for you, choose an idea above or another inspiration. Write it down and post it near the TV or at least somewhere you’ll see it daily. Give it a trial and see how it works. Then come back and share your experience here on Smart Bytes®. We can be a community supporting one another in health!

References

The Nielsen Company. State of the Media. Cross-Platform Report Q3 2011.

Ford ES, Caspersen CJ. Sedentary behaviour and cardiovascular disease: a review of prospective studies. Int J Epidemiol. 2012 Oct;41(5):1338-53.

Thorp AA, et al. Deleterious associations of sitting time and television viewing time with cardiometabolic risk biomarkers: Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle (AusDiab) study 2004-2005. Diabetes Care. 2010 Feb;33(2):327-34.

Grøntved A, Hu FB. Television viewing and risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis. JAMA. 2011 Jun 15;305(23):2448-55.

Wijndaele K, et al. Television viewing and incident cardiovascular disease: prospective associations and mediation analysis in the EPIC Norfolk Study. PLoS One. 2011;6(5):e20058.

Dunstan DW, et al. Television viewing time and mortality: the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab). Circulation. 2010 Jan 26;121(3):384-91.

Wijndaele K, et al. Television viewing time and weight gain in colorectal cancer survivors: a prospective population-based study. Cancer Causes Control. 2009 Oct;20(8):1355-62.