The Importance of NEPA
Filed under: General Health, Weight Loss
This past weekend my fiance and I moved apartments. (Hence the lack of blogging since the beginning of last week!) It was absolute hell. We did the move almost entirely on our own, and our bodies took a toll. Loading our rented moving truck, an absolute monster (it was supposed to be a 16 footer, instead they gave us a 26 footer!) was hard enough, but moving all our crap up three flights of stairs was even more fun. To top it all off, our couch had a slightly raised staple that cut us both up pretty good, making it look like we got into a vicious knife fight.
Me behind the wheel of this rig
We ate like absolute crap this weekend, since we were almost completely out of edible food and whatever was left was half packed away, half buried behind boxes. I ate food that I haven’t eaten in years and years. The worst part was we didn’t take many food breaks, so when we did it, we absolutely crushed food, crushed it! Even with the unholy amount of crappy calories I stuffed down my piehole, I managed to lose a few lb’s over the weekend! This goes to show the absolute amazing effectiveness of NEPA. NEPA (non-exercise physical activity) is a pretty broad term, and I’m not sure that moving heavy crap up and down stairs doesn’t fall under the category of exercise, but bear with me for the sake of argument.
When it comes to fat loss, every little bit counts. Leigh Peele, known for her ability to elicit fat loss from clients who have been stalled for years, is a huge fan of NEPA. In her book, The Fat Loss Troubleshoot, and in pretty much every interview she does Leigh hammers home the point of being more active, of just moving more. It sounds cliche to park your car further away, take the stairs instead of the elevator (right Cass?), but things like that really do add up. Fidgeting burns tons of calories. Just getting up every hour at work to take a 5-10 minute walk, or do pushups or bodyweight squats in the bathroom adds up as well. At the end of the day, you could be talking about several hundred extra calories burned without inhibiting recovery capacity from your actual exercise sessions (and possibly enhancing recovery with increased bloodflow), that really adds up over time.
Long story short, be more active! Take small walks before dinner. Take the stairs at work. Every hour get up from your chair and move around, do some bodyweight movements or stretch. Just move more! It really does help, you don’t have to move everything you own to lose a few pounds, but just moving your body a little more every day will help the process along nicely.
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Posted on June 2nd, 2009 by Brian St. Pierre
3 Comments
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Great post! I have been following Leigh for over a year and I have her books. She is top notch and this advice is really amazing. Thanks for the great post and the great words on Leigh – she is the best!!
October 10th, 2010 at 3:17 am
I would like to start my own blog one day. This was a really nice blog that you made here. Keep up the success
November 8th, 2016 at 8:13 pm
This inoetducrs a pleasingly rational point of view.