#60: A Pretty NEAT Concept

Alive and Active Podcast | Faith and Fitness

“You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.” – Psalm 139:2 (NLT)

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is kind of neat. It is calories you burn just moving about throughout the day. For example, if a 150lb female were to stand for 5 hours, she would burn almost 200 calories more than if she were to sit for 5 hours. Simple, standing is more challenging to the body than sitting.

Fidgeting is also a form of NEAT.

Those that do manual labor have much higher NEAT than those who sit at a desk all day.

NEAT effects are what we call cumulative, which means they may be small in nature but they add up over the course of a day, week, or year.

What if you had a desk job and you decided to stand for half of your day instead of sitting? This means you would get 4 hours of standing instead of sitting. In one day, being a 150lb female, you would burn an extra 150 calories. If you add that up through the 5-day work week you get 750 extra calories burned, and if you add that up over the work month you get over 3000 extra calories burned just by standing up.

Keeping every other variable in your life equal for the sake of this argument, 3000 calories equates to almost a pound of fat loss per month. Pretty cool right? And all you did was stand up instead of sit down.

Ways to Increase NEAT

• Park at the back of the parking lot when you go shopping.
• Carry your groceries in a basket instead of pushing a cart.
• Go to the bathroom two floors below your office.
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
• Fidget more at your desk.
• Use a stand-up workstation instead of sitting for part of the day.
• Take walking meetings.
• Stand up and walk around when you are talking on the phone.
• Get a high-energy dog that needs to be walked every day.
• Ride your bike for short errands instead of getting in the car.

There are many ways throughout the day that you can unknowingly burn more calories by simply changing your environment.

How can you increase the NEAT in your own life?

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