You're not allowed to sit still

Fidgeting Helps Separate the Lean From the Obese, Study Finds By Rob Stein

The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 30 pounds a year, the researchers found....

[James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research said] "...it's going to take a massive, top-down approach to change the environment in which we live to get us up and be lean again."

Other researchers agreed, saying the new study, while small, provides powerful new evidence that a major cause of the obesity epidemic is the pattern of desk jobs, car pools, suburban sprawl, and other environmental and lifestyle factors that discourage physical activity.

Update

I like The Fit Tend to Fidget, and Biology May Be Why, a Study Says By DENISE GRADY a bit better:

The findings, being published today in the journal Science, are from a study in which researchers at the Mayo Clinic outfitted 10 lean men and women and 10 slightly obese ones - all of whom described themselves as "couch potatoes" - with underwear carrying sensors that measured their body postures and movements every half second for 10 days on several occasions.

10?!

Dr. Eric Ravussin, an obesity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote an essay in Science about Dr. Levine's study, said that because the tendency to sit still seemed to be biological, it might not be easy for obese people to change their ways. "The bad news," Dr. Ravussin said, "is that you cannot tell people, 'Why don't you sit less and be a little more fidgety,' because they may do it for a couple of hours but won't sustain it for days and weeks and months and years."

But Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University Medical Center, said, "People can be taught and motivated to change their behavior in service of their health."

Dr. Leibel also noted that although it was plausible that the tendency to be inactive was biologically determined, it had not been proved.

Dr. Ravussin said it might be possible to help people stay lean by making their environments less conducive to sitting, though that would take major societal changes like rebuilding neighborhoods in which people can walk to markets instead of "the remote shopping mall with 10,000 parking spots and everybody is fighting for the handicapped one."

I'm skeptical that any government will be able to do this. But according to Ian Sample in Fat to fit: how Finland did it,

[Finland] is one of only two countries to have halted the downward spiral towards terminal couch potatoism, or sedentary inactivity to use the official parlance. Only Canada, though New Zealand may be a contender, can claim to have done as much to get people off their sofas and exercising.

And how did they do it?

"The biggest innovation was massive community-based intervention. We tried to change entire communities, "says [Pekka Puska, director of the National Institute of Public Health in Helsinki]. Instead of a mass campaign telling people what not to do, officials blitzed the population with positive incentives. Villages held "quit and win"competitions for smokers, where those who didn't spark up for a month won prizes. Entire towns were set against each other in cholesterol-cutting showdowns.

Local competitions were combined with sweeping nationwide changes in legislation. All forms of tobacco advertising were banned outright. Farmers were all but forced to produce low-fat milk or grow a new variety of oilseed rape bred just for the region that would make domestic vegetable oil widely available for the first time.

That sounds like a real non-starter in the US. In addition to changing people's diet, the government made an effort to get people moving:

...first by selling enjoyable activities to people that happened to require physical activity, and second ensuring exercise was the cheap and easy choice to make.

From the start, the Finnish plans benefited by shifting money away from Helsinki to local authorities and making them responsible for exercise promotion. Obvious outcomes were cheap, clean swimming pools, ball parks, and well-maintained snow parks....less obvious were what medics might refer to as "unusual interventions ".

"There were towns where the pubs were full of middle-aged men who seemed to do little other than drink, "says Ilkka Vuori, a fitness expert at Tampere University and ex-director of the UKK Institute Centre for Health Promotion in Tampere. "They were a difficult group to reach, so teams went to the pubs, spoke to them and negotiated what they might be interested in doing as exercise. "Nearly 2, 000 men in one region were either lent bikes and taken on tours, tempted into a swimming pool, or had a shot at ball games or cross-country skiing. "It was about getting ideas that would work at that kind of local level, "says Vuori. "Success relied upon it. "...

In a time when people often give the excuse of not having enough time to exercise, it was seen as the only way of reaching some groups. Commuting became an obvious target, and campaigns were set up to encourage people to walk and cycle more. The public health messages being sent out were backed up by action on the ground with hundreds of kilometres of new walking and cycle paths laid down to form networks into towns and cities, and money was provided to keep them well maintained and lit at night...

A revision to state legislation meant that in many places, the houses lining a street now take responsibility for keeping the pavements in front of their homes safe and clear of snow and ice. It doesn't sound like a law many would adhere to, but Vuori says it is taken very seriously...

The latest practical measure being brought in is the Movement Prescription Project. Based on an idea cooked up in New Zealand, it encourages GPs to prescribe physical activity to their patients along the same lines as medication.

But here's the problem:

Observers of the Finnish success story are now working on how they can bring such drastic improvements to their own countries. Privately, some claim that Finland had it easier than many because its citizens are happy to live in a nanny state.

So I'm afraid it's not likely to work in the US.