Newbie here

kate25

I'm a mom of 3 little ones trying to shed the last 20lbs of baby weight. I just finished my first day. And I feel great. I love how easy it is to keep a food journal on here.

I have one question though. What qualifies as exercise?

kate25

I'm a mom of 3 little ones trying to shed the last 20lbs of baby weight. I just finished my first day. And I feel great. I love how easy it is to keep a food journal on here.

I have one question though. What qualifies as exercise?

Fab140

Welcome!! and congrats on choosing such a great website!!:flowerforyou:

To answer your question, first I must ask one: What did you rate your daily activity level as? IF you said active, I would limit your calculating of excercise to just actual "excercise" (cardio, weight lifting, circuit training, videos, fast walking, etc.)

I personally labeled mine as sedentary, as I sit at a desk ALL DAY LONG :grumble:. I do wlak the office dog and shop for supplies and groceries (for home and office) through out the day, but I don't log those, simply because they do not get my heart rate up to anything worht talking about (except when the incompetent bagger puts the fresh veggies with the canned goods :noway: :laugh: )

What I may suggest, if you're serious about those 20 pounds coming off as easily as possible, invest in a Heart Rate Monitor (you'll see it abbreviated here as HRM) and see how many cals you burn per day without "excercise" and compare that to your daily allotment by MFP. If it's higher than MFP has set for you, you may need to change your daily intakes to prevent going into starvation mode and plateuing.

I'm buying one this weekend, as a matter of fact, because unfortunetly it is the only way to calculate how many calories you are truely burning, This website, others and even the machines only guess-timate, the HRM will give you percise readings.

:flowerforyou: Hope that helps

M

punka274

Welcome!:flowerforyou: Good Luck to you!

amymeenieminymo

As someone else said, it depends on how active your everyday lifestyle is. If you're a mailcarrier, your activity level would be somewhere around high, whereas I sit at a desk so my occasional trip to the printer or walking to another department only qualifies me as sedentary.

Then you have to differentiate between things that are everyday activities (that help determine your daily activity level) and the things you do purely for exercise. For example, if I walk on my lunch hour or take a bike ride when I get home, I log those. If I went to a festival and had to walk a mile each way from the car to the festival I would probably log the mile walk but not whatever walking I did at the festival since it probably evens out with everyday stuff.

If I make a few trips up and down the stairs to do laundry I wouldn't log that since it's kind of an everyday type task, but when we were having company over I cleaned for two and a half hours straight and had worked up a pretty good sweat doing so which is sadly something I do not do on a daily basis. I logged it but MFP said I burned something like 700 some calories even with logging it as "light cleaning" so to be on the safe side I cut that in half and only logged it as 300 some because despite my sweat, I really don't think I cleaned off that many.

So you kind of learn as you go, if there is something in question that you don't know if you should log, just post about it and you should get enough opinions to help you out. Lots of people on here have HRM's but I myself do not have the money for one at the moment. And despite how inaccurate MFP and work out machines may be, I've lost on average a pound a week like I wanted to so it's guesstimation must not be doing too bad. Good luck!

prairiemom

Just a quick hello & Welcome

kate25

Thank you for the warm welcome and the advice