If you’re looking to lose some weight this year, you’ve likely made plans to reduce your calories and hit the gym hard. While calorie reduction and physical exercise are essential components of weight loss, there’s another crucial factor that often gets overlooked: non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT.
NEAT is all the calories you burn daily from everyday movement outside of purposeful exercise. For example, a trip to Walmart for groceries contributes to your daily NEAT through actions like walking from your car to the store, pushing a cart, and unloading groceries.
Some NEAT is done unintentionally, like fidgeting. Calories burned from fidgeting can vary from 100-800 calories a day between individuals. Why the variance? Some people fidget more than others.
You also expend NEAT in other subtle ways. When you sit instead of lying down, you burn 4% more calories. If you adjust your posture while sitting, more calories are burned. And if you stand instead of sitting, NEAT increases even more.
While it may seem like all these small daily movements wouldn’t affect our weight loss goals very much, as we’ll delve into below, the research suggests otherwise. NEAT can play a huge role in getting and staying lean. And once you understand that, you can leverage the NEAT effect to your advantage.
Breaking Down Our Daily Caloric Burn
There are several ways our bodies burn calories each day, which break down as follows for the average person. While the contribution each category contributes is expressed in percentages, since it varies from person to person, these numbers give us a good general idea of what each process/activity contributes to our overall caloric burn:
- Basal metabolism (60-70% of calories). The energy needed simply to keep your organs running and you alive.
- Thermic effect of food (10%). Calories burned digesting what we eat.
- Exercise-related activity thermogenesis (5-10%). EAT represents the calories burned from purposeful exercise.
- Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (15-30%): NEAT includes all non-structured activities like walking, fidgeting, household chores, and occupational movement.
Notice that for most people, NEAT burns more calories than dedicated physical exercise. All those small movements throughout the day really add up!
Modern Life Kills NEAT
Our ancestors had NEAT built into their day-to-day lives. Simply preparing a single meal required a lot of NEAT. You’d have to hunt and haul game to camp and then create and tend the fire to cook it. As we moved to industrial economies, machines reduced how much we had to move for food and survival.
Both work and home life require less movement than 50 years ago. Work tasks that once required getting up from a desk and walking to another part of the office can now all be done with a click of the mouse, while modern appliances have made household chores less physically demanding.
Our leisure time has become more sedentary as well, and often only involves moving from sitting behind a screen at work to sitting in front of a television at home.
Add an increased consumption of calorically-dense, highly-processed foods to this reduction in NEAT, and it’s little mystery why humans have been getting fatter and sicker in the past few decades.
NEAT: The Not-So-Magical Talisman That Wards Off Weight Gain
Have you ever wondered how some people can eat pretty much whatever they want and never gain weight, while you seem to put on the pounds just by eating an occasional extra slice of pizza?
It may be because they do a lot more NEAT than you.
Research shows that daily NEAT can vary by up to 2,000 calories a day between similarly-sized individuals. That’s huge!
Factors like occupation and age influence how much NEAT you get each day; a guy in construction will do more NEAT than an office worker, and younger people tend to move more than older people.
Hardwired differences in the brain may play a role as well.
In a fascinating study conducted at the Mayo Clinic called “The Great Overfeeding Experiment,” Dr. James Levine discovered something remarkable about how people respond to excess calories. When study participants consumed an extra 1,000 calories a day over their maintenance calories for eight weeks, some people stored nearly all the excess calories as fat. Others spontaneously increased their NEAT by up to 700 calories per day and didn’t gain any weight.
What accounts for the variance in these responses?
It may come down to genetics. Levine hypothesizes that in some people, the hypothalamus triggers increased movement to burn excess calories; some people naturally respond to an uptick in calories by subtly and unconsciously increasing their physical activity, enabling them to keep the pounds off without much thinking about it. In other people, this response doesn’t occur, leading them to gain weight.
But, as Levine emphasized when he came on the AoM podcast, even if you’re in the latter category, that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to packing on the pounds. It just means you need to be more intentional about overcoming your propensity towards passivity and doing more NEAT.
No matter your situation in life — whether you’re young or old, a desk jockey or a lumberjack, prone to being fidgety or sitting still — you can choose to move more than you currently do.
How to Increase Your NEAT
It takes an extra 3,500 calories to gain a pound of body weight. So if you burn 500 additional calories a day through doing extra NEAT, that could allow you to lose or keep off over 50 pounds in a year!
According to Dr. Levine’s research, even someone whose brain/life isn’t naturally conducive to generating NEAT can shed pounds by proactively making changes in their daily routine, such as:
- Parking far away from the entrances to offices and shops
- Taking walk-and-talk meetings
- Taking the stairs instead of the elevator
- Using a standing or walking desk at work
- Using the restroom at the far end of the office rather than the nearest one
- Shopping in person instead of ordering things online and having them delivered
- Standing while watching TV
- Doing more of your household cleaning/yard/DIY projects yourself
- Taking a 15-minute walk after meals
- Walking everywhere more briskly than your default pace
- Taking a 15-minute morning walk
- Taking movement breaks from work (doing some squats and/or push-ups) every 45 minutes
What’s great about NEAT is that, unlike many aspects of fitness that require huge lifestyle overhauls, increasing your NEAT is pretty dang doable. It doesn’t necessitate special equipment, gym memberships, getting sweaty, or blocking out hours of your day. It just requires a willingness to move a little more in ways that naturally fit into your day-to-day life.
As Dr. Levine said on the podcast, it all just comes down to looking for ways to make typically sedentary activities more active.
“The trick to all of this,” he told me, “is to make a decision. Is today going to be the day I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and step forwards? Or is today gonna be the day I stay on my seat?”
Combine more NEAT with regular dedicated workouts and a caloric deficit, and you’ll be on your way to getting leaner and meaner in the new year.
For more insights on the power of NEAT, listen to our podcast with Dr. James Levine:
