Yesterday, I explained how conducting 1:2:1 meetings walking, as opposed to behind a desk, is not only more constructive professionally, but a brilliant way to burn through a pound of body fat every three weeks.
Today we’re looking at the little choices you make in a day and a concept called Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT). NEAT describes the calories burned by the movements we make when we go about our daily business (as opposed to through exercise…think taking the stairs and carrying shopping bags).
With the right choices you can achieve as much outside the gym as in it…but how do you make the ‘right’ ones?
I’m going to tell you how you make choices today…and how you can make better ones tomorrow.
Choices, choices, choices
Every day we make approximately 35,000 remotely conscious choices.
The second you woke you (all too briefly) pondered whether to get up straight away or hit snooze. While you brushed your teeth (hopefully this one wasn’t a debate), you deliberated between a bacon sandwich and a banana (we make 227 decisions each day on food alone).
Assuming you spend 7 hours asleep blissfully not making any decisions at all, that makes roughly 2,000 decisions per hour or one decision every two seconds.
There are a few decision strategies available to you when you make a choice (meaning how to choose your choice is the first choice you choose). The options are:
Impulsiveness – Choose the first option you are given and be done with it
Compliance – Going with the most pleasing and popular option
Delegating – Pushing decisions off to others
Avoidance/Deflection – Either ignoring as many decisions as possible to avoid responsibility for their impact or to prevent them from overwhelming you (I felt seen too)
Balancing – Weighing the factors involved and then using them to render the best decision in the moment
Prioritising & Reflecting – Putting the most energy, thought and effort into those decisions that will have the greatest impact…and maximizing the time you have in which to make those decisions by consulting with others, considering the context, etc.
Every day we use a combination of these approaches to deal with the sheer volume of decisions we face.
When it comes to making choices at work, we normally use strategies like Balancing and Prioritising & Reflecting.
When it comes to NEAT choices like ‘do I take the lift or the stairs?’, we lean towards Impulsiveness, Compliance and Avoidance/Deflection.
With that in mind…can we train ourselves to choose better choices?
Making better choices
Consider the following NEAT choices:
Do I take the lift or the stairs?
Do I ride the escalator or walk up it?
Do I sit on this bus or get off one stop early?
Do I check Instagram or stretch my legs?
Do I call my colleague or walk over to their desk?
Most of us don’t register the above as choices, we just subconsciously do the first one. But these are choices, and the options that we fail to choose have health benefits that we seriously underestimate.
The problem is that, although we’re aware taking the stairs is better for us, the benefits from doing it once seem negligible, so we Impulsively and Compliantly decide not take the easy route.
We’re all guilty of this…we’re a bit lazy and want bang for our buck. What we fail to see is that when you consistently make the right NEAT choices…the benefits scale up very quickly.
Choices Compound
Walking down the escalator one morning to the tube won’t take you down a dress size.
But…walking down the escalator might lead to you walking up the other end. Then the stairs in the office may seem more like an option than they did before.
When you get back to the escalator that evening, you might decide to walk it simply because you did earlier.
Then when you exit the tube and your legs feel warm, you could choose to skip the bus and stroll home instead…or at least get off a few stops early.
All of a sudden, in one day you’ve climbed 6 flights of stairs and walked for 10 minutes where before you’d have been stationary.
Choices compound and they gather momentum.
You do the same thing Monday to Friday. After 3 weeks you have a habit and you can’t imagine wasting time standing on an escalator and reading those useless adverts, or cramming into a sweaty, smelly packed bus in the summertime ever again.
When choices compound you create habits, and when you create habits, the cumulative benefits stop being negligible and start being significant.
How Do We Make A Subconscious Choice A Conscious One?
To reap NEAT rewards, we need to start seeing automatic actions like ‘taking the lift’ as a choice. We must acknowledge that the option we’ve always picked actually has real, viable alternatives…then we can decide whether we want to choose them.
Naturally, it’s hard to change something you do subconsciously.
You’ve taken the lift every day for the last 4 years and found it rather nice. If you like Option A, why would you entertain an Option B? You’ve already got 35,000 choices to get through, why add another when autopilot works just fine?
To actively consider an alternative, you need to know what it gives you…the return on investment.
We know choosing the escalator gives you very little other than awkward eye contact with strangers…so let’s see what Option B has to offer:
You can burn around 0.17 calories per stair climbed, and 0.05 calories per stair descended. These aren’t sexy numbers…BUT if you go up and down a flight of 20 steps 6 times a day, that’s 26.4 calories per day, 132 calories per working week.
A 10-minute walk at a moderate pace on flat ground (instead of the bus) burns roughly 45 calories, which is 225 per working week
Adopting both of those practices would see you burning 357 calories per week
A pound of body fat contains 3,600 calories, meaning you would burn that off every 10 weeks.
If you choose to make smart NEAT choices and create good habits as a result, you could burn (at least) the equivalent of a pound of body fat every 10 weeks
Conclusion
My goal was to give you information that increases the number of choices you make a day (sorry!).
Where before you got in the lift on autopilot, hopefully now you will choose between the lift and the stairs.
You may still choose Option A, but being aware of the benefits you could get from Option B gives you control over your NEAT calories and the power to increase them exponentially.
NEAT choices aren’t about huge numbers or big strides forward. They’re small opportunities to create good habits, shift your mindset and burn a huge number of calories over time. Don’t be NEAT ignorant, give yourself all the information and make the right choices.
What opportunities can you find to squeeze more NEAT calories into your day?
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