I hope you have had a great week and have put some plans in place for the week ahead!

Do you like our picture of the duckos out walking? It's relevant, I promise (kind of)....

One of the questions we often get is related to “metabolic damage” from dieting, where people assume that dieting is inherently harmful to their “metabolism”. However, people rarely elaborate on what they actually mean by the word “metabolism”. 

With that in mind, we wanted to share some insights taken from our Triage Militia article on metabolism…..

The big player in this whole metabolism thing, that is rarely considered, is non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). You see, people just stop doing “extra” activities the further into a diet they get. They don’t fidget anymore. They drive and park closer to their destination more. They take the lift instead of the stairs. Etc etc. People conserve what little energy they do have available and don’t “spend” it doing tasks that the body deems unnecessary for immediate survival. This is a great strategy in an evolutionary sense, but considering the modern world, along with the fact that a diet is really just controlled starvation, it is actually a relic we wish didn’t exist. 

The fact that NEAT goes down has been shown to account for circa 2000 calories of daily energy expenditure in one study.

2000 calories!

If you burned 2000 extra calories every day and changed nothing else in your exercise and nutrition plan, you would theoretically (emphasis on theoretically) lose nearly 2kg a week. So, if NEAT can be down-regulated enough so that people stop burning all these extra calories, obviously the plan that originally had you in a nice 500 calorie deficit, is now actually a 1500 calorie surplus! 

(Obviously, we are using hyperbole here, but I hope you understand the meaning)

This down-regulation of NEAT is caused by a few pretty cool interactions between a cacophony of hormones and signalling molecules.

For more of the theoretical information, you can join the Triage Militia, but we would hate to not actually give you some practical take-home points….

What can YOU do?

Setting a step goal is one of the most powerful tools to changing your body composition and health. It should ideally be standardised at the very start of a diet, before even training or cardio are considered. Unfortunately, we get a lot of our information from the bodybuilding world, and this is something they haven’t really cottoned onto yet, although health organisations have been pushing for people to move more in a general capacity for years.

We feel, as do many health organisations, that a rough target of a minimum of 10,000 steps a day is a good place to be. This isn’t a number that is beyond the realms of a normal human, and even people with the most sedentary office jobs can easily hit 10,000 steps a day with some lifestyle modifications. The goal for most people should be to get somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 steps per day [if practical]. We find that most of our clients who make a little effort to be active tend to hit this. But even if you can’t get anywhere near these numbers, you should still standardise your steps. If you are only able to get 3,000 steps per day, you should still aim to consistently hit that 3,000 and don’t allow it to fall below that level and make dieting unnecessarily hard for yourself.

And of course, it's not the tracking that you should be worried about; some people find the tracking aspect helpful, but if you just change your daily habits to park further away, take the stairs, walk to work etc., you are still getting the benefits, regardless of whether you track your steps or not.

Finally, remember, if you add in loads of cardio on the treadmill, yet don’t standardise your basic daily activity, you are missing the forest for the trees. Time and time again, dieters will drastically increase their gym-based activity, but what do they do for the rest of the day? Laze around, sit all the time, take naps (especially bodybuilders), all of which serves to reduce your energy expenditure.

Hopefully, you have found this helpful. If so, let us know, or pass some of these tips onto your social media community (tag us and let us know)!

Have an epic week. And remember, it’s 2ez.

Kind Regards,

Gary McGowan

Triage Method