NEAT
NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis, is the energy you spend on everything that is not sleeping, eating or deliberate exercise: walking, standing, chores, fidgeting and carrying things.
NEAT is the quiet, unglamorous majority of most people's movement budget, and it is the component that differs most dramatically between two people who look similar on paper.
Why it is bigger than your workouts
A hard hour of training might cost 400 kcal. Standing, walking and moving through an ordinary active day can cost several times that, spread thinly enough that nobody notices it happening. A person with a job on their feet and a person with a desk job can differ by 600 to 800 kcal a day before either of them enters a gym.
Why it falls when you diet
This is the part that catches people out. Eating less reliably makes people move less, without deciding to. Steps drop, stairs get avoided, the fidgeting stops. The effect is unconscious and it can quietly erase a large part of a deficit — which is one of the real mechanisms behind what gets called a plateau.
What to do about it
Measure it, roughly, with a step count. A step target is a crude proxy but it is a visible one, and holding steps steady while calories come down prevents the most common invisible leak in a fat loss phase. Anything that keeps you upright and moving counts, and none of it needs to look like exercise.
Sources
- 1.Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans — US Department of Health and Human Services
- 2.Body Weight Planner — NIDDK, National Institutes of Health
Related reading
- Steps, NEAT, and the calories you burn standing up
Incidental movement varies by hundreds of calories a day, and it falls when you diet. Why a step target is the number you are not tracking.
- How to calculate your TDEE, and what it can't say
Four components, three equations, and one better method. Why every calculated TDEE is a hypothesis and how to replace it with your own measurement.
- How to lose fat without quitting in three weeks
A deficit you barely notice, protein high enough to keep muscle, and a weekly trend to steer by. The whole method, and the parts people get wrong.
- Daily weight lies. The trend does not.
Weigh every morning and read only the seven-day average. Why the daily number is mostly noise, and how to build a trend that tells you what to do next.