According to a study recently published in the Diabetes journal and presented at the Second International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health, sitting for long periods virtually shut down one of the body’s best fat-fighting tools, the enzyme lipase. 

What does this mean?  They found: raised levels of HDL (“bad”) cholesterol, metabolism slowed and more fat was retained in the body.  Bad news! 

Recommendation: Get up and move around!  Don’t just sit for extended periods.  It also means you can’t sit at your office job all day long, go by the gym afterwards and work it all off.  Or, if you do some good at the gym, think how much better off you would be if you’d move around during your workday too.

It’s June already so that means some of us will start to get real body-conscious (to get into that bathing suit).  Although I feel I should say that health should be a year-round focus, these two tools can help, whether your focus is short- or long-term. 

They are Gyminee.com, a workout buddy and Cron-o-meter, a calorie counter.  Gyminee excels at counting calories broken down by workout type and duration, and happens to have a good calorie counter that will even allow you to enter recipes and have it total up the calories.  Cron-o-meter is even more anal about counting calories – and calculating nutrition of the food you eat.  You can see a quick demo of both of them at DemoGirl.com (you may have to scroll down the page a ways).  Molly does a great job of tourguide, walking you through the software’s essential elements, usually in under 3 minutes.