No housework in exercises?
Rock_N_TN
Posts: 7 Member
Why isn’t routine housework, like sweeping and mopping, available for recording as an exercise? Using a broom and mop is significant energy use, especially When it take 90+ minutes to sweep and mop. It is constant motion while performing the activity. Vacuuming is available, why not other household chores?
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Replies
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I'd count 90 minutes of cleaning too.
When I do an unusually long amount of cleaning I use "Cleaning, light, moderate effort."
(I also use that for light gardening as it has less calories than regular gardening, which I reserve for when a shovel is involved.)10 -
Because that would factor into your daily activity, for which you set your MFP profile to already consider?13
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It's part of the everyday movements that MFP is assuming that you're doing. If you're going beyond your daily activity, then you can log it (there are database entries available).9
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If housework were exercise, as an OCD cleaner, I’d have been the thinnest woman I knew. I wasn’t. My Dysons (I maintain a fleet) have more mileage on them than my car, and that’s no exaggeration.
Counting housework as exercise is only fooling yourself.
Are you here to rationalize some exercise calories into your diary, or to buckle down and get some weight off?
Are you going to count walking in Target or in the grocery store, too? There’s so much stuff in life that you can pretend is exercise. It’s not. It’s just life.22 -
I'd count all of the above as exercise. Apart from wipe kitchen and bathroom surfaces (not counted as anything) I don't do housework daily and vigorous cleaning is definitely not a regular activity, nor is going shopping. Pre-covid, an hour and a half walking around the supermarket, on my once-a-month big shop, even at a slow pace, definitely counted for something. Thanks @kshama2001 for the 'cleaning, light effort' entry - and that's a good tip re gardening - I'd been halving the number of minutes because there's no way my mowing, raking, picking up leaves and carrying a watering can back & forth was burning as many cals as I'd get for 'gardening'.7
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springlering62 wrote: »If housework were exercise, as an OCD cleaner, I’d have been the thinnest woman I knew. I wasn’t. My Dysons (I maintain a fleet) have more mileage on them than my car, and that’s no exaggeration.
Counting housework as exercise is only fooling yourself.
Are you here to rationalize some exercise calories into your diary, or to buckle down and get some weight off?
Are you going to count walking in Target or in the grocery store, too? There’s so much stuff in life that you can pretend is exercise. It’s not. It’s just life.
THANK YOU
i see so many people trying to rationalize routine activities (cleaning, cooking dinner) as 'activity' its ridiculous. and then those same people lament that they are not losing weight.
gee, ya think?
we have a 20 acre homestead with goats, chickens, ducks, and 7 dogs. I do not count ANY of that stuff as 'exercise'. if i got fat mopping my kitchen floor and cleaning coops and barns, i dont get to count is as exercise....20 -
But does your daily activity setting in MFP reflect that you do all that? I'm set to Sedentary because, 99% of the time, that's what I am. I'm also short and don't get many calories as it is.
I don't count moving around the office or house / going to get cup of tea / going to the toilet / popping down the road to see a neighbour etc, but I do count anything that's over & above my normal day-to-day routine and continues for more than 15 mins. My maintenance cals are only 1340 so I grab all the exercise calories I can!
I'd agree that people complaining that they're not losing weight may be overestimating, but I never had that problem.13 -
springlering62 wrote: »If housework were exercise, as an OCD cleaner, I’d have been the thinnest woman I knew. I wasn’t. My Dysons (I maintain a fleet) have more mileage on them than my car, and that’s no exaggeration.
Counting housework as exercise is only fooling yourself.
Are you here to rationalize some exercise calories into your diary, or to buckle down and get some weight off?
Are you going to count walking in Target or in the grocery store, too? There’s so much stuff in life that you can pretend is exercise. It’s not. It’s just life.
I don't get the double standard activity-shaming. I never see shaming for someone who uses a step counter. Your Fitbit (and body) counts steps whether they are in Target, the grocery store, on a treadmill, or on a track.
