You put on your exercise clothes and break a sweat every day or at least most days. Congratulations! You’re doing what the majority of people DON’T do. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only a little over 20% of people get the recommended amount of exercise daily. That means 8 out of 10 people do not!
Even the 20% of people who meet the exercise guidelines aren’t always successful at losing weight. The reason? Blame it partially on your brain. According to research published in the journal Current Biology, our nervous systems work against us in the quest to lose body fat by making the everyday movements we do when not engaged in structured exercise more efficient. In other words, we compensate for calories burned through structured exercise, not just by eating more than unusual but by moving more efficiently throughout the day, thereby burning fewer calories.
The human nervous system is very proficient at compensating for the calories expended during a workout. In other words, after a workout, people change the way they move and walk to better conserve energy. After you’ve increased the calorie burn by doing a structured workout, your nervous system, behind the scenes, slows down the pace of everything else you do to compensate for the extra energy you expended. It’s your body’s attempt to keep your energy spreadsheet balanced from a calories in-calories out perspective and ensure you have sufficient energy stores when you need them.
Is Laziness Programmed into You Brain?
According to this study, most people are hardwired to be as efficient as possible, not burning more calories than necessary to accomplish a particular task. After an exercise session, your brain quietly “reprograms” your movements, making them more efficient and less wasteful of energy. This study showed participants changed the way they walked so as to burn fewer calories.
Being efficient sounds like a good thing but not when you’re trying to get leaner, and this all happens without conscious awareness. You unconsciously expend less energy when you walk by altering your gait and do fewer extraneous movements, like fidgeting, throughout the day to conserve energy. Surprisingly, even fidgeting movements like twirling your hair between your fingers or shaking your foot as you sit at your desk, burns a significant number of calories over the course of a day. Research shows if you were to sit all day and fidget as you sat, you’d burn around 600 more calories than if you didn’t fidget. Pretty remarkable, huh?
Fidgeting and NEAT
Fidgeting refers to a type of energy expenditure called NEAT (non-exercise adaptive thermogenesis), the movements you do that aren’t structured exercise and don’t involve eating or sleeping. So why does one person fidget more than another? You’ve probably known people who always seemed to be in perpetual motion, even when sitting in a chair – tapping a pencil on the desk, shaking a leg, squirming – or all three. The consensus is fidgeting tendencies are controlled by the brain and partially impacted by genetics.
Genetically thin people tend to fidget more than people who have a tendency to be overweight. In fact, scientists have identified a gene in mice that when missing makes the mice less physically active and more likely to put on body fat. In fact, the non-fidgeting mice had twice the body fat as normal controls. The mice essentially became the mouse equivalent of human couch potatoes when they lacked the fidgeting gene.
Interestingly, humans have a similar fidgeting gene, but in us, it’s probably not as simple as deletion of a single gene. Multiple genes and environmental factors probably all impact the degree to which you fidget.
Becoming a Master Fidgeter
So some of us are inherently more prone to fidget, but if you aren’t, can you become a better fidgeter? Why not? It may not be something that comes naturally to you, but with a little focus on staying active, you can train yourself to expend more energy throughout the day. Tap your toes when you’re sitting and squeeze your glutes when you’re sitting and standing. Trade that desk chair for an exercise ball that will give you more mobility when you sit. You’ll also get more core engagement when you sit on an unstable surface like an exercise ball.
Fidgeting when you have to sit will help you burn more energy but if you have the option to stand – do it. Standing burns more calories than sitting and when you stand, you can still fidget by moving your legs and arms around more. If you have to sit part of the day, break up your sitting sessions with short walk breaks and stretches. Even very short periods of exercise, as little as a minute, add up throughout the day.
Another way to counteract your body’s tendency to make you more efficient is to build more lean body mass through resistance training. Carrying more muscle on your frame not only gives you more metabolically active tissue to burn calories – it increases the number of calories you burn with every movement you do and even when you sleep.
The Bottom Line
Your brain is smart! Its main goal is to make sure you have enough energy stores to survive. Therefore, it may dial back extraneous movements when you create an energy deficit by working out. This is in addition to the fact that research shows some people eat more after a workout – the combination of more efficient movement patterns, less fidgeting, and the tendency to eat more can destroy the calorie deficit you created by working out, especially if you make calorie-dense, low-nutrition food choices.
Being more consciously aware of how much you’re eating and how much you’re moving around after a workout will help you beat the compensation factor. Building up more lean body mass will also allow you to burn more calories with every movement you do.
References:
Current Biology. “Humans Can Continuously Optimize Energetic Cost during Walking” July 7, 2015.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Best Pract Res Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2002 Dec;16(4):679-702.
New Science. “‘Fidgeting’ gene found for weight loss” June 6, 2007.n
Related Articles By Cathe:
Is Staying Lean Harder Than It Was 30 Years Ago?
Why Most People Don’t Exercise – and It’s Not Lack of Time
Exercising When You’re Sick: Is It Even Worth It?
Is Being Physically Active Enough or Do You Need Structured Exercise as Well?
