NEAT

Last Updated: 8/24/2025

How to Increase Your Daily Calorie Burn with NEAT

"You mean I can burn hundreds of calories a day without adding another workout?!"

It's true. The secret is something called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).

NEAT includes the simple movements you make throughout your day. Examples include walking to the store, standing while you work, and carrying groceries up the stairs. Of course, formal exercise is essential for improving health and fitness. But NEAT is an often-overlooked strategy that can make a big difference in weight loss and weight maintenance.

Over the course of a day, these small actions can increase your calorie burn more than you might expect.

To put it in perspective:

An hour of food prep that keeps you moving around the kitchen burns about 100 calories.
Taking the stairs for 10 minutes spread throughout the day can burn around 50 calories.
A 30-minute brisk walk while talking on the phone burns about 150 calories.
Doing household chores like vacuuming, mopping, or decluttering for 30 minutes burns about 150 calories.
An hour of yard work burns 200 to 300 calories.

That is a total of 650 to 750 calories burned in addition to your workout for the day.

Here's why NEAT is significant. Our total daily calorie burn, known as total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), comes from three sources:

Resting Metabolic Rate (60% of TDEE): the calories your body burns just to stay alive.
Thermic Effect of Feeding (10% of TDEE): the energy it takes to digest your food.
Thermic Effect of Physical Activity (30% of TDEE): the calories burned through formal exercise and NEAT.

We can do very little to change the first two, but physical activity is where we can make a big impact. Even two people of similar size can burn 2,000 calories more or less per day based on the amount of time dedicated to formal exercise and NEAT.

And here's the bonus: a focus on increasing NEAT helps change the way you view physical activity. When you focus on simple activities like taking the stairs, walking more, or moving between tasks, you begin to see opportunities for movement everywhere. That constant awareness makes the choice to be physically active feel natural, not forced, and fuels an upward spiral of motivation to improve your fitness.

The takeaway? Even if you exercise an hour a day, you still have 23 hours left and what you do with them matters. Sitting less and moving more keeps your body burning energy long after your workout is complete and cultivates a positive mindset that carries over to all aspects of your health and fitness.

So, make it a goal to look for NEAT opportunities: park farther from the store, stand while you work, walk during phone calls, and tackle those household chores with purpose. Small steps truly add up, and the more you move, the bigger the payoff.