Can Raising NEAT Help Lose Weight?

Living in times of great convenience, most people can move from one place to another either by car or public transportation without too much walking and energy expenditure. Meanwhile, modern people are prone to sedentary lifestyle, spending too much time sitting down. An average of 10 to 15 hours a day are spent sitting in office, in transportation, watching television, browsing or surfing the internet at home. Such lifestyle, together with unhealthy diet, has created obesity epidemic. Obesity can lead to many complications including Type-2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke.

If a person sits for too long, his or her body’s natural thermogenesis (calorie-burning capability) is suppressed, and he or she cannot incite the body’s full capacity to burn calories. In order to prevent from getting weight gain, people need to have more physical activities on a daily basis.

A study that was published 2012 in the online journal ‘BMJ Open’ reported that people who reduce excessive sitting to less than 3 hours a day live 2 years longer and the gain in life expectancy from reducing excessive television viewing to less than 2 hours a day is 1.38 years. Sitting for extended periods of time has been linked with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity, according to researchers.

Most experts encourage people to engage with vigorous exercise several times a week to keep fit and avoid gaining weight. But there is another way for one to burn more calories all day long: increasing NEAT time by moving more and sitting less. The theory behind this is simple: it takes energy (calories) to move even the smallest muscle.

Research published in journal ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’ (now known as JAMA Internal Medicine) found that the amount of everyday activity a person gets, beyond the 30 minutes of traditional exercise, might matter even more for his or her overall health than trips to the gym.

NEAT, which stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis, is the energy a person expends each day for everything that is not sleeping, eating, or sports-like activities. These are non-exercise activities that would normally be performed each day. According to researchers at the Mayo Clinic, NEAT could play a major role in whether or not a person loses or gains weight.

Depending on everyone’s activity level, calories burned from increasing NEAT time each day can range from 1,500 to 2,400 calories. According to the American Heart Association, obese individuals tend to be seated for 2.5 hours per day more than sedentary lean counterparts. Researchers estimated that if obese individuals could adopt the NEAT habits, they could burn an additional 350 calories per day.

There are many things that can raise the NEAT. For instance, one can use the stairs instead of escalator or elevator. This would probably help burn an extra 50 to 100 calories on average each day. Other things like walking, washing dishes, doing garden work, or playing with kids can all increase the NEAT.