Is Technology Causing Us To Gain Belly Fat?
The Powered Lawnmower...
...and all those other powered tools that mean we burn up far fewer calories doing regular jobs which were once completely reliant on manpower (the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, hedge cutter, to name a few). And at an industrial level, there are the people who were once described as 'manual labourers', but who now simply man powered tools - the JCB, forklift truck etc. Factory jobs of all kinds, with everything automated, are no longer as physical as they were even a few decades ago. So when we look at how to lose belly fat fast we need to look at how much physical activity we are doing every day.
Television
Scot John Logie Baird is often credited with the invention of the television, but other people had a hand in its development. In the latter half of the twentieth century, television proved so fascinating that, almost overnight, people in the Western world stopped pottering around in the evening after work or at the weekends and sat on a sofa, watching a square box for hours instead.
And in more recent years, TV has turned most of us into voyeurs, not doers. When you can see your favorite sport on TV, why go to the match? When you can see the top of Everest or even Snowdon on that wide screen, why get off your bum to go and see it for yourself? Go dancing? Well, yes, but we'd just as soon stay in and watch Strictly Come Dancing. Go on a walking holiday to the Lake District? Perhaps - but Wainwright Walks on TV has taken away the necessity, somehow.
In its defence, TV can introduce people to hobbies and ideas that they might not otherwise have thought about, and might sometimes encourage people to take up a sport (for example, kids' gymnastics classes and athletics clubs fill to bursting after the Olympics are screened and are all great ways to burn off calories). But it is a fact that before TV was invented, we spent much less of our spare time sitting, just ticking over metabolically, than we do now. And as watching TV advertising also encourages us to eat it can provide two negatives instead of one.
