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Looking for ways to increase your daily caloric expenditure without putting too much strain on your body? You’ve come to the right place! 

In today’s episode of Fitness Simplified Podcast, with your host, Fitness & Nutrition Specialist Brooke Davis, we’ll break down the four types of your caloric expenditure: basal metabolic rate, thermic effect of food, exercise activity thermogenesis, and none exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). We’ll explain how NEAT can help with fat loss, improve heart health, and regulate your blood sugars. Plus, we’ll discuss the most efficient ways to create a caloric deficit without over taxing the body!

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Fitness Simplified podcast. I’m Brooke Davis, Women’s Functional Nutritionist and Fitness Specialist with Elysian Women’s Wellness, and I’m here to simplify your fitness.

Today, we’re going to talk about one of the easiest ways to increase your daily caloric expenditure without adding stress on the body. Along with that, we’re going to talk about what your overall calorie expenditure looks like. So we are going to break down your TDEE or your total daily expenditure.

When we’re trying to lose fat, we need to be in a caloric deficit. That’s key, but we want to do this in the least stressful way possible or what I like to call “minimum effective dosage.” Excess stress in the form of a major nutritional deficit, too much intense exercise, or even just mental and emotional stress can cause a cascade of hormonal effects that make it really difficult to lose fat along with an array of other miserable symptoms like hair loss, bloating, gas, trouble sleeping, among other things, so ideally, we want to limit this.

So first let’s talk about all the components that make up your total daily energy expenditure or your TDEE. You are constantly burning calories just to survive. Your body burns calories while performing autonomic (or not requiring thought or intention) functions, day-to-day life sustaining functions in the body. This is your BMR or your basal metabolic rate.

This accounts for about 60-70% of your daily energy expenditure. This is determined essentially by a few different things, but age, sex, height, weight, and your muscle mass. So, just to be alive is 60-70% of your caloric intake.

Okay, next is your TEF or the thermic effect of food. And this is the energy required to digest what we consume. This accounts for about 10% of our total energy expenditure. And fun fact, protein has a TEF of about 30%. So basically about 30% of its total calories go to just digesting the food where carbs is about 5-10% and fats is about 0-3%. So, for example, if you were to eat a hundred calories of protein, 30 calories goes to just digesting it.

This is just another reason to make sure that you are getting adequate protein. The remaining 30% of calories is broken up into “eat” and “neat.” So, you probably already know your body burns calories while you work out, right? This is known as exercise activity thermogenesis (eat), which only accounts for about 5% of your total daily energy expenditure.

What’s left is NEAT or non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This falls into the category of not exercise, not eating, not sleeping; this is everything else. This is essentially the easiest way to create a non-stressful fat loss and burn more calories without increasing stress on the body. And this accounts for about 15 to 20% of your total daily expenditure.

So, if we use NEAT throughout the day to burn more calories, we don’t have to lower our food. We don’t have to increase our exercise. And both of those two things increase stress on the body in some way.

So we want to be in that caloric deficit, but we want to find that minimum effective dosage. So if we are minimally decreasing food, which is the easiest way to create a deficit, given that as we learned, exercise activity thermogenesis is only about 5% of your total daily calories. So the easiest way to do that is to decrease food for most people, unless you have hours to spend in the gym, but then you also have to give your body time to recover.

So the easiest way to keep stress minimal on the body and increase your daily caloric output is by increasing your NEAT. The other cool thing is that studies have also shown that NEAT helps regulate your lipoprotein lipase, which is the enzyme that plays a big role in converting fat to energy. So by using NEAT and creating more opportunities for your body to burn calories at a less intense rate, you are also helping it burn fat more efficiently.

So how can we actually increase our NEAT? Well, going for a walk, any walk, anywhere, any length of time, right? Parking further from the grocery store entrance than you normally do or the gym entrance, so you have to walk a little bit further. Every step counts.

Keeping track of your steps throughout the day can also be really helpful. According to the department of health, the general rule of thumb is about seven to 10,000 steps a day. There was really no benefit over that 10,000 steps being seen, especially if you are active, but any increase that you can make in that between that seven to 10,000 can be really beneficial.

Playing with your kids, going to the park, chasing them around, playing tag soccer, whatever it is, just being active with them, right? Piggyback rides, horsey rides, things like that are all ways of increasing your NEAT.

Standing instead of sitting! This has become super popular, right? Getting the standing desks or the standing treadmills. Those are always really great ways to increase your NEAT. You can actually burn about 72 more calories per hour by standing instead of sitting equates to 18,000 more calories burned throughout the entire year. Essentially, you’d have to do 60 30-minute runs at five miles per hour in order to burn that same amount of calories.

If you can’t stand at work fidgeting, my hands are always moving. For people listening to the podcast, you can’t see this. If you’re looking at the video, you see my hand just going all the time, but toe taps, calf raises, literally anything counts. So those are ways to increase your NEAT.

Fat loss, however, is not the only benefit that you get from NEAT.

Multiple studies have shown that NEAT can also help decrease negative heart condition markers, as well as improving your risk factors of blood cholesterol and blood sugar. Going for a walk after you eat can help regulate blood sugar, things like that. So those are the benefits of NEAT That is the breakdown of what your total daily energy expenditure looks like.

And that is the least stressful way to increase your output and increase your fat loss at that minimal effective dosage without creating more stress on the body. So this simple and easy way to increase your total daily expenditure is not only beneficial for looking good, but also feeling good. So I hope that was helpful.

If you have any questions, suggestions for future topics, or just want to chat, feel free to reach out to us on Instagram @Brooke_Elysian and Facebook linked in the show notes or via our website, Elysianwomenswellness.com. And if you enjoyed what you heard today, we’d be thrilled if you could take a half second to leave us a five-star review. Not only will you be helping others find our show, but you’ll also be entered into our monthly hundred dollar giveaway for new reviews. New episodes drop every Monday, so make sure to hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more.

Thanks for listening. See you soon.

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Coach Brooke Davis Links:

Website: bdavistraining.com

LinkedIn: Brooke Davis – Owner – Davis Fitness

Facebook: Brooke Davis, CPT 

Instagram: Brooke Davis  (@brooke_elysian)

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