Standardising NEAT To Enhance Body Composition And Health

Standardising your NEAT is incredibly important, yet many people don’t actually do it. NEAT is your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, the component of your metabolism that accounts for all the little movements you do throughout the day. All of the non-exercise movements that you do throughout the day. So if you are fidgeting around while you read this, maybe moving your hands or feet, this is all NEAT. There is also movement occurring when you go for a walk, climb a flight of stairs, and do various different things throughout your day. All this NEAT is, unfortunately, something that a lot of people do not factor into their overall caloric demands or overall caloric output, and thus they don’t factor it into their diet overall. This has some pretty profound effects and implications, particularly in the realm of fat loss, and we see this all the time when someone signs up for our coaching services. If you are trying to set up your diet correctly, and you don’t account for NEAT, and have a plan for standardising NEAT, you are missing out on some core components of your overall diet set-up.

 

Standardising NEAT To Enhance Your Body Composition And Health

 

When you diet to lose fat, your body becomes more conservative with its energy expenditure. It tries to conserve energy. It obviously doesn’t want to lose fat, as we are evolved to store fat very effectively, and to resist its loss. So there is some sort of resistance to that fat loss when dieting, and one of the ways your body can resist that fat loss is by simply making you burn fewer calories each day. And you have a solid understanding of calories and you know how important calorie balance is to overall body weight change. So if you eat a 100-calorie deficit, your body is going to say, “Oh, well, okay, there’s 100 calories less coming in, so I’m just going to move 100 calories less”. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it was probably quite beneficial in stopping us from fidgeting to death during famine or environmental catastrophes. However, if you’re trying to lose fat, and that’s the goal, and your body is resisting you and it’s trying to stop you from doing that as effectively as you would like, you can obviously see how you would easily run into trouble if you didn’t understand that the body is resistant to fat loss.

The good news is, while we can’t account for every single movement and calorie burned, we can’t we can work to try standardising NEAT to try and account for this downregulation of energy expenditure. If I were to go into a more aggressive calorie deficit, let’s say 500-1,000 calories less than I need, my body might respond by really downregulating my general movement. This is going to make fat loss occur very slowly, or potentially not at all. But we do have some tools in our toolbox to help us combat this. One of the things that I can account for and can manipulate, is how many steps I’m taking in a day. Daily step count can be used as a kind of proxy for our NEAT.

So, for example, if you start your diet, aiming for fat loss, and you’re not tracking your steps, but your steps are generally in and around, let’s say, five thousand per day. So you’re taking five thousand steps per day. So, you start the diet, you’re not tracking your steps, things are going good and then you’re two weeks into your diet and all of a sudden your step count is down to a thousand, a thousand five hundred, maybe? With this dramatic drop in activity, obviously, you’re burning a lot less energy throughout the day as a result.

What we often do with our coaching clients, what we teach in our Nutrition Coaching Course, and what we often recommend people do before they even think about manipulating their calories is standardizing their NEAT and their overall activity levels, as best they can. This is both in terms of what they’re doing in the gym (i.e. they’re not haphazardly doing stuff like going to the gym twice one week and then the next week they go six times) and also the activity they do outside of the gym (i.e. standardising NEAT by using daily step count as a proxy). Now, as I said, you can’t account for absolutely everything, but you can account for your steps. There are various watches that’ll track your steps, and there are smartphones that’ll track your steps, or you can go old school and you can get an actual pedometer to track your steps. But it doesn’t actually matter the tool that you use. What matters is that you actually track this stuff and stay on top of actually doing your steps daily.

However, even though you are standardising NEAT by setting a step target, by the end of your diet, there is still going to be a reduction in the number of calories you burn each day. There will still be changes because if you’re a hundred-kilo individual at the start of your diet taking 10,000 steps versus an 80-kilo individual at the end of your diet taking those same 10,000 steps, the energetic requirements to take those 10,000 steps are going to be different, as you are simply carrying around 20kg less. You could argue that you should actually increase your steps as you diet to account for this, and that is something that some people do (although there is an upper limit to this, and once you are over 15,000 steps per day, unless your job is very active, it just becomes impractical).

Very often before we even think about making dietary manipulations, we’ll just standardise step count first. We’ll just eat at where we think maintenance is, but what we’re really going to focus on is standardising NEAT, by virtue of step count. So maybe you’re doing 5,000 steps per day. We’re going to standardise that so you get used to the habits that are required to ensure you consistently get 5,000 steps. Then once we are confident you can consistently get those 5,000 steps, then we can start doing some dietary manipulations. Alternatively, we may have you eating at maintenance calories, but to encourage fat loss, what we’ll do is actually increase your step count. So if you were taking 5,000 steps per day before, we might increase that to 7,500 or even 10,000 steps per day. As a result of that, we’ll see fat loss occur because you have manipulated your energetic expenditure (i.e. you are now burning more calories each day).

So if you take account of your steps, you standardise them, and you stay on top of actually doing them, then you can more easily stay on top of your overall calorie expenditure throughout the day. Standardising NEAT like this generally means you don’t see this massive downregulation in your metabolism as a result of dieting. Of course, there is still going to be some downregulation of your metabolism because, again, you can’t account for all the fidgeting and all that kind of stuff, and there are some actual physiological changes that occur, and, of course, you weigh less at the end of your diet (so even doing the same movements, you’re burning less energy). So you can’t standardise absolutely everything, and you can’t account for absolutely every bit of calorie expenditure, but if we standardise our NEAT by tracking our steps, it is much more likely that you will be able to get the results you want.

If you found this helpful, you may find other content on our website or YouTube channel helpful. If you need more specific help with your nutrition or training, then you may be interested in our coaching services. If you are a coach who wants to upskill your nutrition knowledge, or you want to become a nutrition coach, then you should check out our Nutrition Coaching Certification program.