I'm NOT an OCD cleaner. I'm embarrassed to admit how frequently I move furniture around to vacuum underneath it. Since it's NOT part of my regular activity, I have no qualms about counting it.
I probably do 30 minutes of everyday cleaning that I don't count. I also don't count the first hour of cooking I do per day. But when I have hours-long cooking projects, I do count those.
If I did do lots of cooking and cleaning day in and day out, I'd bump my activity level up from Sedentary to Lightly Active.19 -
You just have to be careful not to double count. If you have already factored it into your daily activity, counting it again can stall your progress, but if it’s not accounted for there, because it’s not a normal activity then you can count it but watch your progress and adjust id you are not seeing your expected results. I clean regularly so for me it’s already part of my lightly active setting.8
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I’m not activity-shaming. I’m being practical and a bit brutally honest.
These are regular things regular people do every day, and should be considered part of your activity setting, ie sedentary, very active, etc.
If you’re running around and crediting calories to yourself for housecleaning, walking at the mall, mowing the grass, all the things you were doing last week before you signed up for MFP, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.
Choose the right activity setting to begin with and you don’t have to muck about with trying to track little things. Make it easier-and more honest- on yourself.
That’s not saying doing it hasn’t worked for @kshama2001 and others, but you’ve got to give yourself a fighting chance to get after it.
I spent decades not understanding calories and weight, and i cringe when I see others making the same mistakes. I’m the person who thought I could walk a mile or two and it would offset a giant bowl of ice cream and a family sized pack of Oreo Doublestuff. Do you really want to be the person who thinks that because they vacuumed, now they can have a few hundred extra calories to play with?
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springlering62 wrote: »I’m not activity-shaming. I’m being practical and a bit brutally honest.
These are regular things regular people do every day, and should be considered part of your activity setting, ie sedentary, very active, etc.
If you’re running around and crediting calories to yourself for housecleaning, walking at the mall, mowing the grass, all the things you were doing last week before you signed up for MFP, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.
Choose the right activity setting to begin with and you don’t have to muck about with trying to track little things. Make it easier-and more honest- on yourself.
That’s not saying doing it hasn’t worked for @kshama2001 and others, but you’ve got to give yourself a fighting chance to get after it.
I spent decades not understanding calories and weight, and i cringe when I see others making the same mistakes. I’m the person who thought I could walk a mile or two and it would offset a giant bowl of ice cream and a family sized pack of Oreo Doublestuff. Do you really want to be the person who thinks that because they vacuumed, now they can have a few hundred extra calories to play with?
Did you have this thought while logging your exercise and food calories? I get that there would be a disconnect without logging when one does not see "that walk only burned X" and "those ice cream and cookies far exceed X."8 -
I see both sides.
There are some days after working 12+ hours pulling shrubs, hauling rock and dirt, I feel like I've exercised. Even longer than my 2 hour/30 mile bike ride today.
I don't feel like it though when I vacuum, clean bathrooms, kitchen and other routine chores.
I think some of 'it' needs to factor in the starting point of the individual and their condition. My brother who just came off spending 3 weeks on a ventilator and in ICU, can't barely walk. His daily exercise is walking small areas of the house. His is extenuating circumstances.
For people who are generally 'active' daily, personally don't consider housecleaning exercise, assuming it's routine stuff.
I don't count steps either, though my Garmin tracks them. Again, I will probably not come close to 6000 steps today, but I did a 30 mile ride.
It's situational dependent. Just my opinion.5 -
I only count that stuff if its an very rare, abnormal activity, like, cleaning out the basement. I don 't count daily/weekly normal activity like cleaning the bathrooms, sweeping the kitchen floor or vacuuming.4
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Since I’ve set my settings up for sedentary, meaning I sit most of the day then I do log my cleaning if it’s substantial like doing a huge spring clean in my room etc. Otherwise if it’s little things like folding laundry, washing dishes and doing the vacuum for 5-10 minutes then I wouldn’t bother! Depends on the time as well. Vacuuming for 1-2 hours burns a substantial amount compared to 5 minutes! Any movement is important though.8
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Since I’ve set my settings up for sedentary, meaning I sit most of the day then I do log my cleaning if it’s substantial like doing a huge spring clean in my room etc. Otherwise if it’s little things like folding laundry, washing dishes and doing the vacuum for 5-10 minutes then I wouldn’t bother! Depends on the time as well. Vacuuming for 1-2 hours burns a substantial amount compared to 5 minutes! Any movement is important though.
