The evening

By seven o'clock the working day's sitting is done, and you could argue that you've earned the sofa. You've been at it since half past eight. The evening is the only part of the day that belongs to you, and what you want to do with it is sit down and watch something.

I've no quarrel with that. An evening in front of the television with someone you like is one of the ordinary pleasures of life, and a book that told you to give it up would deserve to be ignored. What I'd like you to look at is the form the evening takes, because it's different from the working day in a way that matters.

At work, things interrupt you. The phone goes, someone wants you in another room, you need the printer. You get up more than you think, even on a bad day. The sofa has none of that. The remote is in reach, and so are your drink and your phone. One episode runs into the next without your needing to do anything. The evening sit is the longest and least broken of the day, and it comes after the day's largest meal. On the Wednesday in chapter 1 it ran from seven until half past ten with a single interruption, and that was somebody else's parcel.

That may be part of why television time came out worse than sitting in general in the big Ekelund study. Three hours or more a day in front of the television went with a higher death rate in all but the most active group. The researchers couldn't say why from their data, and I can't either. The reasons usually suggested are the ones I've just given, which are that it's unbroken, it follows dinner and it tends to come with snacks. It may also be that hours of television stand in for other things, such as poor health or loneliness, that the studies couldn't fully measure. I'd hold the finding loosely. It does fit the laboratory result in chapter 8, where seven unbroken hours after a sugary drink was the worst condition.

Think back to Dunstan's test drink. His volunteers drank it and then sat, and their blood sugar ran high for hours unless they got up. Dinner followed by three hours of stillness is a home version of his worst condition.

The evening is also where the tired-so-rest loop from chapter 4 is tightest. You arrive home flat, the sofa takes you, and three and a half hours later you get up flatter. I don't think the television does that. Three and a half hours of any motionless activity would do the same.

So the change I'm suggesting for evenings is small. Keep the programmes and break the sit. Here are some ways to do it, from which you can pick.

Walk for ten minutes after dinner, before you sit down at all. Once you're on the sofa, getting up again is hard, so go while you're still on your feet from clearing the table. A walk after a meal also comes at the point in the day when your blood sugar is highest.

Get up between episodes. The gap is there, and the player fills it with a countdown precisely so that you won't use it. Stand, go to the kitchen, put something away and come back.

Leave the things you want out of reach. If your glass of water, your glasses case and your phone charger are in other rooms, the evening will contain several short walks that you didn't have to plan.

Do one job on your feet during the evening. Iron in front of the programme, or fold the washing at the worktop with the radio on. It counts for the purposes of this book, which may be the only good thing anyone has said about ironing.

And if you watch with someone, tell them what you're doing. Otherwise your getting up every half hour will look like restlessness or a comment on the programme.

If you're retired, the evening pattern may describe your whole day. The NHS figure of ten hours or more for the over-sixty-fives reflects the loss of those workplace interruptions. Without an office to make you get up, the prompts have to come from you. Everything in this chapter applies from nine in the morning.