You Could Stand to Lose Some Weight (and That’s N.E.A.T.)

by Dr. Don Rose, Writer, Life Alert

Men’s Health magazine (April 2008 issue) reported that “sitting shuts down your fat burners [according to] scientists at the University of Missouri.” Apparently, sitting “switches off an enzyme that prevents fat storage.” The author of the study noted that this “enzyme is mostly found in the muscles that keep you standing up, so if they aren’t active, the enzyme doesn’t function.”

To recap: standing helps fend off fat storage, thanks to a useful enzyme.
Sitting signals this enzyme to shut off, fat storage activates, and I need bigger pants.

So it seems this post’s title is literally correct.
You could stand as a way to help lose weight.
In other words, standing upright keeps your butt tight.

Therefore, one useful weight loss strategy could be to identify times when we normally are sitting and make ourselves stand instead. But many of us sit at work all day, required to do work on a computer, and then we spend some time on the PC or Mac at home, plus some TV viewing time on the couch.

What’s a weight-loss wannabe to do?
Here are some ideas:

• Stand during breaks at work (a refreshing change if you sit all day on the job.)

• Stand at bus/train stops rather than sitting on the bench, if you take mass transit

• Stand while watching TV at home (and while you’re up, why not jog in place or do some arm curls with weights, to help burn even more calories)

• Stand while texting or talking on your cell phone

• Stand outside and admire the sunset or gaze at the stars

• Go on dates that involve standing (e.g., art galleries, museums) rather than sitting

• Jog, bike or walk briskly to local destinations (for errands, etc.) instead of driving.

Yes, there are many activities during a typical day that provide us with a, well, “standing invitation” to stand and/or move instead of sit. Since I love to parallel process activities, curling weights or running in place while watching TV makes sense to me (and makes me feel less guilty about watching the boob tube, too). Bottom line: if the simple act of standing helps keep fat from accumulating in our bodies, why not take advantage of that?

The last bullet point shown above, about walking/jogging/biking, brings up another interesting fact, also presented in the aforementioned issue of Men’s Health magazine. Seems that we burn more calories per week doing “N.E.A.T.” activities (NonExercise Activity Thermogenesis) than we do while exercising! That is, all the things we do outside the gym add up to a greater weekly caloric expenditure than the calories we burn doing “regimented exercise.” Hence, we might as well take advantage of all this N.E.A.T. time and get the maximum burn; by detouring away from driving in favor of self-propulsion (that is, travelling under our own power – walking, jogging, biking), we can turn up the N.E.A.T. heat and burn more and more calories each week.

Now that’s hot.
I mean, NEAT!

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