I want to know how big your house is, if it takes 2 hours to vacuum 😅😅😅2 -
kshama2001 wrote: »springlering62 wrote: »...I’m the person who thought I could walk a mile or two and it would offset a giant bowl of ice cream and a family sized pack of Oreo Doublestuff.
Did you have this thought while logging your exercise and food calories? I get that there would be a disconnect without logging when one does not see "that walk only burned X" and "those ice cream and cookies far exceed X."
Oh, honey. This was well before the MFP days. MFP has been brilliant at helping me correlate calories burned versus calories earned. I really had ZERO concept. I don’t think many people do, but I was amongst the truly, truly clueless. A third of a tub of Breyer’s mint chocolate chip ice cream and a whole pack (or two, if it was those little Pepperidge Farm bags) of cookies was a warmup for my evening.
If my friend managed to talk me into walking up to Kroger and back (3 miles) I thought I could double up and break even. Dear heavens. Just the thought now 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
Ignorance was truly bliss.
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I think there are two sides to this, maybe more.
I think some people don't realize that the "sedentary" setting includes the assumption of some routine activity. I think it's maybe in the range of 3500-5000 steps, or equivalent movement. So, on the one hand, there's the possibility that by logging housework, one can be claiming double credit for some activity calories, and that would tend to slow one's weight loss.
I also think there is some tendency to criticize logging housework, either because the critics are more active people for whom it's truly trivial/easy (or a vanishingly tiny percent of daily calories), or because it's not clear that the person logging it does/doesn't have a track record of monitoring loss for a while so may not have a decent handle on what is extra stuff to log and what's not (i.e., critic assumes the person has misunderstood something, without asking about context/details).
I had at least one MFP friend early on who was seriously disabled, and for whom housework was not only an unusual physical victory, but also more actual effort (more effortful movement with mobility problems/mobility aid equipment, probably burned more than average calories, by a little). In a case like that, logging bits of housework - none of which is done routinely - may make sense, once the basic experientially-based routine calorie goal is dialed in.
If someone is just starting out (doesn't have the 4-6 weeks of experiential feedback yet), I think it's a good idea to stay middle of the road in one's practices, but especially important to pick one practice and be consistent with it.
By "middle of the road", I mean not logging routine activity in amounts that one does in a typical week, selecting an activity level at the start that's realistic, etc. One reason I'd advise against logging every little activity is that, frankly, logging gets pretty old pretty fast for a lot of people. So, things that are quite routine (happen every week, basically), it makes more sense to me to include in activity level, and not have to fuss with logging them forever. (If the activity level selection is wrong, that will become evident from the experiential results data, and adjusting activity level is one possible corrective option.)
By "be consistent", I mean, figure out what types of things you're going to log, how you're going to estimate them, whether you're going to adjust the estimates (and by how much) when it comes to eating them back, and that sort of thing. Picking a consistent approach, and sticking with it for that first 4-6 weeks, helps contribute toward clean data, and to more usefully interpreted results, at the end of that 4-6 weeks.
With the information gained from that, that's a better time for a re-think. If no loss happened (or gain did happen), then calorie intake has to drop. It could drop because one stops logging all those details, drops their activity level setting, eats back a smaller fraction of exercise, or simply manually sets calorie goal. In a lot of cases, it won't matter which of those is done. (The amount matters more than how one gets there, usually.)
Same basic deal if loss was too fast to be safe or sustainable: Need more calories, so up the activity level, eat back more exercise calories, log more of routine activity (I wouldn't personally, because more fuss), or just manually increase calorie goal. Doesn't matter.
