In a world that loves acronyms and abbreviations, here’s another one to add to the list. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT is a component of total daily energy expenditure. As we enter the holiday season and consume those extra calories that typically come with it, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss something many people don’t consider when they switch into the New Year fat burning mode. Mixing in a strategy to improve your NEAT calories can be life changing.
Your body’s total energy expenditure can be broken into four parts:
Energy Expenditure (EE) = Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) + Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis (N.E.A.T) + Physical Activity (PA) + Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)
Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)
This is a measurement of calories your body requires to maintain it’s balance or homeostasis. This includes basic body activities such as breathing, sleeping, heartbeats, and maintaining your body temperature. It requires the most amount of your daily energy and is a lot higher than most people realize. It also includes the calories needed for eating and performing light activities such as walking to the bathroom.
Thermal Effect of feeding (TEF)
These are the calories utilized to digest our food. The amount depends on the type of foods eaten, which would explain the food sweats I had Thanksgiving evening. All joking aside, protein does require more energy to digest, so a simple tactic to ramp up your TEF rate is to increase your ratio of protein and decrease your carbohydrate intake.
Physical or Exercise Activity (PA)
This is what we observe daily at the studio. Because we wear heart monitors in many of our HIIT workouts at the studio, new members are always surprised how low this number can be.
N.E.A.T or non-exercise activity thermogenesis
These are the calories burned from all of the movement you do during the day that are not exercise. Examples of this are cooking, cleaning the house, and gardening. This is how technology and its advances have made our daily lives easier, but at a cost. Just go back 100 years. How many people owned an automobile prior to 1922? Think about how getting around has become easier because we don’t need to walk everywhere. Here’s a better example. Just look at the creation of the TV remote control. Not only can we binge watch episodes of Yellowstone for six hours, but we also don’t have to move to change the channel on the TV.
Here is a little secret about NEAT
Our bodies are very in tune when we do things such as reduce calories. It wants to maintain a balance, so it slows down our resting metabolism rate. It can get worse when we reduce calories and add exercise. The same activity can drop in the number of calories required. Yup. The amount of calories you burn pushing the sled across the turf last month decreases if you reduce your calories too much.
Another common scenario is that after reducing calories and exercising you have less energy to do the other activities you normally do. Suddenly cooking at home is substituted by ordering dinner on Door dash. Or the daily walk with your dog is reduced from a 25 minutes power walk to a 15 minute stroll as you look at your Instagram feed.
OK, before you think, “Why bother then?”, this is where the value in the quality of your calories matter and why drastically cutting calories is not good. A subtle reduction of 10% in your calories is enough to create a deficit and not push your body and metabolism into survival mode.
A reduction of 2,250 calories to 2,000 calories is good. 2,250 to 1,500 is far too drastic.
Therefore, there is value in activity trackers. Get in those 10,000 steps. Take a 20-minute walk after lunch and dinner. As you hit the stores for Christmas shopping this holiday season, park far away from the store. At the dinner table, opt for more turkey and ham and be mindful of the stuffing and macaroni and cheese. Simply put, you can’t work out and sit on your butt the rest of the day and expect to drop body-fat. The key is to combine exercise with an increase in NEAT to reduce body-fat.