Stop fidgeting… from observing myself I can say that I do a lot of it. I can’t really sit around easily and relaxed in a one place. The same is on the bus stop, I gotta move and do some small moves. Standing in one place calmly is very hard…

Wel, guess what…it eats a lot of energy, small movements like playing with a pen, fidgeting, moving constantly and etc, are burning a lot of calories. Lyle McDonald calls this “Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis/Spontaneous Physical Activity (NEAT/SPA)”. And we skinny guys must limit it. I know it’s hard though. I still catch myself fidgeting.

This fidgeting thing is one of the big reasons why we tend to use the excuse of “fast metabolism”..if we fidgeted less, then we would burn less calories daily, meaning our bodies would use more calories to build muscle! ;)

Lyle McDonald writes this about NEAT:

NEAT more or less refers to fidgeting, moving around, basically weird spontaneous movement that burns off calories without really accomplishing much. If you remember back to high school, there was always that one skinny guy who was always fidgeting his hands, bouncing his leg, that kind of thing. He was burning calories at a much greater rate than you might expect. Even chewing gum all day can burn up a lot of calories.

It turns out that NEAT can account for 200-900 calories/day of caloric expenditure and there is a massive variance between people in how much change they get. This is especially true during overfeeding; some people ramp up NEAT to super high levels and stay lean, others don’t and get fat easily.

To put that in perspective, 900 calories per day is equivalent to about an hour and a half of hard exercise. That’s a ton of calories burned through nothing but fidgeting. Unfortunately, it also looks like NEAT is genetically determined; either you upregulate NEAT during overfeeding or you don’t. One more thing, in this particular study, women consistently had the smallest NEAT response.

In addition, it looks like the capacity to increase NEAT is tied to the adaptive downregulation of metabolism during dieting. One study found that the same people who were best able to increase metabolism during overfeeding had the smallest drop in metabolic rate during dieting and vice versa; the folks who’s metabolism went up the least during overfeeding had the biggest drop in metabolic rate during dieting.

Metabolic Rate Overview

Now while he mentions it is genetics, well, fuck it.. I believe that with enough will, I can reduce the fidgeting and so can You! Maybe we can’t eliminate it but still, minimizing it could be helpful. I can’t say this is scientifically proven, but this is something I’m gonna do either way. I think it can work.

BTW, do you guys notice yourself fidgeting a lot?

Cheers,
Adrian

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