It’s exercise, but not as we know it

For most of us, being overweight is a result of an imbalanced energy equation, or to put it simply, eating too much and moving too little. Eating just a little more than we need each day can soon cause us to gain excess pounds as excess energy is stored as fat. Just 200 calories extra every day could amount to one kilo or two pounds of weight gain in a month. But every bit as important as what we eat is what we do. The energy we expend must be the same as the energy we eat if we are to keep our weight the same. But our energy expenditure must be greater if we want to lose weight.

Energy expenditure has three components. It consists firstly of our basal metabolic rate (BMR), secondly the exercise we do, and thirdly something doctors often call NEAT, or “non-exercise activity thermogenesis”. Our BMR, the energy we expend through keeping our body warm, breathing, heart beating, and body tissue repair, might be between 1200 and 1500 calories each day. Exercise energy expenditure might be as little as 500 calories for a sedentary person, or several thousand calories for a person with a physical job or very active in sport. There is only a little we can do to influence, or increase our resting metabolic rate, and a lot we can do to increase our exercise energy expenditure, and I’ll talk about both in future blogs. But today I wanted to write about NEAT.

NEAT can be very annoying. NEAT is the energy we burn when we are doing nothing, or at least appear to be. Can you think of someone in your family, maybe in your office or place of work who is constantly fidgeting, moving about, shuffling about and getting up and down from their seat? Annoying? Maybe. But here’s the rub. Fidgeting friends are often thinner friends. Every time they scratch their nose, fiddle with their pen, get up and move their chair a bit, they are burning energy. Scientists have shown that people who fidget can burn many more calories without, apparently, doing anything.

Okay, so we can’t change our personality. But we can make ourselves more aware. The trick is this. On every occasion possible, move. Get up from your seat to talk to your colleague, re-arrange your desk frequently, stand up to talk on the phone, adjust your tie, and twiddle your hair, change your sitting position on the sofa at home, and walk over to the kids to show them you love them. Just be plain annoying. It’s exercise, but not as we know it. And it all adds up.

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