Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Fidgeting burns hundreds of calories
NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It covers movement that is not purposeful exercise, such as gesturing, tapping a foot, or any other incidental motion, and it sits alongside resting metabolic rate, the thermic effect of food, and deliberate exercise as a bucket of daily energy expenditure.
Of resting metabolic rate, the thermic effect of food, and NEAT, NEAT appears to be the most modifiable by a wide margin. That also helps explain why more active people spend a smaller share of their total calories on resting metabolism: their resting rate is not lower, but physical activity makes up a bigger part of what they burn.
How can fidgeting add up to so many calories?
James Levine of the Mayo Clinic studied this with volunteers wearing motion-sensing garments that logged posture and movement all day. His 2005 paper in Science found that lean volunteers spent about two more hours a day on their feet and moving than volunteers with obesity. He estimated that gap at roughly 350 calories a day. Small movements repeated over waking hours accumulate into a large total.
Why does NEAT vary more than other energy buckets?
Resting metabolism is largely set by organ size and lean mass, and the thermic effect of food scales with what is eaten. NEAT depends on occupation, posture, habits, and spontaneous movement, so it has far more room to differ between people. Levine has written that NEAT can differ by as much as 2,000 calories a day between people of similar size.
Does the body change its fidgeting when it overeats?
In a 1999 study in Science, Levine and colleagues overfed 16 volunteers by 1,000 calories a day for eight weeks. Fat gain varied roughly tenfold between individuals. Changes in NEAT explained most of that variation, with some volunteers increasing their spontaneous movement by up to 692 calories a day.
More from Andrew Huberman
