Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)
NEAT
Carving out time to sweat, get your heart pumping and move around is not the only way to of doing exercise.
There is a sometimes overlooked source of metabolic health. It is a concept that goes by the name non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, for short. It is all the calories that a person burns through their daily activity excluding purposeful physical exercise (through low-effort movements over the course of your day – things like household chores, strolling through the grocery aisle, climbing the stairs, bobbing your leg up and down at your desk, or cooking dinner).
It’s a simple idea at its core: Inject mobility — ideally whatever gets you walking around — into what would otherwise default into sitting time.
How NEAT works and how to get more of it
NEAT fills in the slack in your energy expenditure.
How is our energy spent in a day?
Much of our daily energy expenditure is relatively fixed. More than half of those calories go toward supporting basic bodily functions, what’s known as our basal metabolic rate. That’s for the most part not modifiable.
Digesting and metabolizing food takes up another sliver of our daily energy, roughly about 10%, and likewise cannot be changed significantly.
That leaves the remaining 30% to 40% for all your activity.
That’s where NEAT comes in – moving around as you go about your day can chip away at that remaining slice of the energy pie. Daily errands like grocery shopping can increase your NEAT.
And even among those who do exercise regularly, NEAT usually plays a bigger role in calorie burning than working out.
It’s not that NEAT should be considered a substitute for more structured bouts of intense physical exercise, which has its own well-established health benefits. But revving up NEAT can be more accessible for some people, especially those who don’t exercise as much, if at all.
Sometimes it’s hard to carve out 30 to 60 minutes of your day to do an exercise routine. These little behaviors can accumulate and end up comprising a lot of energy expenditure.
Common daily activities can increase your NEAT by surprising amounts.
Factors that affect NEAT
People of the same size can have dramatically different levels of NEAT, based on factors like their job and where they live, as well as their biological drive to get up and move around.
Levels of NEAT directly predicts how well someone can avoid putting on fat.
People who have the capacity to burn off extra calories and remain thin are people who can switch on their NEAT.
Increasing NEAT is an “untapped resource” for managing weight, but it’s not effective on its own — that is, absent changes in diet.
NEAT varies greatly across societies and occupations. Research shows there can be as much as a 2,000-calorie difference between people of the same body size, depending on how physically active their occupation is.
People who are living in agricultural communities are literally moving three times more than even lean or overweight people in North America, just in the environments in which they live.
Long-term health benefits
It’s not all about weight. Being sedentary is associated with a range of health problems independent of obesity, from cardiovascular disease to joint problems to mental health issues.
Keeping yourself moving is all the more important as we age.
For every 287 calories an old person burns per day, there is about a 30% lower chance of dying.
Older people in higher calorie burn groups are not the all-stars of exercising. Those who are less likely to die don’t exercise more than others, but the NEAT in their lives is different. They are more likely to have stairs where they live and are more likely to volunteer. We don’t equate those things to exercise, but it is movement.
Skip the shortcuts and increase your NEAT.
Play actively with kids to increase their (and your) NEAT. Sitting playing on a screen barely raises your metabolism over resting rate.
Even small behavior changes can amplify or diminish how much NEAT you get, and this can shape your health in powerful ways.
Sometimes, we take shortcuts like the following.
- Driving a half mile to pick up coffee instead of taking a 15-minute walk.
- Using the drive thru instead of actually getting out of the car.
- Choosing to take the elevator instead of trudging up the stairs.
Sitting up at the computer is not good for the body. Just strolling about one and a half to two miles an hour can double your metabolic rate. Seemingly trivial movements, like walking to the corner store, or mowing the lawn, can add up to make a big difference over the course of the day. Taking up household projects that force you to move around could bring up your NEAT by 700 calories or more.
The solutions for maximizing NEAT are relatively easy to take up. They often involve choosing to make slightly more effort, rather than choosing convenience.
Unfortunately, our natural impulses to move can be in direct conflict with the environment around us. For those with office jobs, work exerts an especially powerful influence over our NEAT. If your brain is sharing signals to move and you have a job that ties you to the chair, it’s unnatural and you don’t move.
Estimates show that someone who has to sit down for work might burn 700 calories per day through NEAT; a job that involves standing all day would be twice that.
Since jobs take up so much time, it’s a smart place to try to increase NEAT. Try standing desks, walking during meetings, or if you work from home, try breaking up the work day with household chores.
Outside of work, mundane tasks like vacuuming, doing the laundry or gardening can burn a few hundred calories in an hour. Taking the stairs can more than triple the amount of energy you’d use when riding the elevator.
Ultimately, the key is to root out the shortcuts that hamper our natural impulses to move.
NEAT is available to absolutely everybody. We can all do it and we can all do a little bit more.
Many of us who live screen-based lives have the capacity to inject more NEAT into our daily rhythms, not necessarily through seismic changes in our lifestyle, but small-scale ones that mostly just require a shift in mindset.
Reference
Laura Gao for NPR