Adjusting for Unintentional Exercise

DupreeTheTRex

Hello,

This past week my wife and I made the decision to finish up all the renovations in our house and so I’ve been “working out” significantly more than usual. To put it into perspective, I basically never leave my computer desk except for meals and groceries.

This week however, I spent endless hours painting and doing touch ups on around the house, often involving clearing out a room/space and cleaning it thoroughly.

We also did major deep cleaning as we were having someone come over to appraise our house and we’ve been lazy considering we have had no visitors in months.

Needless to say, I’ve been working my butt off and I was curious about the impact on my weight. I dropped almost 4 pounds in a week. Comparatively, I’ve lost around 1-1.5 lbs a week on average for several months.

Am I treading in dangerous waters if I go a week/two losing well above the recommended weekly loss? If so, any recommendations for estimating calories burned when doing chores around the house?

I expect to return to my regular routine within a week, no more deep cleaning needed and most renovations at this point need to be done by a contractor. I’ve also been feeling very hungry but I am afraid of eating too much in a day.

As a note, my dairy is not very accurate these days as I’m training myself to not rely on it as often. I basically only use it to track calories of food that I eat outside of my normal routine. My normal routine being home cooked meals, almost everything from scratch. Out of the ordinary would be eating out (like the sushi I had last night).

wunderkindking

set your activity level to compensate. If you're losing 2.5 times the loss you intend (probably active) to give you a ballpark.

sijomial

You could simply bump your activity level up for the duration of the time you are moving far more if you want to moderate this current rate of loss.

But in reality nothing significant is going to happen in a week or couple of weeks, if you feel fine during this temporary phase then you probably don't have to worry about it too much. The impact of bigger deficits for short periods of time is very different to someone consistently under-eating for months on end.

spiriteagle99

I would just allow a little extra when you're hungry. i.e. half a sandwich before bed rather than be starving all the time.

LisaGetsMoving

You can actually log in cleaning time under cardio exercises... house cleaning or cleaning house. There's two different types, mild/moderate effort or vigorous cleaning. I had a day last week where I spent over an hour whacking blackberry bushes with a machete. It made me sweat as much as any cardio workout I've done lately. I logged it in under vigorous cleaning but because I wasn't as sure of the burn rate I did not eat all the exercise calories back that day.

Don't worry. You didn't mess up anything. Humans have evolved to survive a lot worse. Just be aware of calorie expenditure and on calories in, try not to go too low for too long because it will come back to bite you in the form of raw hunger.