Obesity is an ever-increasing problem now that more than one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese (1). More than one-half of Americans are overweight, and the proportion of the population that is overweight, obese, or extremely obese continues to grow (2, 3). Developing nations are quickly catching up with more developed countries with respect to rates of obesity and related health problems (4). This trend cuts across ethnicity, age, gender, and education level (5, 6). Childhood obesity, which portends adult obesity and predicts health problems in adulthood (7), continues to increase (8). Obesity is associated with a slew of deleterious health effects and health-related risk factors, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol, asthma, arthritis, sleep apnoea, and cancer (6, 9-13), and is also linked with decreased life span (14), disability (15), and a lower in quality of life (16).Weight gain results when energy expenditure is inappropriately low for the caloric intake of an individual. The role of dietary intake and its underlying mechanisms have been the principal focus when examining the rise in obesity (17, 18). Obesity incidence has risen, however, even as dietary quality has improved or energy intake has been reduced (17,18). This circumstance necessitates a critical examination of the other side of the energy balance equation, namely energy expenditure. As illustrated in Fig. 1, total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) consists of basal metabolic rate (BMR), the thermic effect of food, and the energy expenditure of activity. Some studies find a decreased BMR in those predisposed to become obese (19)(20)(21). Even in these obesity-prone individuals, however, the decrease in BMR could not fully explain the positive energy balance incurred (19), and the energy expenditure of physical activity was directly implicated in the development of obesity (20). Smaller, tightly controlled studies lend little support to the belief that differences in resting energy expenditure contribute to the tendency of an individual to gain weight (22, 23). Next, the thermic effect of food contributes little to TDEE in terms of both absolute kcal ⁄ day and variability. This suggests that the remaining component of TDEE is likely to change with obesity and the propensity to gain weight, specifically the energy expenditure of activity. At the population level, sedentary behaviour has increased steadily as physical activity has decreased, and this corresponds to increased obesity and decreased health in both children and adults (22,(24)(25)(26)(27)(28). The current trend in the general population is opposed to communities with heavy physical activity demands, which show very low rates of obesity (29). Indeed, increasing physical activity levels may be the missing link needed to reverse the current obesity trends (18,22,24,25,27,30). The rise in obesity is associated with a decline in the amount of physical activity in which people engage. The energy expended through everyday non-exercise activity, called no...