What do you log as exercise?

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!