The basic "test and adjust" process, wth 4-6 week test periods, can happen over and over, experimenting with different approaches to find the most convenient/useful.
Summary: Pick an approach, follow it consistently, evaluate results, adjust the approach. Repeat.
The approach can vary, as long as it's not creating arithmetic randomness.20 -
callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »Since I’ve set my settings up for sedentary, meaning I sit most of the day then I do log my cleaning if it’s substantial like doing a huge spring clean in my room etc. Otherwise if it’s little things like folding laundry, washing dishes and doing the vacuum for 5-10 minutes then I wouldn’t bother! Depends on the time as well. Vacuuming for 1-2 hours burns a substantial amount compared to 5 minutes! Any movement is important though.
I want to know how big your house is, if it takes 2 hours to vacuum 😅😅😅
Note the person you quoted, but in the fall before I turn the heat on, I do a big vacuum and get all the baseboard heaters. While I'm at it, I move furniture and do a far more extensive vacuum than an ordinary 5-10 minute job.4 -
Sorry I posted that. Seems many are here to shame and degrade, not help. I’ll not be back on the community boards.
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If it isn't part of your daily activity then counting it would make sense. I recently went from having my activity level set to lightly active to include walking my dogs every day. Today I changed my setting to sedentary and am recording my walks so I can try and get a better idea of my caloric needs. It really depends on the individual and how much they normally do. If it isn't stopping you from losing weight then go for it. To everyone shaming people for it, not everybody can go to a gym or get in 'real exercise' every day. Tracking these activities which burn more calories than one would normally burn in a day is perfectly acceptable and useful especially for those people who do activities you don't consider real exercise.11
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Sorry I posted that. Seems many are here to shame and degrade, not help. I’ll not be back on the community boards.
Whereas I'm glad you did post it, as it was a valid question. As with anything there are differences of opinion, but all of the above answers give food for thought.
Re the point above about some people thinking that a 3 mile walk gives you free rein to eat a pack of biscuits or an entire tub of ice-cream or whatever, part of the reason why I log my exercise is that it highlights how little I burn. During lockdown, I've done a regular brisk half hour walk to get the newspaper. I get less than 100 cals for that. However, several hours of gardening gave me a lot of cals - a lot more than I thought was reasonable, but it makes sense that that is actually based on heavy digging, not mowing the grass, raking up leaves or cutting branches off shrubbery. The suggestion to use 'light cleaning' would enable me to log something, whilst not being excessive.11 -
I never log it. I look at it as a bonus calorie burn. It is easier that way for me and I count cleaning as part of my regular daily activity even though I have it set to sedentary.5
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My daily activity varies. Somedays I do almost nothing and other days are quite active (for me). What I found works best for me is to set my activity level sedentary and then log everything that feels like it required a bit of an effort. After a few weeks I adjusted my calories up 100 calories per day because I was loosing weight faster than my goal. It works for me.9
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springlering62 wrote: »Are you going to count walking in Target or in the grocery store, too? There’s so much stuff in life that you can pretend is exercise. It’s not. It’s just life.
..And behold the birth of Fitbit.6 -
I think there are two sides to this, maybe more.
I think some people don't realize that the "sedentary" setting includes the assumption of some routine activity. I think it's maybe in the range of 3500-5000 steps, or equivalent movement. So, on the one hand, there's the possibility that by logging housework, one can be claiming double credit for some activity calories, and that would tend to slow one's weight loss.
I also think there is some tendency to criticize logging housework, either because the critics are more active people for whom it's truly trivial/easy (or a vanishingly tiny percent of daily calories), or because it's not clear that the person logging it does/doesn't have a track record of monitoring loss for a while so may not have a decent handle on what is extra stuff to log and what's not (i.e., critic assumes the person has misunderstood something, without asking about context/details).
