Looking for a few tricks to burn more calories without stepping foot in the gym? Here are a few NEAT tips to make it happen.

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Diet. Exercise. Protein. Strength training. When should you workout? For how long? How much should you eat? And when?

All of this stuff gets pretty confusing if you’re diving into a fat loss journey for the first time on your own. It’s a bit daunting.

Here you are trying to handle the big rocks of the fat loss puzzle––nutrition and fitness––when in reality, there are a few more factors at play that could be preventing you from seeing real results.

What if I told you that you could lose weight and keep it off without much effort in your exercise programming?

You’d probably be like, “Sign me up for that shit, Pete.” Or you might be thinking, “Yeah that sounds too good to be true, Pete. You’re the one always preaching about patience and how there is no fat loss easy button.”

Also true.

But, one of the most overlooked aspects of losing weight is the activity that you perform outside of the gym.

In this article, we’re going to spend some time talking about NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) and its role in melting fat and keeping it off for good.

And then I’ll share a few tricks to burn more calories utilizing your NEAT activities.

Let’s get into it.

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How do you lose weight?

A simple search on The Google will spit back well over 945 Million results. Yes, almost 1 Billion different websites with some advice for dropping a few pounds, most of which is misleading in nature––this is another rant for another time––let’s stay on topic.

The majority of those hits from your randomized search will lead to some semblance of the phrase: Eat less and move more.

Thanks for that overly simplistic catch all sound byte.

In the past, you’ve likely read that and decided it was time to lace ‘em up and pound the pavement on a daily 40-minute run in the scorching heat of the noon hour so you could sweat more. Then you packed on another 3-4 HIIT classes with a couple of boot camps so you could really “feel the burn.”

All while starving yourself with a lack of carbs as a form of punishment from the food gods for the ultimate sin of overindulgence on pancakes.

Look, the simple phrase “Eat less, move more,” does have some merits. But what you need to know is that it is much easier than you think as long as you follow some of the tricks to burn more calories that I’ll share in a minute.

Movement is what drives metabolism

Using the tried and true analogy of the body being some kind of machine, we know that the human machination needs some sort of fuel to move.

Our bodies crave and require calories to keep us functioning.

As I pointed out in this guide to all things metabolism, the majority of your calorie needs goes to just keeping you alive and breathing.

After that, we get into the movement phase, which can broken up into two distinct phases. Intentional movement and non-purposeful movement.

Intentional movement is your workouts. It’s when you lace em up to go for a job. Or when you decide to crush yourself in a boot camp. It’s also when you hit the weights to get stronger. Or when you work on your sun salutations in yoga class.

All of this is intentional and it requires energy to power your body to move those legs and feet, crank out that next circuit, lift that weight or fold into different poses.

Then there’s the unintentional movement. The non-purposeful movement. This is the majority of your movement throughout the day. While exercise might only take up 30-40 minutes of your time a few days per week, it’s the unintentional stuff that will take up the majority of your energy needs from a movement perspective.

For the sake of this article, we’re going to talk about that non purposeful movement.

Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis can be the key to burn more calorie throughout your day

NEAT is all the energy that your body burns throughout your day that does not include exercising, breathing, sleeping and/or digesting food.

It’s all of our normal, everyday, run of the mill, boring, thoughtless movement.

• Walking to your car.
• Waiving your hands around as you talk.
• Fidgeting.
• Doing the dishes.
• Cleaning the house.

This is all NEAT.

NEAT calories are the undercover key to your fat loss progress.

While your purposeful exercise routine feels like you are burning a metric fuck ton of calories, in reality, it’s likely only responsible for the same amount of energy as a candy bar.

On the other hand, your non-purposeful, NEAT calorie expenditure accounts for up to 20-percent of your daily energy needs.

In other words, your little step tracker is much more important to your fat loss progress than you think.

When I start a new client off on one of my online coaching programs, one of the first things I do is ensure they are moving more throughout the day in the form of walking.

Become more active with the right activities

Remember that simple weight loss sound byte from earlier? Something along the lines of the overall goal is to eat less and move more.

Again, this is not a recipe to go destroy your body with endless bouts of cardio or a daily trip to your boot camp or HIIT class or OrangeTheory.

It’s all about that simple low-hanging fruit of just regular slow-paced movement, like walking or even cycling to work.

The individual who bikes to work will burn up to 2,000 more calories than the desk job worker that spends the entirety of her day sitting.

If we’re talking about trying to lose a little excess weight, those 2,000 calories go a long way. It can lead to pure unadulterated calorie burn towards trying to remove some unwanted fluff. Or it could mean being able to eat a little more while still being in a deficit.

