Lexington, KY - Men's Health magazine recently released a scathing list of the 100 most sedentary cities in America. Inert at the top of the list, slouching in an armchair, watching cable TV with its hand forever in a bag of potato chips, was Lexington, Kentucky - home, dead beat, home.
The ranking (eloquently titled, "Where Sit Happens") set off a local firestorm of incredulity, especially in the social media sphere, which unfortunately didn't buttress any sort of strong rebuttal, since you've got to be planted on your keister to post to Facebook or Twitter. Apparently, we are not going to take it, but we are still going to be sitting down.
People love a good list. We might hate the results, but we still love to look. And why wouldn't we love to look? Maybe we're on there. This selfish human characteristic is not lost on Men's Health, or other media outlets, so they pimp out shoddy scientific research for the sake of attention-grabbing headlines. If there were a Top 10 list of magazines with bogus lists and rankings, Men's Health would be thumping its chest at the top, followed quickly by Rolling Stone. This practice is a quick ploy to generate notice, and hopefully readers, and I'm sure Men's Health received a robust (and dare I say, healthy) amount of web traffic from Lexington readers, as well as from other readers around the country who wanted to see how their cities fared, and to point and scoff at lazy-ass Lexington.
I think city rankings are fun to look at, and often contradictory. Earlier in the year, I saw Lexington placed on another city-ranking list, in Newsweek, which put our town as the No. 5 most sleep-deprived city in the country. This statistic, taken in light of our apparent listlessness, is stunning. Either we're all sitting around all night, doing nothing, or we're worrying so much about being lazy that it's keeping us up at night. Men's Health also put Lexington as the No. 10 city for having the least amount of sex, so we're clearly not making whoopee during the wee hours.
And yet, in a ranking of cities with the best quality of life for men, Men's Health put Lexington at No. 4. So we're not only content with not having sex, being slugs and staying up all night, we're downright happy about it.
When the sedentary ranking came out at the end of June, cynicism set in quickly. What sort of metrics did these number savants at Men's Health use to bestow such a dastardly title on us? Who do they think they are? People wanted to know. Thousands of runners come out for events like Bluegrass 10,000 and Midsummer Night's Run, and Lexington is host to the increasingly popular 2nd Sunday initiative, with a stated purpose of getting people out and active. The parks are packed. More and more drivers are getting frustrated with the number of cyclists on the road. These are all indicators of an active community.
Turns out the ranking was the product of an astute formula that took into consideration
the amount of physical activity reported, the rate of death from deep vein thrombosis (a condition caused by, among many other things, immobility), the amount of TV we're watching, and the real piece de resistance for the whole calibration: the number of video games we're purchasing. (Purchasing, mind you, not necessarily playing; if that were the case, Seattle, home to the venerable game console Xbox and a number of video game-developing companies, would certainly have been knocked from its least-sedentary pedestal.)
Please don't get me wrong, I don't think Lexington should be above any sort of criticism regarding its citizen's fitness record. We could all stand to walk our butts around the block a couple of more times a day. I just think it would be great if we all took this opportunity to really encourage each other to make Lexington the title holder of a statistic we can all be proud of: the city with the highest rate of subscription cancellations to Men's Health.
and
Robbie Clark is editor of Chevy Chaser Southsider magazines.