Why Improving Your NEAT is Significant to Fat Loss and Maintaining a Lean Body

Our September Step Challenge has come to a close! We focused on improving our Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT). As you likely recall, NEAT refers to any activity you do throughout the day outside of formal exercise or sleeping. While there are numerous NEAT activities from which to choose, we chose walking for a variety of reasons. Walking is cheap, easy on our joints, great for our heart and mental health, gets us outside, is fun to do with our spouse, partner, friends, or doggo, etc. There are simply so many benefits to doing it!

Focusing primarily on energy expended throughout a given day when walking, most people burn 30-40 calories per 1,000 steps. So for easy math, 10,000 daily steps is an extra 300-400 calorie burn. Done daily, this really adds up over time!

Now take a look at the picture above. This pie chart shows the components that make up our Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), or the number of calories we burn each day. As you can see, NEAT is a fairly large and CONTROLLABLE piece of this pie!

You might be thinking, “Why are we so concerned with NEAT at 15% of our TDEE when our Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the largest piece of this pie at 70%?”

Well, BMR is the number of calories we burn at rest each day. It is largely dependent on things we CANNOT CONTROL, including age, sex, height, genetics, and hormones.

Our body composition, particularly our amount of muscle, something we can work on improving, also affects our BMR, but perhaps not as much as you might think.

Each pound of muscle burns between 6-10 calories per day. Muscle gain is typically a slow and gradual process, dependent on numerous factors, and for middle-age adults, can take years rather than months to see sizeable results. For example, if you happen to gain 10lbs of muscle in a year, that’s only an extra 60-100 daily calorie burn. Muscle contributes to your TDEE for sure, but it is nowhere near the effects of improving NEAT through an activity like walking!

There are other smaller contributing factors to your TDEE including the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) and Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT). They are additional controllables that we will cover at another time. 😉

TAKEAWAYS: Your nutrition will always be the most important factor when it comes to fat loss and maintaining a lean body, with NEAT coming in right behind. Focus on the controllables! The more general movement you can get in throughout the day, the better.

That NEAT is pretty neat! 😊

~ Coach MJ