#190: The Hidden Key to Burning More Calories—Without Working Out!

What if you could burn more calories without spending extra time in the gym? The secret lies in Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)—the overlooked factor that plays a massive role in weight loss and overall energy expenditure.

In this episode, we break down how small daily movements—like standing, walking, cooking, or even fidgeting—can help you burn hundreds of extra calories every day. Learn practical strategies to boost your NEAT, avoid metabolic slowdown, and make weight loss feel effortless.

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#190: The Hidden Key to Burning More Calories—Without Working Out!

So today we're going to talk about NEAT. So this is probably something that I really believe is the most underestimated or overlooked factor on your wellness journey. So NEAT stands for non exercise activity thermogenesis.  Okay. And as I said, it's one of the most overlooked factors in losing weight.

And if you make these choices in life to look at increasing your NEAT, it can really be life changing and really help fast track you to success. So your NEAT varies enormously from person to person and your NEAT can decrease when your calories are restricted. Human body is very intuitive and it has a strong drive to keep us alive and maintain homeostasis.

But when we start cutting out calories, Without exercising, our metabolism decreases and your hormones like leptin set, you just start to want to eat more food. Likewise, when we start to exercise at the same time, then we start calorie, cutting our calories. The metabolic efficiency of exercise often increases, so we burn fewer calories.

For the same amount of workout and that's not good. So meanwhile while we're doing all this We are wanting to eat more and without even meaning to we reduce our meat So your meat is your how you kind of move throughout the day. So it's your steps It's, you know, the amount of calories you'll burn from doing your daily activity.

So doing different things like whether it's in your job, whether it's, um, you know, making dinner, uh, doing the washing. So it's kind of all those odd jobs. And those things around the house, that is your neat, the amount that you move throughout the day. Like I said, that daily movement makes a massive difference, but it's really, really underestimated.

And it's something that people don't value when you are cutting calories and you are cutting too many calories. And then you're trying to increase your total energy expenditure. The body is trying to get us to stop because it's, it's wants to keep us in that safe spot. So even without realizing it, when you, when you start doing that, you're, you're reducing your, you are  burning fewer calories when you're doing your workouts because you're not fueling your body properly enough.

And then you'll become more, you'll start to notice you become more lethargic. So let's say after a really tough workout, this is an example, you decide to let your children take the dog for a walk instead of taking the dog for her usual 45 minute walk. And it might not sound like much, but this is essentially 250  calories fewer burned in the day.

So now that you add this up over the course of the week, it's potentially 1, 750  Fewer calories that you're going to burn. So lots of people give themselves, you know, they think, well, I've done a workout now, so I'll just sit on the couch for the rest of the day. Or I'll go back to bed. Any of those things, we just underestimate.

Uh, so, so in the end, you're actually burning less calories throughout the whole day, even though you're fitting in that workout. Why would you prioritize this NEAT? Everyone tells you you should exercise, you know, or that good old exercise more, eat less. Well, the thing is, That everybody spends so much time focusing on their workout.

Your workouts are, say, an hour a day, three to five times a week. So that's three to five hours you've done a week of workouts. But what about all those other hours in the day? How could you start to move more and start prioritizing those things? You know, there's still 160 plus hours every week that you haven't accounted for.

And we need to make sure you're moving more. That's why I love Uh, you know, I really use my watch as it, it's got lots of information and data to tell you in there. And, um, and that's why I really love using my watch. So in a 60 minute workout, we can burn anywhere from a hundred to a thousand calories depending on the activity and the intensity at which we work out.

But what about if we focused, instead of focusing on only that workout, you focused on small differences that you could make each day that would add up over time. So what about if you put more emphasis on the changes that you could, that could end up making you burn the same amount of calories, but without actually doing a workout.

You'd actually even burn more.  So if you could help someone burn an extra 500 calories a day by reaching 10, 000 steps, then you could add on things like cooking, gardening, and everything else into the mix. You can then therefore increase your ability to expand more energy daily. You haven't even added in any exercise yet.

You're giving your body a better chance to burn, to burn more calories because you're moving more throughout the day. So there is multiple studies. that show that people who engage in intentional exercise unconsciously ended up eating more to compensate for the calories that they burned, um, by moving less after.

And therefore, um, they kind of, you know, chuck the efforts out the window. And also, it's also the stories that we tell ourselves. So I see lots of people saying, well, I've done a workout. So I deserve to eat this. So it's, it's funny how our mind kind of works, but you know, in really, really simple terms, you can't work out and then sit on your ass all day and expect to lose weight.

Uh, we need to do a combo of increasing your needs. and, um, your physical exercise. The other thing is that we need to learn to, we need to change what you're already doing. This is where, uh, some people get a bit stuck. Some people say, well I already do 25, 000 steps in a day because I am a gardener. You might have a physical job and you might do lots of steps per day, but your body is used to that.

So if you want to get a change, you have to increase your steps more. You have to move more or do something different because your body is used to that. You've got to look at your individual circumstances and see where you're at. I had a lady that all she did was she increased her, she increased her daily steps, her neat.

She was, had a desk job and she chose to go for a walk in the morning  and then she chose to walk in her lunch break and she would have a wrap so she could eat it while she was walking and she did that and she, so she, all she did, so she didn't change her food, she just changed how much she moved and  she got amazing results.

Because she just moved more, but you just got to remember is even if you, they say, you know, some lots of people you'll hear that 10, 000 steps thrown around and if you go, Oh yeah, but I already do 10, 000 steps. Well, the thing is your body's used to that. So you need to do more than that. So you need to look at increasing whatever you already do in order to get a change. 

So what are some ways that you could increase your neat so you could do things like obviously taking a walk? There's other great benefits of being out walking with nature for me. I love walking on the beach Uh, you could look at getting a standing desk. So you're standing or I recently have started doing my work on a treadmill.

So I've got an attachment for my treadmill and I've been using that. So I've been walking while, uh, at a slower pace while I'm doing things instead of sitting down. Look at, you know, doing, making sure you're doing your own cooking. Uh, look at all of those things, you know, you're washing. So look at how much you move around the desk.

around, um, around your own house and then also look at things about in your workplace. Is there ways that you could take, I had a lady once that she worked out that she could walk, walk a certain way and she'd be able to, she, she could increase her steps by walking a different way to the printer, you know, uh, go for a walk in your lunch break.

Uh, take, you know, when you get your breaks at work, take a walk, take the stairs. So you can look at all things, park further away. So there's things that you can do in your daily life that will make a huge difference to your overall results. And there can be little, just little things, but all these little things add up.

So I really want you to start thinking about how you could start doing this and how you could start increasing your knit. It makes a big, big difference.