Do you exercise? "Yes, I walk the dog." That's N.E.A.T.!

N.E.A.T. stands for Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis and comprises all the activities you perform during that day that are not sitting or sleeping.  These activities include:  walking the dog, going to the grocery store, doing yard work, etc...  We often talking about being "active" during the day and at work, and many patients who work in construction, or on their feet every day tell me that they don't exercise because they're so "busy at work."

Sadly, that kind of activity is not a replacement for exercise, BUT it is still very important to our overall fitness and health!   This is taken from Vanessa Bennington's online article and is so well written, I will just include it here:

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR), plus the thermic effect of the foods you eat, added to something often referred to as Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) or Non-Exercise Physical Activity (NEPA) makes up your energy requirements for each day. NEAT or NEPA is a huge part of that equation and I’ll explain how. 

BMR + thermic effect of food + NEAT/NEPA = daily energy requirement

BMR, or Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR), is the energy requirement of your body either without any activity or while lying motionless. BMR/RMR accounts for about 60% of your total daily energy requirements. The thermic effect of food (the amount of calories needed to digest food) accounts for about 10-15% of your energy requirements. The rest of your energy requirements are dependent on how active you are in both intentional exercise and NEAT/NEPA activities (normal life activities like cleaning, shopping, walking, etc.).

NEAT/NEPA can account for as little as 15% of energy expenditure in the very sedentary and up to 50% in very active individuals. If a woman has a BMR of around 1,000 calories (we’ll use that nice even number for simplicity’s sake), she’ll burn about 150 calories digesting the food she eats each day. She may also burn anywhere from 150 to 500 calories more per day depending on whether she has a day full of walking around, shopping, and cleaning or if she spends the day sitting and working on the computer.

We’re also going to say our person didn’t engage in any intentional exercise on this particular day. So, on the low end of things, she is going to burn 1,300 calories. If her NEAT activities are on the higher end, she’s going to burn 1,650. That’s a 350-calorie per day difference between those activity levels. Now, I don’t know many people who eat only 1,300 calories per day, but I know plenty of people who have office jobs and don’t workout. Couple a sedentary lifestyle with a daily surplus of calories beyond your basic energy requirements and over time you have weight gain.

So, made simple, the little activities that we can fit in during the day really do matter.  Walking the dog, taking a walk around the office, or maybe doing a couple of laps in the office parking lot at lunch time will make a difference in how active you are OVERALL and if you can add that to a regular exercise routine, you're on the way to a faster metabolism and being in better shape!

Men: can you do 40 push-ups?

Rick Manivong, Personal Trainer - adding something extra to the push-up

Harvard school of public heath recently asked an excellent question... we all know that better fitness is associated with better health... but is there a simple, easy test that a patient could perform in the office to determine their fitness level that could predict their future cardiovascular issues?

Push-ups.

The authors studied 1,104 men over a 10 year follow up. At baseline, patients who could do 40 push-ups had a significant reduction in cardiovascular disease over the next 10 years, compared to patients who could do less than 10.

>> Read the study here in JAMA

Your "Cardio Fitness" Level May Predict Heart Disease

Good data keeps being published about daily exercise.  In nearly all studies, doing some sort of physical activity every day is associated with lower rates of disease.  Recently data was published in the European Heart Journal looking at cardiovascular aerobic fitness, and heart disease.

Per Jordan Smith at Bicycling, "...they discovered that people in the top 25 percent of cardio fitness levels had a nearly 50 percent lower risk of heart attack ... This remained true even after researchers adjusted for those other factors that may influence heart risk.

That means that even people who were deemed “healthy” in other aspects—say, their blood pressure was in the normal range, and they were nonsmokers—were still at greater heart risk if their cardio fitness levels were poor."

>> Read the original article here

Healthy Fats May Help You Lose Weight

There is so much research on diets that it becomes confusing what to eat, and what NOT to eat. This is especially true with fats. There are 4 types of fats:

Mono-UNSATURATED
Poly-UNSATURATED
SATURATED
TRANS fats

The "bad" ones that raise your LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol are the SATURATED and the TRANS fats. Which foods contain those fats? Cookies, Ice Cream, Chips, Fried Foods, High Fat Dairy and some cuts of Red Meat (that's for you Dr. Awar).

Check out his article on Popsugar that looks at why the "healthy fats" can help you loose weight. In essence, healthy fats can help you naturally reduce your calorie intake, because they take longer to burn... meaning you feel full, longer. 

 
It's like we discuss in the office: protein is like "lighter fluid" for the metabolism, it speeds everything up, but you will likely be hungry soon afterward. Healthy fats keep that hunger craving somewhat a bay. Its why the best diet combines the best of all categories: lean protein, healthy fats, and small amounts of complex carbohydrates.