A NEAT Way to Keep From Gaining Weight
Regular, vigorous exercise helps keep the pounds off – we all know this. But, as it turns out, it may be your non-exercise activity that determines how much weight creeps on over the years. Activities as simple as pacing while you think, or puttering around the house add up to a significant number of calories, if you’re constantly doing them throughout the day.
How many extra calories could you possibly burn? According to researcher James A. Levine, it’s an average of 350 calories a day…which is rather a lot, when you add it up over time.
Levine’s research is on NEAT: Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. As he describes it,
“NEAT is distinct from purposeful exercise and includes the energy expenditure of daily activities such as sitting, standing, walking, and talking.”
As trivial as these low-intensity activities seem, Levine and his colleagues have documented clear differences in motion between lean and obese subjects. Even among self-proclaimed “couch potatoes,” obese subjects in one experiment were seated 164 min (just shy of 3 hours) longer than lean subjects. Conversely, lean subjects were upright for 152 min longer than obese ones. As Levine summed up:
“Notably, if the obese subjects had the same posture allocation as the lean subjects, they would have expended an additional 352 ± 65 (±SD) (range, 269 to 477) calories (kcal) per day”
When it comes to losing…or gaining weight, those differences add up. Even when overfed by as much as 1,000 calories a day, lean subjects mitigated weight gain by spontaneously increasing their non-exercise activity. One lean study volunteer, increased his “strolling-equivalent activity by about 15 min/hour during waking hours” in response to overfeeding, and managed to dissipate about 700 of those 1,000 surplus calories each day. As Levine and his colleagues concluded:
“NEAT proved to be the principal mediator of resistance to fat gain with overfeeding. The average increase in NEAT (336 kcal/day) accounted for two-thirds of the increase in daily energy expenditure, and the range of change in NEAT in our volunteers was large (-98 to +692 kcal/day). However, most importantly, changes in NEAT directly predicted resistance to fat gain with overfeeding, and this predictive value was not influenced by starting weight. ”
The moral to the story? Apart from exercise, even low-intensity motion adds up. While it might not burn as many calories as an hour in the gym, simply moving around more each day can help keep the pounds from creeping on.
Click here to read Levine’s most recent summary on the impact of NEAT on weight gain.
