N.E.A.T.
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (aka NEAT) is the energy burned for activities outside of sleeping.
Literally everything else you do, requires energy!
Working more hours over the last year and felt like you’ve used a lot more energy? It’s because you did. This explains why we have varying degrees of energy requirements from one task to the next, and day to day.
How can we use NEAT to our advantage?
Well, purely from a caloric standpoint and looking at weight loss, and as long as you have no reason to believe you have any underlying hormonal disruption affecting your ability to lose weight, if you increase your NEAT activities, you expend (burn) more calories doing daily activities.
Something like increasing your daily walking to 10,000 steps can have you burning up (approx.) 400 calories! Remember, you don’t have to do all 10,000 steps in one go. Just move more in your day to burn more throughout the day, if that needs to be a part of your goal.
Other NEAT activities: breathing and meditation, fidgeting, laughing, talking, working/typing, writing, cleaning, DIY projects, painting, sculpting, drawing, raking the leaves, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, and other yard work, and so much more!
From a more health-focused lens, increasing your daily NEAT, shows us that we are moving more throughout the day. This very factor alone, changes drastically from our school-going years to our work-going years. Remember as a child, you’d go to school (sometimes walk), sit in class, have recess, play, sit in class, have lunch and recess and play, sit in class, have recess and play, sit and class, and then walk home (and maybe play again)? We don’t play or walk as much. So adding those aspects back into our life help us with expending calories, providing more motion to our bodies in various ways, and helps us from being too sedentary in our day.
I’ve spoken with many of you in the last 2 years, and we all know that our activity levels have drastically changed from even 2 years ago. This has impacted our bodies from everything like weight gain, increased blood pressure, borderline diabetes, mood disorders, and general increased stress and tension.
I get obsessed with NEAT, because it sure as heck beats looking at the weigh-scale (which gives me zero info about my health and daily activity levels, and loads of self-confidence issues). I use it as a guideline to tell me if I’ve been more sedentary, and check in with how I feel in my body. If I notice moving more, in certain ways (walking), provides me with relief and a better mindset for the day, then I try to use this as medicine on the daily.
We all know movement is key, and we as a society do not move as much as we should, in general. Using NEAT as a way to know that not all exercise needs to be the kind you do in the gym, and a lot of what we do can be achieved by increasing our NEAT, this can help you achieve your goals more readily, and also helps you get your daily activities done. Many goals reached at once!
Isn’t that ‘neat’? ;)