Beyonce startled the universe yesterday, releasing unannounced a new ‘7/11’ video that has gained 4 million more views on YouTube in 12 hours. The video features Bey and her posse dancing around as if jammin’ at a slumber party. ‘7/11’ and another new track called ‘Ring Off’ are both featured on the ‘Beyonce Platinum Box Set’ on Monday.

Beyonce is also nominated for Artist of the Year at the 2014 American Music Awards (AMAs), which will be broadcast live from the Nokia Theater LA tomorrow night, Sunday, November 23, 2014.

Forgive me for going all serious on readers this moment, but watching Beyonce’s ‘7/11’, my only response was ‘let’s move’! Any kind of movement — because our good health and longevity depend on it. Now Beyonce has all the right moves — but the casual, spontaneous nature of this dance routine says ‘anything goes’. So get your booty movin’, arms flailing and don’t worry about making an idiot of yourself.

Get A Move On

Researchers in Germany took a look at 43 observational studies that analyzed 4 million people’s answers to questions about how much they sat each day and incidences of cancer. “The researchers examined close to 70,000 cancer cases and found that sitting is associated with a 24% increased risk of colon cancer, a 32% increased risk of endometrial cancer, and a 21% increased risk of lung cancer,” reports QUARTZ.

The really bad news is that your nightly trip to the gym isn’t enough to undue the damage to your body of sitting all day. Meeting your daily activity requirements working up an intense gym sweat or yoga workout is not enough.

This is where Beyonce’s crazy moves come into the picture. With 1.5 minutes of activity every half hour, you can keep your body fighting back against the physical damage associated with our sedentary lives. Consider these medical facts:

Weight Gain

1. You probably know the first item on our agenda: weight gain. Our bodies burn on average a calorie a minute in a sedentary position. Weight gain and obesity can promote insulin resistance and inflammation, both of which increase the risk of cancer among people of above-average weight.

Not you? Even though you have a largely sedentary desk job, you’ve kept your weight under control. Great! But read on.

Muscular Shut Down

2. When we sit all day, our large postural support muscles — the quadriceps and glutes — are parked, too.

“Skeletal muscles have an electrical activity in them when they’re working which is like the light switch that turns on all these healthy things in the muscles,” explained Marc Hamilton, director of the Inactivity Physiology Program at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana in a recent webinar. When you sit, you turn these light switches off.

This physicality body blackout also shuts down lipoprotein lipase, an enzyme that has been described as “a vacuum cleaner for fats in the blood stream.” When rats remained inactive for 24 hours, their lipoprotein lipase activity plummeted, causing a 75% drop in the ability of their muscles to remove noxious fats in the bloodstream. ‘Good’ cholesterol (HDL) levels also dropped significantly.

Incredible as it seems, Hamilton found that just a few hours of sitting suppresses a gene that controls inflammation and blood clotting, with negative impact on our cardiovascular system. Dr. Hamilton is quoted in an excellent article in ‘Runners World’:

“Your body is designed to move,” Hamilton says. “Sitting for an extended period of time causes your body to shut down at the metabolic level.” When your muscles, especially certain leg muscles, are immobile, your circulation slows. So you use less of your blood sugar and you burn less fat, which increases your risk of heart disease and diabetes. Indeed, a study of 3,757 women found that for every two hours they sat in a given work day, their risk for developing diabetes went up seven percent, which means their risk is 56 percent higher on days they sit for eight hours. And a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology reports that a man who sits more than six hours a day has an 18 percent increased risk of dying from heart disease and a 7.8 percent increased chance of dying from diabetes compared with someone who sits for three hours or less a day. Although running does much good for you, Healy says, if you spend the rest of your waking hours sitting, those health benefits depreciate. In a 12-year study of more than 17,000 Canadians, researchers found that the more time people spent sitting, the earlier they died—regardless of age, body weight, or how much they exercised.

Every Hour, Get a Short Move On

If these articles don’t inspire us to get our dance moves on, not much will. We repeat that doctors say a minute and a half of gettin’ your groove on in some way every 30 minutes will go a long way to keeping you healthy. Two minutes of treadmill walking every 20 minutes is great. Reality is that most of us don’t have access to a treadmill during the day, so we must improvise.

For starters, standing up and waving our arms while marching in place for 90 seconds is better than doing nothing. March for a minute and add squats at desk for 30 seconds. Improvise! Trust me, I understand the mindset that says “I can’t stop now” — except that you MUST!! Your life depends upon it. Just imagine that you’re Beyonce or one of her dancers.

I will try to adjust my own routine to accommodate 90 seconds of exercise every 30 minutes and let you know how I’m doing. ~ Anne