In Sitting Kills Moving Heals, Dr. Joan Vernikos tells us:
“About nine years ago, James Levine an exercise physiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, coined the term non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). His concept of NEAT sounds much like what I had been discovering in my space and gravity-related research. NEAT is a much greater component of your body’s total energy expenditure throughout a typical day than are structured high-intensity exercises such as walking, running, bicycling, or working out in a gym.
NEAT is defined as the small, brief, yet frequent muscular movements one makes throughout the day, of which changing positions is the most effective: standing, sitting, lying down, bending over to pick up something, squatting, stretching upward to take something off a shelf, getting dressed and undressed, playing a musical instrument, and stirring a pot; even movements as small as crossing and uncrossing one’s legs, waving one’s hands while talking, and fidgeting are helpful. It is these types of small movements and activities that do not happen enough when a person is habitually inactive. Whenever we move around, calories we have consumed are converted into energy by contracting muscles and are measured as generated heat—thermogenesis—the ‘T’ in the ‘NEAT’ acronym. Thus, people who move around a lot all day, even if they don’t go to the gym or engage in intense exercise burn up many more calories than people who are sedentary. They even expend more calories than those who do go to the gym, but then spend the rest of their day sitting around. Not surprisingly, the research on NEAT has shown a connection between the lack of NEAT and obesity and metabolic diseases like diabetes.
Our body was designed to live in gravity as a perpetual motion machine.”
In Move Your DNA, Katey Bowman tells us we have trillions of cells in our body—15-70 trillion or 15,000,000,000 to 70,000,000,000. Nearly all those cells have special equipment to detect movement because our bodies were designed to move.
Remember it’s NEAT to be a perpetual motion machine.