 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. Welcome to Plateau Buster number three, Get Neat. So what does this mean? Neat stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It's basically all of the subconscious movement and really all the movement that you do every day that isn't part of a conscious, purposeful, planned exercise program. Now we could argue about semantics there, but that's basically what neat means to me. All the movement you're doing that is not exercising. So this could be, are you laying down? Are you sitting? Are you standing? How much do you fidget? How much do you wave your hands around? How often are you blinking? All of these things would fall under that category of non-exercise activity thermogenesis or neat. So why does this matter? Well, if you're eating fewer calories, your body's response is going to be to subconsciously tell you to move less. So if you're eating fewer calories, but also moving less and burning fewer calories, you will no longer be in the same energy deficit. And this is honestly the number one reason that people think that their diets are failing because of this survival mode or metabolic adaptation. It's like, hey, I'm eating the exact same food every week. I used to lose a pound a week. Then it was half a pound a week. Then it was a quarter of a pound. Now I'm no longer moving. Your metabolism hasn't really crashed. You are just not getting neat enough. So let's go ahead and look at the studies. What does the science say? Changes in energy expenditure resulting from altered body weight. Super, super important study from really the leading experts in the field. So here's what they found. Losing 10% of your body weight. So 10% weight loss led to a decrease in neat of 37.5%. So your brain's response to you losing precious fuel is, hey, we've got to stop moving. We don't have enough energy. We can't be wasting energy by moving unless we have to. This change in neat non-exercise activity thermogenesis explained 78% in the reduction in total daily energy expenditure. So yes, these people went on a diet. They lost weight. Yes, they were burning less calories, but the huge majority of it was not some loss in basal metabolic rate. It was 78% of it was the decrease in neat. Some more of it would be the fact that they're eating less. So the thermic effect of food, the calories it takes to eat and digest and utilize our food would also have gone down. So when you take that out of the equation, 85 to 90% of the metabolic adaptation or what we call survival mode can actually be explained by alterations in neat, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Now they're interesting one because some of us are just neater than others is the way I like to look at it. Determinance of 24 hour energy expenditure in man. Methods and results using respiratory chamber. So they took these subjects and they and they locked them in a small respiratory chamber. Imagine being like a really, really small room, probably like a room that I'm in. So they could still move, but it wasn't like they were out. They weren't walking miles a day, but this was amazing. Some of the amount of energy they burned from non-exercise locked in this room just from fidgeting and things like that maybe standing more or sitting less. The difference between one participant in the next, which is much as 100 calories to 800 calories. So some people burned 100 calories a day in neat and others burned 800 calories per day. So a 700 calorie difference, that means that think about how easy it would be for the one person to lose weight because they're burning so many calories and how hard it would be for the other. Well, when you're on a diet, your numbers going to decline and you're going to be closer to that one end. Alright, so not only are some people neater than others, but it can really impact our weight loss. Another really important study here, the response to exercise with constant energy intake and identical twins. So they were on identical diet and workout plans. It was 90 days. So during this study, some people lost seven pounds as little as seven pounds. Others lost 25 pounds. So you take two people, put them on the exact same diet and workout plan. One of them loses seven pounds. One loses 25. Guess what explained it? Differences in neat because they were exercising the same amount and they were eating the same amount. So that didn't impact it. It was differences in neat. So the person that lost 25 pounds kept moving, kept subconsciously being active, kept standing, fidgeted more. The person that only lost seven pounds, their body's response was to make them less active or at least try to make them less active. And that's the key. How are we going to actually bust this plateau then? We have to consciously move more to overcome the fact that your brain is subconsciously telling you to move less. So how can you do it? Maybe you wear a fitness tracker and you keep a step count or you set a movement goal for the day. So I recommend if you can, try to get 10,000 steps a day, whatever the number is for you. For me, it's 12,000, but I'm always a little bit more aggressive. For you, maybe it's seven or eight. But see how many steps you get per day when you're not on a diet. Make sure you keep getting that many steps when you are on a diet. So if you can get a fitness tracker or a pedometer, that would be a great idea. If not, at least set a movement goal for each day. A great thing to do would be every morning I take a short walk and then after every meal I take a 10 minute walk. Things like that. So consciously make sure you're moving more. I'm going to do an entire course on this and give you a thousand different things you can do to increase your need. But for now, just remember, consciously move. Sit more than you lay, stand more than you sit, move more than you stand. Do those things consciously to overcome your body's subconscious desire to preserve calories. We don't want to preserve calories. That's where this plateau came from. We want to burn calories and get back to losing fat. Alright, so I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.