This scientist-approved method could burn up to 2,000 extra calories.
In addition to a varied and balanced diet, sport helps burn calories and helps lose weight. But good news for those less keen on physical exercise : a method, completely ignoring sports practice, would make it possible to considerably increase your daily energy expenditure and could have a direct impact on weight loss. This is the NEAT method, an English anagram of “Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis”, or in French “Thermogenesis of non-exercise activities“. It corresponds to the energy expended during movements made during the dayin addition to sports activities, such as moving, cooking, working, typing on the computer, driving, doing gardening work, cleaning, walking the dog, shopping, taking out the trash or even climbing the stairs, can -we read in a scientific publication published in the magazine Best Practice & Research Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
How to increase your NEAT?
The principle of NEAT is to move as much as possible. Concretely, the objective is to increase your daily share of these activities at first glance “insignificant” during work time and personal time:
- Reduce the time spent sitting each day: get up every hour and take a few steps, hold standing meetings if possible…”The less we sit, the more calories we burn through NEAT“.
- Park your car at the end of the parking lot or in the space farthest from the store
- Take the stairs instead of the elevator (or escalator) or go down 1 or 2 floors before yours.
- Walking while on the phone
- Carry your groceries yourself rather than putting them in a cart
- Walk a few steps rather than wait, for example if the person you are waiting for is late
- Choose to cycle or walk to work
- Get off a bus or metro stop before your own
- Laugh as much as possible: Studies have shown that the average adult can lose 2 calories per minute by laughing. Also, sustained laughter works the abdominals.
Up to 2,000 more calories burned
Researchers view NEAT as a sort of “reservoir” of involuntary physical activities that we do every day without realising it and that we cancarefully regulate (…) to control your weight“. According to a publication in the medical journal “Mayo Clinic Processing“, movements linked to NEAT carried out in high doses could allow burning up to 2,000 extra kcal per dayin addition to the calories burned by basic metabolism (i.e. the minimum daily energy expenditure that the human organism needs to survive at rest) and to have at the end of the day “a negative energy balance” and therefore weight loss. Furthermore, doing more movements allows you to increase your muscle mass. And the more muscle you have, the more calories the body expends. It is therefore a virtuous circle. “The benefits of increasing your NEAT include not only extra calories burnedbut also the reduction in the occurrence of metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality“, specify the researchers. This is why health professionals often advise people the most sedentary to first improve their NEAT before even considering practicing a sporting activity.