Day-to-day life is exercise?

Machka9

TheBeachgod wrote: »

I'm genuinely curious about a train of thought I see with some people on the forums that seems obviously wrong to me. I wonder what the logic is behind it and if the practitioners have had success achieving and maintaining their goals this way.

It is considering typical daily activities as exercise and logging it as such. That seems counter-productive to me ...

I've wondered this as well.

I don't track steps. I figure if I happen to get a few extra steps walking to the photocopier (which is now at the other end of the building), great. But I'm not going to count those steps.

I don't track house and yard work. With one exception ... one day I tracked it because I spent several hours one evening unpacking boxes after a move -- moving furniture, moving boxes, walking back and forth and back and forth putting stuff away. I don't usually do that so I logged it as about 1 hour of exercise, despite the fact that I spent about 4 hours doing it.

I don't track walking as a part of grocery shopping ... I'm moving too slowly.

I figure if I happen to burn one or two extra calories by walking down to the photocopier or spending an extra 10 minutes cleaning my kitchen, they're bonus calories.


However, I do track walking as part of my commute and walking at lunch because I motor along briskly, often carrying stuff.

Larissa_NY

Mouse_Potato wrote: »

Larissa_NY wrote: »

Mouse_Potato wrote: »

Larissa_NY wrote: »

I was thinking about this thread yesterday, because I went on an epic cleaning binge, the likes of which I only go on a couple of times a year.

I cleaned for five hours, no time-outs or rests. I moved furniture. I climbed in and out of the bathtub to clean. I got up and down off the floor to scour out corners. I shampooed and vacuumed my carpets. I did multiple loads of laundry. I moved my kettlebell collection (~200 pounds of iron) into another room and then back. I rolled up my yoga pants, put a house/electronica channel on Pandora, and cleaned like a 14-year-old tweenie in a Dickens novel with five younger siblings and a charming but useless alcoholic father.

*kitten* got DONE, is what I'm saying. Then, after I'd finished cleaning and made dinner, I went for a walk. The walk was a little over three miles and I covered it in abut 45 minutes.

For the cleaning (heavy) and the walking (brisk pace), MFP was prepared to reward me with a whopping 1173 points, about 200 less than my entire daily allotment on a non-gym day - 1007 for the cleaning and 166 for the walk. Awesome, right? I can eat two days' worth of food!

Not so fast, though. My Charge HR, which is strapped to my wrist and so makes its own decisions instead of relying on what I tell it, gave me a calorie burn yesterday of 2,272. That's just about 400 calories more than I burn even on a day when I'm sitting around doing nothing - for cleaning nonstop for five hours and then going on a three-mile walk. I actually only burned about a third of the calories MFP thought I did.

Eating back even half of what MFP gave me would have knocked me right out of maintenance and into weight gain territory. Not that I would have eaten it anyway, because Friday night I had a big dinner with tons of protein and fibrous vegetables and it was dinnertime on Saturday before I was hungry again, but it was a pretty interesting lesson in why awarding yourself calories for house cleaning is a bad idea if you're trying to lose.

My Fitbit seems to be more of an extremist than yours. It is, in fact, one of the reasons I do count cleaning and heavy yard work (although I don't trust MFPs numbers for such). If I sit and read a book for an hour, it will give me about 60 calories burned. If I walk my dog for an hour, I get almost 300. A normal day at the office will have me burning ~1900, but I spent a day moving from an apartment to a house and got over 2700!

Of course, the Fitbit can only track step-based activity with any accuracy. It gives me higher calorie burn for grocery shopping than a full aerial silks class!

You understand that the Fitbit is counting ALL your calories, including the basal metabolic rate, and not just the calories burned from exercise, right? Depending on your weight and heart rate, 60 calories might be about the right amount for you to burn sitting and doing nothing. Your body burns calories even at rest.

Yes, I do. I'm not sure why you are asking. There is a roughly 240 calorie per hour difference between me "doing nothing" and doing something as simple as walking my dog. Is that a little more clear? I don't count book reading as exercise. I just know this because the Fitbit is counting all of my activity.

Eta: you said 5 hours of heavy cleaning and a 45 minute very brisk walk only netted an extra 400 calories for you versus "sitting around doing nothing." I was saying that my Fitbit would have given me the extra 400 for, say, an hour and a half or so of walking. (240 calories an hour over my BMR). Okay, I think that makes more sense.

Okay, I see what you were saying now. My bad, I was thinking that you were saying the Fitbit shouldn't have given you any calories at all for sitting and reading.