What is NEAT?
NEAT is short for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis – it’s the energy expended for everything we do that is not sleeping, eating or planned exercise. If you're doing something physical and it's not training, then it's NEAT. Moving around through your day, maintaining posture, fidgeting, cleaning, and gardening would all be considered NEAT.
Prefer to watch than read? Then please check out the video below:
Before I continue, let's look at everything that accounts for the calories we burn daily, starting with TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), as it'll help us better understand the importance of NEAT. I'll be throwing a lot of acronyms your way, but bear with it – this is important!
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure)
TDEE is simply the total number of calories you burn throughout the day. TDEE consists of two main categories; REE (Resting Energy Expenditure) and NREE (Non-Resting Energy Expenditure), so the calories we burn at rest and the calories we burn when we're not resting. REE consists of our BMR
REE (Resting Energy Expenditure)
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)
While sitting watching this video, or even during sleep, your body still requires calories to breathe, maintain organ function, and, well, stay alive. You can do things to positively impact your BMR, such as building a decent amount of muscle mass to make muscle tissue a much more energy-demanding organ, but in the short term, there's not a great deal we can do to noticeably impact this on a daily basis.
NREE (Non-Resting Energy Expenditure)
So let's move on to NREE – again, this is Non-Resting Energy Expenditure and is broken down into three components:
TEF (Thermic Effective of Feeding)
TEF is simply the number of calories we burn via digestion. Not a lot we can do to make a dent in this, apart from eating foods that require more calories to digest, such as consuming a high protein diet – protein has by far the highest thermic effect of feeding. But as good as this is, it won't make a huge difference to the number of calories you burn daily
EAT (Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
EAT is exercise, planned exercise; lifting weights, running, and is obviously recommended, but we're limited in the number of calories we can burn when we only really train for 30-60 minutes.
NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
This brings us to the potential star of the show, NEAT! I say potential star because, for many of us with sedentary lifestyles, this can be our Achilles Heel, but if we cultivate a generally active lifestyle, it can be the key to fast fat loss and sustainable results. Let me explain; if you're generally active – you move around a lot doing chores, don't shy away from a spot of gardening, embrace running around with the kids and the hecticness of being a parent, you'll stand to burn a lot of calories! If you naturally shy away from that stuff, you won't! So be mindful of this, don't take the elevator – take the stairs – take your dog, partner or kids on regular walks – cultivate an active lifestyle! If we don't focus on NEAT it can actually hinder our fat loss endeavours. You see, when someone starts their weight loss journey, they often only focus on reducing calories and doing planned exercise, such as going for a run. But, due to this new increase in energy expenditure and reduction in energy intake, you may subconsciously become less active – your NEAT may well reduce. You may move less and just generally have less of a skip in your step. And because of the vast number of calories we can burn from NEAT, if we unknowingly reduce it by moving less, it can be enough to prevent someone from positively tilting energy balance in their favour, thus inducing no weight loss. But if we're conscious of this, we can ensure we keep on top of our NEAT and remain as active as possible. Having a step count north of 6000 steps per day will help with this. Technically speaking, if you're going for planned walks, it's not NEAT – it's EAT, but having a step target is a great way of remaining conscious of your overall activity levels.
Parting shot
If you become a more active person, you'll find it much easier to get lean and stay lean! Have a good, active week!