I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting e-mails and tossing out snail mail. Attend! Like! Join! Contribute! All this exhorting. It takes a heap-load of aggressive ignoring to maintain a modicum of focus these days.

But because of my upbringing—a mother who was an exercise enthusiast and who read Adelle Davis before health food was popular—I tend to pay attention to information about health. I love reading the Science Times in Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times. Of late—the past few months—there have been numerous articles about the effects of exercise on the human body and brain, articles reporting on research that has probed well beyond the well-known truth that exercise is good for us. The titles of these articles, many of them written by the Times “Phys Ed” columnist Gretchen Reynolds, are always compelling. “Don’t Just Sit There.” “The Men Who Stare at Screens: How healthy are couch potatoes who work out?” And “Jogging Your Brain” with a log-line that reads: “A  mouse that runs all the time is smarter than one that doesn’t. Probably true for people too.”

Much of the research points to the same conclusion, that sitting for long periods of time is harmful even for people who exercise regularly. Being sedentary for long stretches creates cellular changes that include producing less of an enzyme that dissolves fat in the bloodstream so fat accumulates and travels to the heart and liver which can lead to diabetes and heart problems. In one study when volunteers rose every twenty minutes to walk on a treadmill their blood sugar levels remained stable, while those same volunteers when they sat all day responded with spiking blood sugar and out-of-whack insulin. 

Clearly seven to eight hours is too long to sit, but what about an hour or two?  It appears—though I am no scientist—that even that might be enough for the sedentary effect to kick in. Gretchen Reynolds has responded to what she has learned by rising every twenty minutes or so to “prowl” around her office. She stands to talk on the phone, and sometimes she reads standing up. Gretchen Reynolds is very convincing, and I strive to emulate her.

But—here’s the rub. As a writer there is almost no “skill” more valuable than sitzfleisch. This German word combines the words “sit” and “flesh” and means “the ability to endure or carry on with an activity.” For a writer this means nothing other than getting your fanny to the chair and keeping it there in order to, in the case of a fiction writer, imagine more deeply. Sitzfleisch is a fashionable word these days in writers’ circles. For some, including me, it is almost a mantra.

Speaking for myself, getting up every twenty minutes or so does not fly when I’m writing fiction. I need to stay at my perch, body still, mind and imagination in charge. Getting up invites the possibility of distraction from the fragile what if at hand. On a good day, if things are cooking, I can sometimes stay still for three hours at a stretch. After that I usually have to move, even if it is only to get up and make tea, or to go outside for the paper.

But three hours! I hate to think of my poor cellular self after those hours, all the fat accumulating and migrating to where it shouldn’t be. According to the research, it seems, whatever exercise I do later will not compensate for the harm I might already have done.

Clearly I need to do something differently. One possibility is to give up writing—but I’m not ready for that. I could ignore those health articles more aggressively. I could alter my writing techniques… I’ve been experimenting a little, trying to be more Gretchen Reynolds-like. Just now, after an hour of work, I got up to make myself tea and, as I waited for the water to boil, I did some yoga postures. That’s improvement, isn’t it, a compromise, a move towards balance.

But still it remains a daily tug-of-war. I look forward to a future where I have learned, like a smart mouse, to simultaneously write and run.