Our bodies can sabotage our healthy behaviors..

I pass on an interesting chunk from Reynolds' review of work by Mansoubi et al. showing that people who use sit-to-stand workstations in their office compensate by reducing activity and increasing sitting outside of working hours, thus canceling out the effects of their virtuous exercise at the office.

...the human body and brain are funny. They often, and rather insidiously, undermine some of our best efforts to be healthier, in an attempt to maintain our physiological status quo. The result can be that we do not benefit as much as we’d hoped from changes to our lifestyles. When we slash calories to lose weight, for instance, our bodies often lower our metabolic rate, and our weight doesn’t budge much.

Similarly, studies of people who begin or greatly intensify an exercise program have shown that these exercisers often start sitting more during the hours when they are not working out, so that their overall daily energy expenditure doesn’t increase substantially and the number of hours that they spend sitting grows.