How to fidget your way to weight loss

Looking for a way to lose weight in the aftermath of Christmas excess? Fidgeting may be the answer.

Fidgeting could help lose centimetres off your waist

Looking for a way to lose weight in the aftermath of Christmas excess? Fidgeting may be the answer.

So I learned on the Stanford professor Andrew Huberman’s popular health and medicine podcast Huberman Lab. Many people, filled with turkey, mince pies and regrets, will presumably be tuning into the recent episode “The Science of Eating for Health, Fat Loss and Lean Muscle”.

The reason some people are effortlessly slender, Huberman’s guest Dr Layne Norton explains, is down to something called Neat, which stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This encompasses the various calorie-burning activities we do without thinking, which include things like fidgeting with your hands and feet and even typing (if typing burns calories I should have the physique of a supermodel).

“Obese resistant” people who seem to have no problem staying thin are often just more fidgety. The effect is not small either. Fidgeting can result in “hundreds to maybe almost a thousand calories burnt per day”.

And when food consumption increases, many people with high Neat unconsciously increase their fidgeting to burn the extra calories. If you have a thin relative nervously buzzing about at Christmas, tapping their feet and wringing their hands, this may be why.

Such cool facts are not always easy to extract from Huberman’s podcast. The episode I got that one from is nearly four hours long – which listeners will consider the kind of grotesque self-indulgence of which only Americans are capable.

There’s also a lot of chummy mutual backslapping. Introducing Norton, Huberman does not say “nice to meet you” or even “I think we have a lot in common” but: “I feel great kinship with you.”

As I said, it’s very American. This will not suit every taste. Neither will its superficially bro-y, Joe Roganesque delivery, full of macho pseudoscientific-sounding boasts about self-optimisation (“I’ve been accused many times of not blinking very often,” Huberman says confidently, but that’s just “part of the way I access memory”). The exorbitant episode lengths are down partly to the fact that (Huberman being a Stanford professor and all) the podcast is stuffed with detail about different parts of the brain and lengthy descriptions of scientific studies. Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe you’ll think it the sort of filler a good BBC producer would have left all over the cutting-room floor.

I loved The Dahl Factory, about Roald Dahl, from the egghead mag the London Review of Books.

The host Tom Jones says that his relationship with Dahl is “queasily oscillating” (he has changed his mind about him). Professor Colin Burrow says that Dahl committed “great foundational imaginative acts” (he wrote good stories).

The analysis of Dahl’s life and work is fascinating. If, like me, you haven’t read Dahl since you were a child, you’ve probably never stopped to think of even basic questions such as which of Dahl’s children’s books work and which don’t.

Burrow says The BFG is a classic but disparages other books such as George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Twits – written during a time when Dahl had yoked himself to impossible deadlines to make as much money as possible.

There are lots of smart questions. Why is the obnoxious, telly-obsessed Mike Teavee allowed to make perceptive comments about the mistreatment of Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Why in the original version of Matilda was Miss Honey a gambling addict (a detail that the publishers insisted on changing)?

It’s a brilliant discussion, never taking things too far and over-interpreting, but using careful thinking to say something genuinely interesting about Dahl, who is already so incredibly familiar to us.