QUARANTURNT Day 23 - What’s The Magic Word? Pullllleease

Hey Quaranturnt Crew,

So yesterday I left you hanging a bit. What does it mean to Rev Your Engine?

Your body has a natural amount of energy it needs to operate. Essentially the operating budget of your living existence. Every day it needs energy (taken from calories in your food or your fat stores) to beat your heart, heat your body, maintain your muscles, repair any damage you sustained, etc. Additionally, you do non-workout things like walk places, take stairs, scroll your thumb from the bottom part of the phone to the middle part of the phone. These involuntary activities like heart beating plus the voluntary non-workout activities are your NEAT: Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Think of it as the caloric needed to just keep you living a normal (or even a quarantined) life. 

On top of this NEAT energy expenditure, you have your workouts. You’ve all been on a treadmill before, you’ve seen it estimate that you’ve burned almost 200 calories in the past bazillion hours of running. Would you like to guess how many calories you need for NEAT vs. your workouts? The answer is….well the answer is the same as anything with fitness: “It depends”. But I will ignore the nuances and just tell you that your NEAT is significantly higher than your workout expenditures.

If you had to workout to burn all your calories, you wouldn’t be able to eat more than a cheetoh per day without storing fat. 

So what does revving your engine mean? It does not mean working out 5x harder, that’s like pushing your car on foot to speed it up. Revving your engine is increasing your NEAT. 

To increase NEAT you could :

• Take ice baths and skip the sweaters
• Increase the amount of energy needed to maintain/repair your body (aka build muscle)
• Increase your heart rate with amphetamines

Some of you may choose option 3, but in that case I’m not the right person to help you. And while do I love option 1, option 2 is how I can help you best. 

So before you decide to cut your fat, you really should increase your metabolic requirements, build some muscle, and only then cut back the fat. 

One day, we’ll cover the challenges with keeping that engine hot while you cut back your caloric intake. It involves a discussion about “cheat meals”, but we’ll get there another time.

Here is the IG post, I heard y’all like Burpees? That’ll get you breathing hard, but afterwards you should really do the breathing practice. Take in the good air around us!

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