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Modern life is replete with an ever-growing list of shortcuts, each of which we gratefully embrace as it comes over the horizon of consumerism.

Baby carrots that don't need peeling. Pre-washed herbs and salad greens that don't need spinning. The garage door opener that eliminates the need to bend and tug. The leaf blower and sit-on mower that make yard work a breeze.

These blessings, we frazzled folk believe, steal back for us small bits of that most precious of commodities: time. What we fail to recognize is what they steal from us.

Modern conveniences are robbing us of opportunities to actually move. They are stripping from our daily lives movements that could add to our flexibility, mobility, balance and strength, that could help us battle weight gain and forestall the effects of aging.

Obesity and fitness researcher Mark Tremblay thinks we ought to start taking back some of those chances to bend and flex and burn a few calories.

People should introduce a dash of inconvenience to their days, advises Dr. Tremblay, director of the healthy active living and obesity research group at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario's Research Institute in Ottawa.

"The list of conveniences is very, very long and we're very easily seduced into thinking that these conveniences are good things," Dr. Tremblay says, pointing as an example to the latest time saver to hit his radar.

"I saw on the television last night that podcasts are now broadcasting church services to the home so that parents with young children don't have to go through 'all that bother.' And it's 'all that bother' that is what we need to recapture. Because all that bother is part of what keeps us healthy, active, limber, mobile and at a healthy body weight."

Diane Finegood figured out the inconvenience trick when she set out to lose weight a few years ago.

Dr. Finegood had fought a long-term battle with her weight and was up to about 250 pounds when she decided enough was enough. Having lost and regained on diets, she decided to change the way she lived instead.

That meant embracing activity. But the pedometer she wore to calculate how much she was moving in the course of the day revealed she was nowhere close to the 10,000 daily steps she was aiming for. So she looked for ways to inject extra steps into her daily routine. Inconvenience was key.

She started deliberately parking her car in the farthest possible spot from the door.

"In my job, I don't move. I sit on airplanes a lot. I sit at my desk a lot," says Dr. Finegood, who is scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes.

"And that's what's led me to behaviours like parking my car as far away in the lot as I can, whether it's going to work or going to the mall. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator and recognizing that those stairs counted and were valuable to me. ... Purposefully getting up and going to the farthest coffee place across campus to get that coffee in the morning or something like that."

"Those kinds of activities were really helpful," says Dr. Finegood, who has lost 75 pounds.

This is the type of activity Dr. Tremblay is advocating. He isn't trying to turn everyone into triathletes. Adding small movements at multiple points in the day would be a start: getting off the bus/subway/streetcar a stop or two before your destination and walking the rest of the way; climbing more stairs; standing more often; chopping your own vegetables or preparing your own food; raking leaves.

"We've been reducing steps, reducing arm movements. reducing lifting, reducing climbing ... just little bits here and there, but enough that add up to the positive caloric balance that we find ourselves in that just causes the whole population's weight to incrementally increase and increase and increase."

Parents of small children, manual labourers and fitness fanatics excepted, many of us barely move in the course of a regular day.

We drive or ride to work, where an elevator or an escalator carries us to our floor. We then sit for hours on end. The occasional walk to the washroom or a fevered burst of typing may be the big exercise hit of the day.

Come quitting time, we drive or ride home, where we may pop some prepared fare into the microwave, load the dirty dishes into the dishwasher and then plop ourselves in front of the TV, exhausted.

We have burned so few calories we are almost in a state of hibernation. When it comes to balancing calorie intake with energy output, we don't have a chance.

"I don't think we can possibly condition ourselves to eat as little as we need to to get into energy balance when we're ... doing absolutely nothing [physical] most of the day," Dr. Tremblay says.

Reclaiming incidental daily movements won't produce sculpted abs and rippling biceps. But "every little bit helps," Dr. Tremblay says.

"The body and its systems are rather rational," he warns. "So if you don't use it, you lose it. Whether that's flexibility or strength or power or endurance of whatever muscle group you're talking about, it will diminish and get weaker."