I’m not the type of person who could work at a job where I would have to sit at a desk every day. I get restless and anxious. Unfortunately there are some days when I do get stuck at the desk and just have to deal with it. Being the fidgety person I am, I try to cope by tapping out rhythms on the desktop, wiggling in my chair, and pacing back and forth across the office.
If you are the type of person who gets stuck at a desk, these fidgety types of behavior may actually benefit your health. A study published last month in the journal of Medicine and Science reported that these anxious movements can actually help burn calories and augment your normal exercise routine. When all these unconscious movements are compiled, a large amount of physical activity is accumulated.
We live in a world where modern conveniences like escalators, motorized vehicles, and electronic gadgets are used to complete even the simplest tasks. Things like opening a can and sautéing some vegetables has been replaced by an electric can opener and a microwave. All of these conveniences have taken a huge amount of physical activity out of our daily lives.
It’s obvious that formal exercise helps burn calories, but how beneficial can this incidentalexercise really benefit you? Fidgeting does actually burn calories that would otherwise be stored in the body as fat. The amount of calories you burn from fidgeting really depends on what you are doing and for how long. Someone tapping their fingers can lose about 100 calories and hour, while someone who is up and down from their chair and pacing the room could lose an additional 200-300 calories an hour.
The key to burning calories without exercise I whether you can turn on something called “non-exercise activity thermogenesis,” or NEAT for short. Neat is activated when you do any type of physical activity, even something as trivial as writing a letter. In a 1999 Mayo Clinic study cited by Science Daily, subjects who overate gained weight in direct proportion to the amount of NEAT that was activated, with the most fidgety people gaining significantly less weight.
So whether you’re sitting at work, watching TV, or eating dinner, keep those feet tapping and you will be able to fit in those skinny jeans in no time.
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