I know sitting is bad for me. But how can I cut back when it’s so much fun?

‘I could easily become the David Hockney of sitting, denouncing the nanny state, defiantly sitting in a room full of chairs.’ Photograph: LumiNola/Getty Images (posed by a model)

Are you sitting down? Not because I am about to say anything shocking. Sorry – I shouldn’t scare you. I bet you are sitting. So am I. Because sitting is what we mainly do, isn’t it? Sitting is nice, a simple and enduring pleasure, unless it’s forced upon you by illness or disability. This is a shame, because it’s also killing me, you and everyone else.

You know this, probably. The “sitting is worse than smoking” messaging started in about 2010. It isn’t worse than smoking – duh – but it is “associated with higher all-cause mortality”. “People doing more than 12 hours per day sitting had a higher risk of [premature] death,” according to one of the authors of the most recent and widely publicised research on sitting and how to counteract its ill effects, which analysed data from four large-scale studies.