The “Low-Grade” Fitness Revelation That Transformed My Life at 37: From Desk-Bound To Dream Body
Here’s how something almost insignificant can lead you to 40 pounds of weight loss and achieve life-changing results
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I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, where phrases like “no pain, no gain” and “feel the burn” were popular in exercise culture.
Heck, even the most outstanding athlete of all time, Mohammed Ali, known for his famous line, said — “I hated every minute of training, but I said don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”
Ali trained at a world-class level, but you can see how “pain” has been closely associated with health and wellness and influences our preconceived ideas about fitness.
What chance did a desk-bound office worker with a dadbod like me have of achieving my dream body after spending nine hours a day behind a computer screen?
Almost none.
Without sounding too weird or kooky with philosophy language, famous fitness experts like Joe Delaney hit the nail on the head when speaking about achieving your best body.
“It’s the cumulative result of small, gradual, repetitive, and distinctly undramatic actions. It’s the expression of routine, the manifestation of unspectacular but unrelenting habits”.
“Undramatic” is the key term because he’s not discussing tackling Mount Everest here. They’re small things that might seem trivial, but they have life-changing effects over a long enough time horizon.
They also don’t have to be painful, despite what culture brainwashed us to believe.
Buckle up, and let’s dive in.
Authors Remark: I’m not a certified health and fitness expert — But as you can see, fitness, self-research, and using myself as a case study is my passion and the information contained in this article is all based on my personal experience, self-taught knowledge and deep research.
You’re not thinking small enough.
I lost 33+ pounds and, more importantly, kept the weight off when I began to think a lot smaller regarding fitness.
Running was at the top of the totem pole of fitness boredom when trying to tackle my potbelly. I love it now, but the thought of running for 30 minutes terrified me back then.
I’d make excuses like, “It puts too much pressure on my knees” or “I just get bored too quickly.”
What if I told you to worry a little less about all that high-intensity, back-breaking stuff because it’s the even more granular things that significantly impact your weight loss?
Dr. James Levine coined the term NEAT or “Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.”
Simply put, it’s all the energy you use outside the gym and exercising, and you don’t even consider it.
It includes energy you use up laying down, standing, walking, stair climbing, fidgeting, cleaning, singing, and typing like I am now.
Research shows when you include all non-strenuous activity, it makes up about 60% to 80% of all the calories we burn daily.
High levels of NEAT are directly associated with lower levels of obesity. You can see actual “exercise” only makes up around 15% of all the calories we burn daily.
Dr Levine’s research concluded that long-term weight control is more manageable by focusing on NEAT rather than exercise activity first.
He’s right because I’m living proof.
It seems small, but it’s a biggie because you can burn 350 calories a day from “Low-grade activities”, which for the average person is 40 extra pounds a year, by making minor and seemingly insignificant changes.
Another study examined Levine’s research:
“We recruited 10 lean and 10 mildly obese sedentary volunteers and measured their postures, activities of daily living, and fidgeting for 10 days. Obese individuals were seated, on average, two hours a day longer than lean people.
Their conclusion:
“If obese individuals adopted the NEAT-enhanced behaviours of their lean counterparts, they could expend an additional 350 kcal/day from these numerous small low-grade activities and movements. Since this is equivalent to approximately 18 kg (40 pounds) in a year, this may be an essential factor in long-term weight control”.
The checklist of strategies for me to move more was my starting point when I got advice from a fitness professional.
At first, I thought they were pointless, but they’re a massive cog in the wheel because I do them every day and most likely for the rest of my life without even trying.
Warning: They’re not groundbreaking tactics, but they’re effective.
As a writer, I leave my phone upstairs in my room (more steps)
I go outside and go for a walk every morning.
I make a concerted effort to take the stairs.
Every 30 minutes, I stand up at my desk.
Go for a walk on my lunch break.
I have a stress ball at my desk.
On average, I hit 8,000 steps daily, which is between 314 and 391 calories, without making a significant change.
Focus on burning “fun calories.”
My typical week includes going to the gym three times for weightlifting and three 5km runs (more details here).
I learned to love running because lockdowns brought about anxiety. I felt like it was the best way to clear my head, and I’ve maintained it ever since.
