After many months of buildup and memes, the Barbie movie is finally here. Margot Robbie plays the stereotypically blonde-and-perky Barbie, who finds herself facing an existential crisis.
Joined by Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, she heads off on a journey from Barbie Land to Los Angeles. The movie is directed by Greta Gerwig.
If anyone asked if I get enough exercise, my answer would be unequivocal: Yes, I make a point of carving out time to sweat, get my heart pumping and move around.
I probably would not mention that I prefer to drive the half mile to pick up my coffee instead of taking a 15-minute walk. Or that using the drive thru sounds infinitely more appealing than actually getting out of my car. Or that you'd rarely spot me choosing to trudge up the stairs at the end of the day.
None of these shortcuts on their own feel like that a big deal.
After all, I worked out today, right?
But added up these are slowly sapping a sometimes overlooked source of metabolic health.
It's a concept that goes by the name non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, for short.
This is essentially all the calories that a person burns through their daily activity excluding purposeful physical exercise.
Think of the low-effort movements that you string together over the course of your day – things like household chores, strolling through the grocery aisle, climbing the stairs, bobbing your leg up and down at your desk, or cooking dinner.
"The fact there's so many things in part explains why it's so difficult to study, because how on earth do you measure everything?" says Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist who pioneered research on NEAT while at the Mayo Clinic and now heads the nonprofit Foundation Ipsen.
But researchers have made progress understanding how NEAT works – and how we can tap into its benefits. They've learned that even small behavior changes can amplify or diminish how much NEAT you get, and this can shape your health in powerful ways.
They've also found that people of the same size can have dramatically different levels of NEAT, based on factors like their job and where they live, as well as their biological drive to get up and move around.
What's clear is that many of us who live screen-based lives have the capacity to inject more NEAT into our daily rhythms, not necessarily through seismic changes in our lifestyle, but small-scale ones that mostly just require a shift in mindset.
Here's what to know about how NEAT works and how to get more of it.
NEAT fills in the slack in your energy expenditure
Much of our daily energy expenditure is relatively fixed.
More than half of those calories go toward supporting basic bodily functions, what's known as our basal metabolic rate.
It's just been a little bit hard to study that compensatory action," she notes, "I would say the jury is still out."
However, evidence from the lab supports the idea that our biology plays a role in NEAT. Kotz is researching a compound in the brain, called orexin, that appears to have a key role in regulating NEAT.
She was studying how it influenced feeding behavior in animals when she noticed that it also was having another effect.
"Through a lot of experiments, we discovered that when we either give the animals more orexin, or we stimulate their orexin neurons in the brain, it causes them to move more," she says.
This may help explain why certain animals in the same setting with the same food, end up gaining weight, while others don't.
In the context of NEAT, Kotz describes the role of orexin as "similar to what our Apple Watch is trying to do – every now and again reminding us, 'hey, you should stand up, you should move around.'"
"Orexin seems to do this naturally," she says.
These kinds of experiments haven't yet been done yet in humans, but the hope, Kotz says, is that a medication could leverage orexin so that it's easier for people to be active.
However, that doesn't mean people who have lower orexin "signaling or tone" are destined to be sedentary.
"I think it can be overcome just by being conscious and aware of the fact that you do need to move more," she says.
Novak says increasing NEAT is an "untapped resource" for managing weight, but that it's not effective on its own — that is, absent changes in diet.
This snapshot of their daily energy expenditure helped predict the risk of being alive or dead about seven to 10 years later.
For every 287 calories a person burned per day, there was about a 30% lower chance of dying.
"We immediately thought that the people in this higher group would be the all-stars of exercising," says Manini, "But that wasn't the case at all."
It turned out those who were less likely to die didn't exercise more than others, it seemed to be the NEAT in their lives.
"They were more likely to have stairs where they live and were more likely to volunteer," he says.
"Those things we don't equate to exercise, but it is movement," he says.