I had at least one MFP friend early on who was seriously disabled, and for whom housework was not only an unusual physical victory, but also more actual effort (more effortful movement with mobility problems/mobility aid equipment, probably burned more than average calories, by a little). In a case like that, logging bits of housework - none of which is done routinely - may make sense, once the basic experientially-based routine calorie goal is dialed in.
If someone is just starting out (doesn't have the 4-6 weeks of experiential feedback yet), I think it's a good idea to stay middle of the road in one's practices, but especially important to pick one practice and be consistent with it.
By "middle of the road", I mean not logging routine activity in amounts that one does in a typical week, selecting an activity level at the start that's realistic, etc. One reason I'd advise against logging every little activity is that, frankly, logging gets pretty old pretty fast for a lot of people.
[snip]
I agree with everything you say here, including the part I cut for space, but I can't resist noting that in nearly seven years on the MFP forum, I don't remember a single time when someone complained that logging exercise calories was tedious. As far as I recall, it's always the "calories in" that they find to be a grind to log.
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lynn_glenmont wrote: »
I agree with everything you say here, including the part I cut for space, but I can't resist noting that in nearly seven years on the MFP forum, I don't remember a single time when someone complained that logging exercise calories was tedious. As far as I recall, it's always the "calories in" that they find to be a grind to log.
I chose to not complain and get a Fitbit instead
I don’t have a car, so my everyday activity varies a lot even without intentional exercise due to things like weather and errands. If the weather is nice, I bike from home to subway station and back - that’s 15 minutes of biking I randomly get or don’t get depending on weather, and 100+ cals right there. If I have errands to run, I have to walk for them. This week I had to go to the post office twice the same day. That was an extra 40 minutes of non-exercise walking I normally wouldn’t have. And so on. Last week my lowest step count was 3000, highest step count was 13000. Neither day included any intentional exercise, so estimating a ”regular day” for activity level would be pretty hard.5 -
If you had correctly logged the mile or two as exercise, you would then have been easily able to see that it didn’t burn enough calories to cover a giant bowl of ice cream.springlering62 wrote: »I’m not activity-shaming. I’m being practical and a bit brutally honest.
These are regular things regular people do every day, and should be considered part of your activity setting, ie sedentary, very active, etc.
If you’re running around and crediting calories to yourself for housecleaning, walking at the mall, mowing the grass, all the things you were doing last week before you signed up for MFP, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.
Choose the right activity setting to begin with and you don’t have to muck about with trying to track little things. Make it easier-and more honest- on yourself.
That’s not saying doing it hasn’t worked for @kshama2001 and others, but you’ve got to give yourself a fighting chance to get after it.
I spent decades not understanding calories and weight, and i cringe when I see others making the same mistakes. I’m the person who thought I could walk a mile or two and it would offset a giant bowl of ice cream and a family sized pack of Oreo Doublestuff. Do you really want to be the person who thinks that because they vacuumed, now they can have a few hundred extra calories to play with?
There’s a wide spectrum of regular. And not everyone beginning a weight loss journey falls into “regular.” When I set out to get healthy, it was a rare day when I walked to the mailbox, my house was definitely not cleaned regularly by me, and I barely moved. I had lupus flares which caused debilitating vasculitis, and an ovarian tumor, and many days I was bedridden except for walking to the bathroom. Mine is an extreme case, but there are plenty of people for whom a day walking around Target shopping is an exhausting, unusual day. When I started moving more you can bet I counted everything, and I was right to do so, since for the first four months of using MFP I lost at more than twice the projected rate.
Overcounting is a definite risk for many people. If you log a bunch of exercise calories without ever breaking a sweat, and your weight loss is not what MFP says it should be, take stock and reconsider. But not all exercise happens in a gym.9 -
lynn_glenmont wrote: »I think there are two sides to this, maybe more.
I think some people don't realize that the "sedentary" setting includes the assumption of some routine activity. I think it's maybe in the range of 3500-5000 steps, or equivalent movement. So, on the one hand, there's the possibility that by logging housework, one can be claiming double credit for some activity calories, and that would tend to slow one's weight loss.
