The world we live in functions on two things, money, and beauty. And if you have both you are at the top of the list. The concept of beauty and weight has been a forever-changing concept with trends guiding the masses.
Most people in today’s world still live under a rock and think that whatever is given to us naturally is what we have to live with for the rest of our lives. Fitness is not different, for the most part, it was believed that to make a name in the showbiz industry you have to look a certain way.
The fitness trend has had quite a journey of its own with every new diet or magic pill to reduce weight gain popularity and dies ever so quickly. With the majority of people suffering from diabetes and heart disease, weight is the first thing you need to take care of if you want to live a long, healthy, and pain-free life.
The question is how? How do we maintain a healthy weight while still enjoying all the yummy foods? Well, you can’t. To maintain a certain weight, you must be cautious about calorie intake. And if you are trying to reduce weight, stay away from eating out as much as you can.
Now, most of you argue that my friend eats double the amount of food and is still thin as a stick. The reason behind it is their BMR (basal metabolic rate), in simple terms, they just burn more calories while at rest. However, some scientists in the past found this phenomenon quite intriguing and decided to study their metabolism on a much deeper level to understand the process. The results they found were quite astonishing. First of all, let’s get to basics first.
What is TEE
TEE is the total energy expenditure of the body; in simple terms, it is the number of calories a person burns throughout a 24 hours window. Now the total number of calories burned is dependent on a few things, like BMR (number of calories burned at rest), exercise (like your workout at the gym or yoga, etc.), and non-exercise activity (like cooking, cleaning, running errands, walking throughout the house, etc.)
You can increase your calories burned by increasing your exercise and non-exercise activity. Pretty simple right?
Importance of planned exercise protocol
Having an exercise plan is very important if you want to lose weight or build muscle mass. An exercise plan is usually something that your gym instructor or physiotherapist provides you to follow. The plan consists of mostly weightlifting and cardio for 4-5 days minimum of 30-60 minutes. An ideal fitness program usually contains a leg day, an arm or upper body day, a back or abs day, and full-body circuit training with some cardio training.
That’s the optimum fitness plan however since most people hardly meet the criteria of minimum activity with 10,000 steps a day as suggested by the WHO for having a healthy heart and body which is free of pain. The idea of doing all of it might seem intimidating to a lot of you. But there is a solution to that through NEAT.
Basics of weight loss or fat loss
The simplest formula for weight loss is based on two things calories in and calories out. You either eat fewer calories by eating less or burn more calories by exercising. But there’s more to it, researchers have found that you can increase your calories burned throughout the day by simply increasing the amount of non-exercise activity in your routine.
The need for NEAT
The NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and it typically involves our body movement throughout the day like cooking, cleaning, running errands, washing, bathing, and everything else which involves movement of the body. The researchers have found that increasing the rate of non-exercise activity is enough to burn calories better than the gym.
Now that does not mean you can skip exercise altogether, exercise is important for your bones, your muscles, your joints, and even your heart and brain. The benefits of exercise are so much that if you take a single body part and study the effects of exercise o it, it will end up with more than 1000 medical research papers.
Fidgeting and its effects
The concept of non-exercise activity was studied out of curiosity of Military cadets, the author tried to explore why the cadets despite eating so much food do not gain any weight, the results showed that apart from drills and all their overall daily routine was heavily based on physical activity. That means they were more active even when not doing their exercise training (Widdowson et al., 1954).
More research dived into the topic throughout the years shows that subtle body movements like shivering, knee bouncing, and foot taping can affect the number of calories burned. The relation between overeating and fidgeting was also studied and the results show that the people who do these subtle body movements throughout the day actually burn calories in the process and therefore do not gain weight (Levine et al., 1999)
The scientists further studied how chewing gum will affect the calories burned and found very similar results (Levine et al., 2000). Can you imagine, chewing gum for 10 minutes or more actually burns calories? It’s insane. Why does nobody talk about it? Well probably because it won’t help people with their businesses who are trying to sell you slimming teas and weight loss pills.
We have been told over the years that fidgeting is a sign of anxiety and nervousness, but that very fidgeting helps you digest your food and prevents you from gaining weight. Isn’t it just incredible? The secrets of nature are still well hidden from the perspective but maybe in the future with focus and determination scientists may find something even more astonishing than that.
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