Once I started to lean into activities that I enjoyed and were second nature, like playing 5-a-side football (soccer) with the lads or committing to playing cricket every weekend in the UK summer, my activity and step count increased.
Personally, anything involving a ball doesn’t feel like a strenuous activity. And because I’m ludicrously competitive, there’s no off button. I’ll race to tackle someone or chase after a ball during a cricket game without thinking of it as exercise.
During a game of cricket here in the UK, if it’s not interrupted by weather and you play a significant part in the game, you can cover 23 km, which is about 900 calories burned.
I weighed myself every Sunday morning the day after a cricket match during the summer — here’s what it looks like on a chart.
Circled in red is each Saturday I played cricket. You can see it’s like a top signal on a stock chart because the very next day, my weight came crashing down after a day's play. I was usually down about 3.5 pounds.
I understand that factors like dehydration and nutrition can play a role in weight regulation, but the point is that this doesn’t even feel like exercise to me. It’s pure enjoyment.
I incorporate these social activities to stay physically active, but the research highlights something more critical, which is you have a 29% lower risk of death if you play a recreational sport.
A longitudinal study of 7,925 healthy men and 7,977 healthy women aged 25 to 64 who reported exercising at least six times a month found that 1,253 people in the study who died prematurely all had lower levels of physical activity.
Researchers concluded being physically active is linked to a lower risk of dying.
Stop sabotaging yourself.
You’re doing it by disregarding flexibility.
Before I took my weight loss journey seriously, I treated my exercise habit like this immovable boulder in the sea.
I was either all-in training at a million miles an hour or no exercise and eating like a drunken sailor. There was no middle ground.
For some reason, we don’t use damage limitation or flexibility after a lousy week of eating and not exercising, so we self-sabotage by turning the damage into destruction.
Controlling every variable in your life, like weekends away, beers with friends, birthdays, weddings and your neighbour’s cocktail party, is impossible.
When these things cropped up, I used to chuck the towel in. Or, as my online fitness trainer Chris calls it, “push the f**k it button.”
He used to say to me:
“It’s okay for these things to crop up. It happens all the time, but for you to be brutally consistent, it’s counter-intuitive- you’ve almost gotta be comfortable with inconsistency, but consistently keep getting back on the horse”.
It was an aha moment.
He’s right — just because one thing has cropped up in your social life doesn’t mean you have to eat like a child and smash your diet to smithereens (like I did every time).
Researchers from Harvard Business School studied 2,508 Google employees to help them achieve their fitness goals.
They wanted to find the tradeoff between people with a flexible gym routine and people who fix their training to a particular day and time.
They even incentivised them to see if money made a difference, giving one group $7 and another $3 each time they attended the gym for 30 minutes.
The flexible gym routine group receiving $3 attended the gym 8% more often over a more extended period than the fixed group participants receiving $7, who had a steep drop-off.
They were paid more and went to the gym less, lol.
8% doesn’t seem like a lot, but let’s compound that over 52 weeks, which, if you go to the gym four times a week, is 208 times a year, it works out to 17 gym sessions or an entire month off from going to the gym a year.
“In short, when people are induced to exercise at an equal frequency but in a more routinised way, we find evidence that they form weaker exercise habits, contrary to past theorising”.
The moral of the story — Be flexible.
The solid line is the flexible group paid $3 — The dashed line is the fixed group paid $7
Final Thoughts.
These low-grade activities were the foundation of my consistency and led to high-intensity workouts, like weight training and running.
The foundations of what I do are to focus on the more minor things I do every day because those are repeatable for life.
With calories, think small — think about the everyday things you do and what adjustments you can make to move more.
Stop disregarding flexibility — it’s a strength, not a weakness, to change course slightly when something crops up — just get good at jumping back in the saddle.
Put yourself in a position to burn fun calories around the things you love, or at least like, because you’ll likely do more of it for longer.
It’s not a conclusive list of changes to implement, but it was my ground zero when setting the wheels in motion for success.
I hope it gets you started on your journey.
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I love the notion of flexibility. It helps especially when healing injuries and flare ups happen (ie in my life). And thanks for the reminder to hit 8k steps as frequently as possible 😀