The Role of NEAT in Fat Loss and Maintenance of Fat Loss

I received this email from one of my readers and thought it-and my response-would make a good blog post. Enjoy!


PJS

PJ:

In my effort to drop about 40 lbs., I recently met with a dietician who told me I should be more focused on just moving more, whenever I can, than on working out really intensely 3 or 4 days/week for an hour. She said doing more general activity and moving around a lot more can make a far greater impact on weight loss as compared to killing yourself in the gym a few days per week and being so sore and tired that you don't want to do anything else the rest of the day. What do you think about this advice? Thanks!

Arnold from Delaware

Arnold:

There was a time when I would have told you your dietician was full of crap and that the whole "just park  farther away in the grocery store parking lot, play with your kids more, and take the stairs instead of the elevator" line of thinking was for people who didn't want to pay the price and train hard. My thoughts on that have changed.

Two years ago, I opened my first training facility. Since that time, my weight has decreased by about 15 lbs. and stayed that way, without me consciously counting calories and quantifying my food intake in an effort to lose this amount of weight and keep it off. Sure, I've made highly nutritious food choices 80-90% of the time, and have intuitively ate appropriate portions, but I certainly havn't weighed and measured anything.

In that same time period, my approach to training (not working out mind you...there is a difference) has stayed pretty much the same as it has for years now: I strength train and condition 4-6 days/week for 20-60 minutes depending on what the training session entails. My point is that I have not added extra structured workouts.

So, why have I lost roughly 8% of my body weight and kept if off over the last two years? I'm just moving more (but not training more). When you own a fitness facility and train clients all day, you move a lot. I spot people, I load plates, I demonstrate exercises, I clean the place, etc. Also, the increased anxiety that has come with being "out on my own" as a self employed individual has caused me not to be able to sit still very well. Much to my wife's annoyance, I fidget a lot and I pace around a lot.

My point is that all of this general activity, also called NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis), has caused me to get leaner and stay that way, despite the fact I havn't been obsessive about my nutrition and have not added additional or longer sessions to my training schedule.

Here is the deal, you should definitely perform structured TRAINING throughout the week in an effort to increase and/or maintain strength and lean body mass and your conditioning/work capacity. As an off tangent side note, TRAINING is structured, goal oriented, and competitive: you are trying to progress and improve or at least maintain fitness gains you have made in the past. This is different than what most people do when they go to the gym, which is "workout" or, as my colleague Tony Gentilcore says, "try". "Working out" and "trying" is simply going to the gym and having no rhyme or reason for doing what you are doing...it's basically mindless mechanical work. You see a machine or pick up a dumbbell and just perform some arbitrary number of reps with whatever weight you deem to be appropriate. Yes, "working out" burns calories, but that shouldn't be the only goal of your structured, dedicated workouts.

Now, with the above being said, NO AMOUNT OF STRUCTURED TRAINING IS GOING TO MAKE UP FOR THE FACT THAT YOU SIT ON YOUR ASS FOR THE BETTER PART OF THE DAY AND DON'T MOVE...at least not in terms of weight/fat loss or maintenance of fat loss. This is what the dietician you met with was getting at, in a round about way (and I disagree with her that you should avoid hard training), and I agree with her on this.

I always tell people, even if you perform a ridiculously intense 1 hour training session 6 or 7 days/week, the best case scenario is that (dependent upon you body weight and the type of training being done which can impact how many calories you continue to burn after the workout...another blog post), you'll burn 700-1000 calories (and that's generous). Mind you, very few people are going to do this anyway. But let's say you did...that's still only 1.5-2 lbs. worth of calories you've burned through these structured training sessions. You know how easy-and quickly-you can eat an additional 700-1000 calories? Without going into a myraid of examples, it's not that hard, especially in our society where food is everywhere.

The bottom line is this: if you are going to rely on your structured, high intensity training sessions as your only mechanism of burning calories (and your goal is weight and fat loss), your diet better be spot on. This means you are eating at or slightly below maintenance calories pretty consistently (which means you have to weigh and measure food). If you are a little more liberal with your diet (or extremely liberal, as most are), you better supplement your structured trainings sessions with a lot more general movement. Trust me, this NEAT movement adds up. On another side note, a recent issue of Men's Health magazine highlighted the entire concept of NEAT and, while I'm not 100% sure of the accuracy of this statement because I don't have the issue in front of me, I believe it showed NEAT can have a far greater impact on energy expenditure than running dozens of miles each week.

So, in a very long winded way, I agree with your dietician in that you should definitely perform a lot of general, low intensity movement throughout the day whenever the opportunity presents itself. However, you also need to train to enhance your level of muscular and conditioning fitness, especially if you want to have some contour and (forgive me) "tone" to your physique when you do reach your weight loss goal. Remember, the primary goal of structured training is not to burn calories. The goal of training is to improve and/or maintain fitness related qualities: strength, lean body mass, work capacity/conditioning. You need to train hard AND you need to move more...and never forget the fact that the easiest way to make a calorie deficit is to simply not eat excess calories to begin with (this doesn't take you any time I might add).