Walking (shoppinng)

Hey, you know what? Bite me.

That was not my intention at all..It didn't even dawn on me as a matter of fact.

Guess you're the guilty one. Quit being so condescending and judgmental. Mind your own Fng business and if you don't have anything nice or helpful to say, don't say anything at all.

Lord...walked in on a cat fight

Sorry - I got attacked and judged on my first day here .. All I did was ask a question. As it turns out though, lots of people came to my defense. It was only a rotten few.

Oh please. You were not attacked. Relax. Your question received the answers that it deserved (at least, the non-coddling ones...) Furthermore, I looked at your profile - this is NOT your first day here...

This comes up regularly and there are plenty of... opinions about it. Since I have one, I'll share it.

It does depend on what you think your average daily calorie usage is, without "exercise" in the strict sense of something you do explicitly to raise your fitness level. However, the fact of the matter is, weight loss--*not necessarily "fitness"*--is about calories consumed and calories burned, PERIOD. If an activity burns calories it doesn't have to qualify as "exercise" to qualify as a calorie expenditure. You don't have to hit your target heart rate to burn calories.

You'll see a lot of hostility towards logging housecleaning, cooking, and yes, things like shopping on your exercise diary. Some people here characterize it as laziness, self-delusion etc. Bullhockey. The idea that if it's something you used to do before you joined MFP, it doesn't count, is nonsense. The question is whether it's something you do *for about that long* on a typical day.

I am set at Lightly Active. I do small hand weights and walk 65-70 miles a month at a brisk pace (just the exercise walking, not including other walking--I don't have a fitbit or other all-day tracker). I'm a programmer, so a lot of my day is sitting in front of a computer, but do have to run around my (large) building to meet with others and visit the computer room and so on. I don't log ordinary tidying up around the house for a half hour or so a few times a week, but if I spend anywhere from two hours and up attacking the house and running up and down two flights of stairs to do it, I'll log usually half the total time as Cleaning, light effort or split it with Cleaning, heavy effort depending on what I did. If I hit the stores after work for a few bags of groceries and cat provisions, as I do a couple of times a week, I don't count that, but if I am out of the house on errands for several hours, make multiple stops while I'm out, and am running around large stores and hauling home stuff from Costco, you better believe I count half that time (minus lunch break); carrying light loads, moderate paced walking and yes, even driving all burn calories. I don't count cooking most of the time as I usually only spend about 5 hours a week cooking, but if I'm in there busting butt for hours preparing a big meal or project I count that at half-rate. Same for gardening and washing/waxing/detailing my car. Anything I'm doing for an unusual amount of time or intensity, I count, usually because it is making me hungry, tired, and oftentimes sweaty. The fact is, once these activities reach atypical levels, they also start taking a bite out of how much time I have left to spend "really" exercising. It does not accurately reflect my day if I refuse to count the four hours I spent running a gamut of errands and then only count the paltry 35-minute, 3mph walk I phoned in at the end of the day because I was already tired.

This is about numbers, not ideology. Calories in and calories out. It's true that you can kid yourself about how much you're burning, but you can do that about fifty ways including with questionable measures of "actual exercise".