I also think there is some tendency to criticize logging housework, either because the critics are more active people for whom it's truly trivial/easy (or a vanishingly tiny percent of daily calories), or because it's not clear that the person logging it does/doesn't have a track record of monitoring loss for a while so may not have a decent handle on what is extra stuff to log and what's not (i.e., critic assumes the person has misunderstood something, without asking about context/details).
I had at least one MFP friend early on who was seriously disabled, and for whom housework was not only an unusual physical victory, but also more actual effort (more effortful movement with mobility problems/mobility aid equipment, probably burned more than average calories, by a little). In a case like that, logging bits of housework - none of which is done routinely - may make sense, once the basic experientially-based routine calorie goal is dialed in.
If someone is just starting out (doesn't have the 4-6 weeks of experiential feedback yet), I think it's a good idea to stay middle of the road in one's practices, but especially important to pick one practice and be consistent with it.
By "middle of the road", I mean not logging routine activity in amounts that one does in a typical week, selecting an activity level at the start that's realistic, etc. One reason I'd advise against logging every little activity is that, frankly, logging gets pretty old pretty fast for a lot of people.
[snip]
I agree with everything you say here, including the part I cut for space, but I can't resist noting that in nearly seven years on the MFP forum, I don't remember a single time when someone complained that logging exercise calories was tedious. As far as I recall, it's always the "calories in" that they find to be a grind to log.
Oh, absolutely. I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention it explicitly either. I'm more thinking it could become just another brick in the wall of weariness about tracking, for some people, when it seems simpler to me to include consistently-done things in activity level. (Talking more or less weekly consistency, not daily, since pretty much all the so-called calorie calculators, MFP or various TDEE ones, look at activity on a per-week basis).
While understanding this next is not the way MFP is designed to work, I'd extend that idea "include everything consistent in activity level" to saying that it's rational for someone with a clockwork exercise schedule to use a TDEE calculator rather than the MFP approach, even if tracking with MFP. (Someone might choose a TDEE method for other preference reasons, too, of course.)
I do think the TDEE-based approach can have pitfalls for a type of person we see here (and for me IRL) pretty frequently: People who start an aggressive exercise program at the same time as an aggressive change in eating patterns, to achieve weight loss, and do the TDEE calc assuming that aggressive level of exercise. I wonder what fraction of "calorie counting doesn't work" may arise from people who let their "7 days vigorous exercise" wither away as the honeymoon fades, but never reset their calorie goal. Easy way to wipe out a deficit. Add in the ever-popular "cheat day", and I'm pretty sure the deficit is kaput.
As a complete aside (not aimed at you, Lynn - I know you get this stuff): I suspect it can be unhelpful for an individual to mix NEAT and TDEE approaches in some cases. Depending on the calculator(s) used, the activity multipliers can differ. For example, I don't think TDEE calculators' "sedentary" will necessarily be equal to MFP's (or other NEAT calculators') "sedentary" in terms of BMR/RMR multiplier.5 -
How many calories does running around the house and yard looking for the cat for over an hour burn? Asking for a friend...
No idea where his secret hiding spot was, but it was not here:
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My house is over 1200 square feet and is all hard floors. Because I have 5 cats, 4 of which are long-haired, I vacuum my entire house, but only about once a week. I've timed myself and it takes 20 minutes. If I then come back behind myself and swiffer mop or steam mop, it takes right at another 20 minutes. I'm set to sedentary and definitely log back a portion of those calories pushing that big vacuum and that mop. And especially so if I traditionally mop with a bucket of water, since I essentially double mop that way - first pass with wet mop, second pass with one that has been wrung out to pick up excess water.
I don't typically count cleaning my bathroom since its a quick job to clean. I might count dusting if I took time to dust the entire house because it will usually take me an hour to do it as I rarely dust and when I do, I make sure to be thorough.
I'm with the ones who say count it if its' not been accounted for in your normal routine in your settings, then watch your weight loss rate and adjust as necessary to get where you want to be. This has been working fine for me!6
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