Neat Bliss

Losing weight is hard work and sometimes it feels as if I’m being asked to change my entire personality and all of my habits in order to make my body shed the weight. I’m the type of person that doesn’t do anything without researching it and finding out the ins and outs. Weight loss is no different and I’ve always researched the best diets, the best exercise plans, etc. The problem has always been that a lot of them call for you to make a complete 180 in a short amount of time and that’s never been sustainable for me. I’ve always gotten disheartened and disillusioned and given up.

John’s heart attack has given us all an extra impetus to get healthy as we want to support him and we all got a sobering wake up call that the food we eat, the exercise we do or don’t get, and all of those other habits do matter and if your habits aren’t the right ones, they will manifest themselves in your body.

As I was tiptoeing through the web in search of sustainable diet and exercise tips I kept coming across the term NEAT and how people who were NEATer lost more weight than those who were not. Now if neatness truly does count in weight loss, I’m in sorry shape because I struggle with clutter issues. However, the more I read the more excited that I got because NEAT refers to Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis and as scientific as that name is, all it really means is building more activity into your day. A study by the Mayo clinic showed that a group of self-proclaimed couch potatoes who were NEAT had a healthy BMI versus a group that wasn’t NEAT and was obese. The study showed that the NEAT people ended up burning an extra 350 calories a day just through daily activities.

I got excited by this study because it shows that little–and very doable–things do matter. I started thinking about all the ways that I could become NEATer in my daily life and I’ve started putting them into practice. Here are a few of the ways that I’m working to build more NEAT into my life:

• I’m parking at the far end of the parking lot and walking instead of parking as close as I can to the door.
• I’m walking down stairs instead of taking the elevator at work. I work on the fifth floor and generally go downstairs at least three times a day. Eventually, I’ll get to the point I’m ready to start walking up the stairs too.
• I’m trying to walk more in my daily life by parking farther away from the door, getting up and walking to see someone versus sending an email or calling.
• Sometimes I’ll sit on an balance ball and watch TV instead of the couch. Although this doesn’t sound like much, the balance ball forces me to constantly make adjustments to my balance. I actually moved my computer to my chair and am sitting on the balance ball as I write this. My only problem with the balance ball is that it is actually too much fun sometimes.
• Instead of sitting down and vegging while waiting for food to cook, I’ve been turning on some tunes and working on cleaning up clutter while its cooking. It helps my kitchen get cleaner and me get healthier.

I’m continually looking for more ways to add NEAT to my day and going forward, I’m probably going to start parking down the block and walking home when I come home between work and picking up John, walking up the stairs at work, and parking even further away. None of those are huge changes that require massive lifestyle changes, but they are things that can help me become more fit.