Importantly, non-exercise activity correlates with body weight in obese as well as normal weight individuals, so everyone can benefit from extra movement.Įven if you already work out regularly you should still strive for additional daily activity. This is not true of more formal exercise, which tends to make people hungrier. There’s good evidence that increasing your daily activity can burn hundreds of extra calories each day and may be one of the most effective ways to impact your energy balance (i.e. Unlike structured, high-intensity exercise, walking and other low-intensity movements don’t make you hungrier. These things add minuscule amounts of time to your tasks but add up significantly for your health. Just standing up more can make a difference. Avoid elevators and escalators, walk to lunch or between floors in your building, do chores more enthusiastically at home and park further away in the parking lot. If you don’t have a dog, there are plenty of other ways to move more.
I’m happy to report that my pants are fitting better again and I’m back down to my normal weight. He needs to get out and walk a few times a day, so I thought why not improve both of our lives by making a daily pilgrimage to the bigger, better park that’s about a mile from the house instead of the smaller, dirtier park that is closer and more convenient? He gets more exercise and behaves better, I get my walk in, and we both have more fun. To solve my problem, I turned to my puppy Toaster. All you need to do is make an effort to be a little more active throughout the day, and work to build more activity into your daily routine. It means that it is not a chore to burn more calories-in fact, you will hardly notice. It’s easy to forget, but this is good news. How could I forget that non-exercise activity (NEAT) is so important? And it’s not like I never think about this stuff, I noticed when I first started walking that I effortlessly dropped weight. What’s crazy to me is that this amount of exercise seems so inconsequential it doesn’t even register in my brain until months after the change has occurred (did I mention I was still working out almost every day?). This sedentary shift correlates exactly with when I noticed my pants getting tighter. At first I had a standing desk/table I was using, but logistics and a problematic elbow forced me to move to the coffee shop across the street where most of my work gets done now. But after I quit in January I just stayed at home writing. Though I came home each evening and worked on Summer Tomato until the wee hours of the morning, I was not sedentary.Įven during my brief stint in the corporate world after graduation I had a walking commute to work. I also worked in the lab, running back and forth between rooms and up and down stairs to get equipment. When I was still in my PhD program I had a substantial walk to work, at least a mile each way if I took the campus shuttle, and about 2.5 miles each way if I walked the whole distance (I did this rarely, but tried to squeeze it in when I could). Then about 6 weeks ago I figured it out: I had stopped walking. I wasn’t upset about how I looked, I had just gotten slightly larger and didn’t know why. My workouts have actually gotten better, and I’ve noticed welcome improvements in several aspects of my physique (thank you kettlebell!). I didn’t think the problem was exercise, since I still go to the gym 4-6 days a week. I’ve been eating the same or better quality food than I always have, and have even improved on my mindful eating techniques. If anything I have eaten healthier than ever during this time, since I started working at home and control 100% of my meals.
I no longer crave sugar, and avoiding it isn’t hard. I write and think about healthy living all the time, and I absolutely love the food I eat. It wasn’t a lot, just 5 lbs over 6 months or so, but it was strange for me since I didn’t think I was doing anything different.
This year was the first time in about 5 years that I found myself gaining weight. It’s amazing to me how easy it is to forget to move.
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