Physical activity

Moving toward a healthier body composition is the way to go. This means decreasing the percentage of body fat. For most of us, decreasing our intake of calories will not be sufficient. We will need to increase our level of physical activity. Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic has been in the news lately. He has studied the effects of everyday activity that is not related to formal exercise. This has been called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (heat production), which has been abbreviated to NEAT. Dr. Levine has found that those who are obese tend to be less physically active over the course of the day. That is they engage in less NEAT. By standing instead of sitting, using stairs instead of an elevator and generally looking for ways increase our physical activity throughout the day, we can burn a substantial number of calories over the day with little effort. Step counters are useful also in encouraging physical activity. These are readily available at sports stores, and perhaps some pharmacies. About 10,000 steps per day is a healthy level of physical activity. I have found that using a step counter from time to time is an incentive to increase physical activity. If we find that we are only walking 2,000 to 4,000 steps per day, it is an incentive to look for opportunities to increase our physical activity throughout the day to get in more steps.