Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) and Action Items
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
What it is:
Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is the energy your body uses outside of structured exercise, eating, sleeping, and your resting metabolic rate (RMR). It includes fidgeting, carrying bags, climbing stairs, pacing during calls, and other unplanned movement throughout the day. NEAT can vary by as much as 2,000 kcal per day between people of similar size, largely due to lifestyle and occupation. This means two people with identical workout routines can still have very different total energy needs.
We can determine your exact calorie range through testing, such as the Apeiron Life RMR test, which measures resting caloric expenditure and your fat/carbohydrate utilization to inform your nutrition programming. Combined with a thorough review of your lifestyle, exercise, and eating habits, this gives us a clear picture of your energy needs, so we can build a program for body composition and healthspan that includes simple, low-effort NEAT habits to help close that gap.
What the Research Says:
Research shows that around 8,000 steps/day plateaus mortality risk, where more steps are associated with progressively better health outcomes. Purposeful, low-intensity movement, shifting your weight at a standing desk, walking to refill your water glass, taking a short walk after a meal, all count toward this. These micro-movements are NEAT, and "exercise snacks" are one way to build them in but any consistent movement counts. Prolonged sitting is linked to worse insulin sensitivity, elevated triglycerides, and a less favorable metabolic profile, even in people who otherwise meet exercise recommendations.
One crucial mechanism is that sedentary behavior limits opportunities for spontaneous movement, thereby reducing NEAT and overall daily energy expenditure. Setting yourself up for more incidental movement, for example, a standing desk that lets you shift your weight or bounce on your toes occasionally, builds in behavioral change with very little effort.
It can also become a self-reinforcing cycle: habitual sitting reduces your tolerance for being on your feet, so the less you stand, the more you default to looking for a seat (at a sports event, waiting for a train) rather than standing or pacing. This isn't purely behavioral; either physical factors like muscle mass, hydration, and fatigue tolerance all affect how much incidental movement you're able to sustain through the day.
From an energy balance perspective, NEAT is the most variable component of total daily energy expenditure, which means small, consistent changes in daily movement can meaningfully affect fat loss over time. Because there are far more hours in the day available for micro-movement than for structured exercise, lifestyle-level differences in body composition often come down less to workouts and more to accumulated daily activity. Building movement-friendly habits can burn an extra several hundred kcal a day and support better overall health.
Action Items:
Try to incorporate as many of these as possible over the next month.
Grab a loved one (or the whole family) for a 5–15 minute walk as part of your after-dinner routine.
Whenever possible, walk during calls and one-on-one meetings, reserving chairs for deep-focus work that genuinely requires them. Specifically book short walk-and-talk work phone calls right after lunch.Â
Stand or pace while making decisions, not just while on calls. Some executive coaches and physicians who work with high performers note that standing meetings tend to run shorter and can sharpen decision-making by adding mild physiological arousal, useful for time-boxed check-ins or any meeting where brevity is the goal.
Engineer your environment to work for you. Create spaces for different work tasks in your office. For example, take meetings at a standing or treadmill desk. Do emails, design, or creative writing on an exercise ball. Or if you’re mobile enough, sit on the floor in different stretched positions.
Train yourself to stroll, do calf raises, or engage in light mobility work while waiting (for the train, at checkout, or at the airport) instead of sitting idly.
Redesign your environment to make movement the default, not a decision. Put printers or supplies in another room, and store frequently used items on a shelf that requires reaching or a slight squat. The goal is to remove the "should I get up" decision entirely, since decision fatigue is itself a barrier to spontaneous movement.
Take the long way on purpose: the farther parking spot or the stairs instead of the elevator. None of these require blocking time on a calendar, which makes them easier to sustain than scheduled exercise during demanding weeks.
Check in with your Client Advocate about other ideas that fit your lifestyle and how to make them sustainable over the long term.
Resources and Further Reading