Remember two things:

• Calorie deficit means eating fewer calories than your body burns. So if your body is burning a ton of calories every day, it gives you more room to be in a deficit and see weight loss progress.
• And the goal of all deficits and the entire fat loss journey is to eat as much as possible whilst seeing the results you are after.

In other words, you should be moving more.

How to Increase Your NEAT

What gets measured, gets managed.

I tell me online fat loss clients all of the time that in order to see the best success in this game, it’s all about treating your journey like your own science project.

Remember back in school when you had to get those big project boards and fill the thing up with all these numbers and data?

Data drives the project. It’s how you got that “A” in your science class.

It’s how you’ll get your A on the fat loss science project. You need data. And you should be tracking that data consistently.

Get a fitness tracker of some kind. I have a FitBit. You can get a simple pedometer. Or you can look to the step trackers in your Apple Watch.

All of them work well for our little science project. None are really superior to any other.

At minimum, you can even just keep your iPhone in your pocket and it has a step tracker in the Apple Health app (you’ll need to enable that function in the settings).

Get moving

Once you’ve got the tracker all set, it’s time to go to work.

The goal is to do a little bit better each day. This is not a race to see how quickly you can get to 20,000 steps per day.

Instead, aim for a consistent effort of around 8,000 to 10,000 per day. On average.

I emphasize “on average” because if one day you’re coming up a bit short, you can still make up for it throughout the rest of the week to hit that average.

So, you’ll need about 70,000 steps for the week in total.

5 Tricks to burn more calories with NEAT activities

Commuting

If you live in a walkable city, commit to walking to work a few times per week. Or everyday, if you can.

Can’t walk? Maybe you can pick up cycling to work. Or by using a bike share program.

Can’t cycle? Then take the car, but commit to parking farther away in the lot or garage and forcing yourself to take more steps to get into the building.

Activity breaks

If you work a sedentary job, it’s easy to get bogged down at your desk and never move. Let’s fix that.

Set a timer for 25 or even 55 minutes (I like the Pomodoro Tracker). When it goes off, you get up and walk around, pace or even march in place for 5-10 minutes.

Too busy to take a 5 minute break? No you’re not. You’ve just been conditioned to think you are a prisoner to your desk.

You’ll be more creative and more productive by giving your mind a break to recharge and your eyes will thank you for peeling away from the screen.

Sneak more steps into your day

We already covered parking farther away from your office. You can do the same when going to the grocery store or mall.

This same approach applies to things like opting for the stairs instead of the elevator or the escalator.

Take the scenic route whenever you can.

Opt to pick up your lunch or dinner instead of having it delivered to you.

Daily walks

The most accessible and low-impact exercise on the planet is one that nearly everyone can do.

Get up and walk.

Aiming for a 15-20 minute walk once or twice per day will go a long way towards elevating your NEAT calorie expenditure. And doing so will boost metabolism so you can make this fat loss game even easier.

If you can manage 8,000 to 10,000 steps per day on average, fantastic. But if that goal seems like a marathon compared to your current daily step count, that’s fine. Just opt to do a little better every day. Set a goal to walk 1,000 more steps over the next week or two and then slowly build from there.

But adding one or two committed walks per day will definitely help smash that goal.

Hobbies

Walking is the most measurable metric of the NEAT calorie game. But walking is not the only way to increase activity.

Instead of coming home, plopping on the couch and settling into Netflix all night long, find some hobbies to keep you engaged.

Do you like to clean? Awesome. That’s movement. Even washing the dishes, vacuuming the house, dusting off the furniture … all of these count.

Fishing. Playing an instrument. Painting. All require some additional levels of movement that much better than sitting around and streaming shows.

People who are more active are leaner

If your goal is to get into better shape and look pretty awesome, you’ll want to find more time in your day for lower-impact movement to drive up that NEAT.

It is not about punishing your body with endless rounds of cardio or HIIT or boot camps.

Instead, simple activities throughout your day with actionable tricks to burn more calories like these will drive up that metabolism and allow your body to become a fat burning furnace for almost effortless weight loss.

Start today by adding a few more activities into your daily routine. Then add a few more. And a few more.

When combined with that calorie deficit and the appropriate amount of strength training, you’ll be on your way to long-term health.

Let me help you learn a few tricks to burn more calories throughout your day … 

I’m here to help you out. 

If you have any questions, reach out. I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “Tricks to burn more calories” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Or you can hit me up anytime on the socialz on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

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