Working in an office has its obvious upside: it's generally the case it leads to health insurance, a higher wage, and  a stable wage. Oh and there's air conditioning. Most of us sit on our asses in college for four years (often more) to get to such a luxurious strap-down.

A major reason that there aren't non-office jobs that earn living wages is because of outsourcing. Thanks, Reagan.

The downside, as you may have guessed from my skillful foreshadowing, is that us officeworkers have to sit down - all the damn time.

I'm extremely insecure about my physical appearance, particularly about the size of my ass. Thusly, I'm hypersensitive about sitting on it all day. Not only am I not burning calories, but CLEARLY gravity is pushing my weight down on my ass thereby spreading it out and only increasing its size.

As much as sitting makes me neurotic and allows generally unpleasant feelings about my ass and thigh cellulite breeding like flies,  I do my duty that earns my paycheck day in and day out. I sit on my ass, in front of my computer, talking on the phone, solving problems.

Now in order to erase this ill of sitting all freaking day, I go to the gym as often as I possibly can. This means four to fives days out of the week. I really thought that this was undoing some damage. I find the gym annoying and, of course, smelly. Another personal issue is my inability to wear my glasses while I'm working out, so I can't tell who is looking at me, if I know someone, or generally what the fuck is going on. But I go anyway, because I always hoped to be redeeming my health - if not decreasing the size of my ass.

Alas, MSNBC Health has published an article by LiveScience touting a lovely study that suggests pumping iron and trudging aimlessly on the treadmill every day does nothing for our health if we spend the rest of our time sitting.

So...can you at least tell me that my gym time is making me a little better off? Maybe helping my metabolism or something? No? Damn.

The caveat to my very brief description of the article is that  it does assume we sit in offices for eight hours ever day. Outside of that, if we sit more than six additional hours, we're undoing the gym time.

I think that for many of Americans who can afford to live in actual single family homes with yards that require upkeep, perhaps take the train to work, or do other things that don't allow you to sit-on-ass all day, this might be doable. But wo-is-me, a Los Angeles apartment dweller. If you aren't from LA, I'll just fill you in: the rumors are true, nobody walks here.

In January I spent one week in Tokyo. Even carbo-loading my face off, I lost five pounds. That's because we walked, rather conveniently, everywhere.

American obesity isn't just a culture problem: it's a perfect storm of poor diet, abundance of office jobs, suburbia (which requires driving), and in some cases, absolute laziness.

Allegedly, the future of the workforce will be telecommuting.  Hopefully I can telecommute from the gym.