What do you log as exercise?

My lifestyle is marked as lightly active. I am a student on a large campus (probably half an hour of vigorous walking from class to class, usually an hour of wandering around), and I keep a tidy apartment (generally on my feet for an hour or so a day with that). Those are my lifestyle calories, and are already counted in my net calories. If I had myself marked as sedentary, I'd definitely include those calories.

My lifestyle is marked as lightly active. I am a student on a large campus (probably half an hour of vigorous walking from class to class, usually an hour of wandering around), and I keep a tidy apartment (generally on my feet for an hour or so a day with that). Those are my lifestyle calories, and are already counted in my net calories. If I had myself marked as sedentary, I'd definitely include those calories.

Maybe I should have put mine as 'lightly active' too. I put sedentary, because my work is sedentary. But I do, at the very least, get a half hour of walking the dog in a day, and usually more like an hour. To me, that isn't an efffort, it's just what I do every day.

But to many others, that's a lot of walking.

If you live or work in a city (as I do) you also get in a lot of incidental walking even with a desk job as you walk from your commuter transportation to your office and back. To ME, that's not a big deal. To someone larger or more sedentary, it would truly be 'exercise'.

So this is why I am confused. MFP doesn't really have a way to advise any member what is 'exercise' vs. 'daily life activity'. Yes, 'daily life activity' is different for me, who is somewhat active, owns a dog and walks to and from commuter transportation and only needs to lose 30 pounds, than it is for someone with many more pounds to lose or who has truly been inactive for many years or lives in a suburb and drives everywhere. But we're all supposedly using the same calculations to get us to our goals.

I find this confusing, hence the question.

Are some realtively light and healthy people overestimating 'exercise'? Assuming that the calories recommended are for staying in bed all day? And conversely, are some larger and inactive people UNDERestimating calories, based on their larger efforts for any sort of activity?

I don't see MFP differentiating here, or advising. So I asked the question. My goal was NOT to upset or wound anyone. It was only to get a clearer understanding.

i have seen people say they are logging sex as cardio...i mean really come on now

For me, better safe than sorry--I am at a "normal" weight (just not an attractive one, IMO) and am a student and an editor, so I sit a lot. My lifestyle is entered as sedentary for that reason. I have kids and a three-story house--laundry in the basement--so I am up and down stairs all the time. I don't include cooking, cleaning, grooming, shopping, marital activities, or walking between classes. I might give myself a five-minute walking credit for walking from my car to class, and I do count walking my kids to school (also 20 min RT). My thought is, I was doing all these things for years and still sitting at a weight I hated, so clearly these activities are not enough exercise to get me to my goal. But logging and eating the walking calories helps get me from "Jesus, I might actually starve to death today" at 1200 to "Perhaps I can actually do this" at 1400 calories.

If you use your bmr as a guide it is the amount of calories you need to survive for your weight if you were in a coma so for some folks any activity is to be counted to ensure you intake the correct amount of calories, essential if you are a diabetic.

This is an interesting question/issue, and I can see two different ways of approaching it. 

First, as an example, my own lifestyle: As far as I can tell, I'm what MFP would consider "lightly active." My career as an elementary school librarian has me sitting sometimes, but I spend a lot of time up on my feet teaching classes, helping students find books, straightening shelves, visiting classrooms, etc. At home, my evenings and weekends are a mixture of cooking, cleaning, shopping, walking, sometimes dancing, and some couch potato time--this varies from day to day.

I don't run or work out at a gym because I am not looking to be muscular or crazy toned--just healthy and fit. I'm also what some people might call old-fashioned in that I very often sacrifice convenience for quality. I'd much rather spend time with my husband walking the 1.8-mile round trip to the store, taking two hours to cook a delicious meal together from scratch, and then cleaning the kitchen afterwards than, say, working out for two hours while listening to my iPod, mixing up a protein shake in the
blender, and throwing my two dirty dishes in the dishwasher. 

I could enter my lifestyle as "lightly active" on MFP and not log my cooking and cleaning, and that would probably work just fine. 

Instead, I have entered my lifestyle as sedentary (which it most definitely is not), and I do log things like cooking, cleaning, long shopping trips, etc. I do it this way for several reasons. 

First off, most days this still keeps me at a lower number of calories than I would consume if my activity level were set for lightly active--and I'd rather slightly underestimate how much I need to eat than eat too much. 

Second, this sometimes keeps me motivated to be more active when I get home, because I know that if I work up a sweat in the kitchen, I'll get to log it. I am held more accountable for being "lightly active" because the activity calories haven't just been given to me in my daily allowance--I have to earn them every time!

Third, for me, it's sustainable. I have known so many people, myself included, who have lost weight by working out 5-7 days a week, basked in the glow of their success, and then gained the weight back a year later because their gym time gradually got phased out. When exercise is just a means to lose excess weight/inches, it's easier to forget about it once a goal is reached. But if I can change my entire lifestyle to be more active, then it'll be sustainable because it's fully integrated into my way of life. I liked how the Men's Health article (linked above) said it:

In a 2007 report, University of Missouri scientists said that people with the highest levels of nonexercise activity (but little to no actual "exercise") burned significantly more calories a week than those who ran 35 miles a week but accumulated only a moderate amount of nonexercise activity. 

Finally, logging my daily activities is kind of fun for me because I can go back through my diaries and see exactly what I did each day. 

I am not saying my way of logging would work for everyone, but It definitely seems to be working for me! I've lost 7lbs in the last month and am very close to my goal of fitting back into my favorite jeans. Now that I'm spending so much time in the kitchen, I'm also eating a lot of delicious food!

I was referring to this...Well said!