One of my fighters with Parkinson’s told me he wanted to lose some weight he had gained in the last couple of years. He developed a detailed spreadsheet and started tracking everything that he thought affected his health and his PD symptoms. For instance:
- Food intake (what and how much)
- Exercise (what kind and how long)
- Water intake
- Hours slept
- Hours watching TV
- His medication timing and doses
- PD symptoms (bradykinesia, tremor, stiffness, etc.) and their severity
There is a saying: “You can’t improve what you don’t track.”
He was surprised at the results. He said he knew he was eating too much, so he cut down on his caloric intake and lost over 25 pounds and still had more to lose.
What surprised him most was that when he watched more than two hours of TV, his symptoms were a lot worse the next day. Even when his exercise, sleep, and all other factors remained constant, TV-watching made the difference.
Right away I said, “Well, that seems logical. If you sit too much, you get stiffer, especially in your hip flexors, which makes standing up straight and walking harder to do.”
He replied, “Yes, Kimberly, but my tremors were worse.”
I said, “Tremors? From watching more than two hours of TV? Interesting.”
Now, this isn’t an official study, and the sample of one makes it hard to extrapolate the results, but I did find published reports showing a correlation between TV-watching and poor health outcomes. These studies were published before the pandemic began, which is significant since most people started watching a lot more TV during their time sheltering. We’ve certainly heard of people declining during the pandemic, and we know that increased sitting is as detrimental to our health as smoking.
In a study published in 2015, for example, researchers followed more than 221,000 people, ages 50 to 71, who did not have any chronic diseases at the start of the nearly 15-year study period. They found the more time spent in front of the TV, the greater the risk of disease or death.
The more TV these adults watched, the more likely they were to die from conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, flu/pneumonia, Parkinson’s disease and liver disease.
Even when other risk factors were taken into account—such as smoking, drinking alcohol, calorie intake, and health problems—the association between TV-viewing and increased risk of death during the study period remained.
The increased risk of death associated with watching a lot of TV was seen in both active and inactive people in the study, according to the report published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
“Although exercise did not fully eliminate risks associated with prolonged television viewing, exercise should be the first choice to replace that previously sedentary time,” researchers said.
Your big take-away: try tracking your symptoms, minimize your TV-watching time to under two hours per day, and move often.
Go Forth and Conquer!
💜 Coach Kimberly
Sources:
https://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/news/20151029/too-much-tv-linked-to-leading-causes-of-death#1
- Sarah K. Keadle, Steven C. Moore, Joshua N. Sampson, Qian Xiao, Demetrius Albanes, Charles E. Matthews. Causes of Death Associated With Prolonged TV Viewing. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2015.05.023