 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. So NEET, or Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, regulates appetite. We've always been told that being physically active works up an appetite, but is that the truth? Did you know that moving more can actually help you eat less? So let's go ahead and take a look. Alright, so what can a 1956 study of 213 jute meal workers in Bengal tell us about our appetite today? Well, let's take a look at it. This is the most famous study ever done on the relationship between physical activity and appetite. So it's from 1956. The relation between caloric intake, body weight, and physical work. Studies in an industrial male population in West Bengal. Alright, so let's look at this chart here and then I'm going to talk about it a little bit. So you see we have at the bottom, we have the type of work, from sedentary to light work, medium heavy, and very heavy work. And then on the side, we have the number of calories they were taking in a day. And you see that as you transition from the middle towards the left, it says becoming sedentary does not downregulate food intake. So moving less does not cause you to eat less. Going to the right though, increasing physical activity improves satiety signaling. So notice that as you increase your physical activity, they are consuming more calories, but they're consuming the appropriate number of calories. That's why it's called the regulated zone. Their calorie intake is linked to their calorie expenditure. On the left hand side, it's called the non-regulated zone because they're eating way more than their body needs. Alright, so what does this all mean? A sedentary life appears to disconnect our satiety signals and our hunger signals from our movement. So satiety is the absence of hunger, the feeling of fullness. So basically you're going to be hungry when you really don't need food. You're not going to feel full even though you've eaten enough food for your movement. So it disconnects our physical activity from our hunger and fullness or satiety signals. Notice that the most sedentary workers on the left are consuming as many calories as people in the heavy work category, even though their energy expenditure would be wildly different. The people in the heavy work category are eating what they need to maintain their weight. The sedentary workers are eating way more than they need and they'd be piling on body fat that's what they found in the study. So let's look at some more recent studies. Energy balance, body composition, sedentaryness and appetite regulation, pathways to obesity. So a quote, sedentaryness, which would be physical inactivity, is positively associated with adiposity and is proposed to be a source of overconsumption and appetite dysregulation. So in plain English, moving less makes you want to eat more calories than you need. That's what this study is talking about. Low levels of physical activity are associated with dysregulation of energy intake and fat mass gain over one year. So this is a really neat one. They followed 421 people. So there was a positive relationship observed between calculated energy intake and activity group except in the lowest quintile or lowest 20% of the activity levels. So it basically meant unless you're on the far bottom and you're moving the least, then you were eating as much as you should. If you moved a lot, you ate a lot. If you moved a little, you ate less. But this lowest activity group, the group that was in the bottom 20%, they reported higher levels of disinhibition and cravings for savory foods compared to the groups with the highest level of physical activity. So they basically, they were craving food more. They had a harder time saying no to the food. They were hungrier than they should have been even though all the other people in the study were eating the appropriate amount of food. So what are we talking about here? The reason I love this study is because it even tells us the threshold. It tells us the number to shoot for to make sure this doesn't happen. But before we get there, the odds of gaining more than 3% of body fat during the one year follow up of this study were between 1.8 and 3.8 times higher for the individuals that were the least active compared to those in the middle activity group. So the 20% that had the lowest physical activity were much hungrier. They were having a harder time saying no to food. They were eating more than their body needed and they were up to 3.8 times more likely to gain a bunch of fat in the year follow up from this study. So here's what I really liked though. A threshold for achieving energy balance occurred at an activity level corresponding to 7,116 steps per day and amount achievable by most adults. So we're not talking about becoming a marathon runner so that you can get the appropriate appetite. We're talking about 7,116 steps per day. People that walked that many steps or above, they had a regulated appetite. People that walked less than that had a dysregulated appetite and guess what? A lot of typical Americans are walking between 4,000 and 6,000 steps. We're not hitting that number. So what this study found is that an adequate level of movement and activity appears to strengthen the connection between our food intake and our physical activities. It regulates our appetite. So eating more and moving less is a terrible combination. calorie behavior is causing the obesity epidemic on both ends of the calories in, calories out equation now. We're burning less calories because we're sedentary and we have an increased appetite because we're sedentary. That's a terrible combination. It made me think of just this kind of funny quote from Robert Quillen. Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back. So what are our key takeaways here? A lack of physical activity actually increases our appetite and leads to overeating. And moving more will help you lose weight by burning more calories while eating less. That's a win-win. So Neat does let you eat more. We learned that with the Amish and other people. So Neat does allow you to eat more, but it can also lead to you wanting to eat less as your appetite gets regulated over time. I've definitely found that myself. So walking and increasing your Neat don't spark hunger the same way that more intense forms of exercise do as well. All right, so what are our action steps here? For now, aim for at least 7,000 steps per day to help regulate your appetite. I'm going to ask you to try to get to a higher step count than that, but even getting for 7,000 or slightly above can start to help you regulate your activity as you get more physically fit there. All right, so in the next video, we're going to talk more about the importance of walking and how it can hopefully you can walk away from an early grave and have a long, healthy life. All right, I hope this helped. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.