Can I count housework as a workout?
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ceoverturf wrote: »No...housework is not exercise.
If you're serious about trying to lose weight, you'll recognize that as such.
Otherwise, you're only trying to fool yourself into being able to eat more calories just because you 'exercised'.
^this.
I not only clean my house daily , I also do it as a part time job. Hefting trash bags, vacuuming, going up and down stairs.
I kept one straight amount and if I was losing too aggressively, I added about 100 calories the next week and kept that, adjusting until my rate of loss was reasonable. Adding some arbitrary number for cleaning will most likely lead to frustration when you've stalled your losses from over accounting for it.
Make it as easy as possible and don't add too many things that will make it a quagmire to adjust intake with.0 -
i dont because i see it as my life style just like a daily job.
However an exercise is when your heart rate is up for a certain amount of time due to moving.....So this means that i who garden a bit everyday dont count that but hauling stones from one side of the garden to the other side, for some time.....i count for sure. lol and lose 3.5 pound overnight when i did.
So normal house work like vacuuming mopping floors cleaning windows nope My heart rate doesn't go up enough.
But dragging boxes up and down, unpacking ( we moved not long ago) and re-organizing rooms and make me sweat and get a bit out of breath for longer than 15 minutes yes i count.
I can see all of this on my heart rate monitor.
Of course it is different for every person. When i rake my garden ( fast) my heart rate doesn't go up anymore...was different when i was 90 pounds heavier and not doing anything at all.
So different for each person
I chose it to see it as my life style and when i really do heavy heavy work my heart rate goes up and a start sweating i will count it.
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460mustang wrote: »Sure, you have to do it like this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moGFeRtLqHk
I think i got more amusement out of this than I should have lol
roflllll
aldo i think it is *kitten* funny...i also never want to get so obsessed like that
whahahahahaha
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Depends on activity level set and how hard you're working, and whether or not you are going to eat them back... I'm set at sedentary, so if I do 2 hours of hard core housework and then have no time for a "real" workout, I'll count it, manually set calories burned waaaay lower than MFP, and don't eat them back... But then, I guess, what's the point??? I guess it makes me feel less bad about missing a workout?
Do whatever works for you, but I'd caution against eating them back!0 -
ceoverturf wrote: »loseitall150 wrote: »vigorus housework such as: sweeping, mopping, dancing, washing dishes while having my 27lb 12 month old daughter on my back.
I'll be sweating the whole time because I live in a old home and central air doesn't work good in the kitchen.
Wait a minute...wut???
Do you not dance around with mops attached to your feet?
Anyway, I only counted it when I helped someone clean her house after a very long illness/before guests came because it was a solid week of scrubbing filth and missed workouts. Even then I only input half the time.
Sweat =/= large increase in calorie expenditure. There will be a slight increase because your body is regulating its temperature, but you're not logging the slight increase you get when you spend two hours in a chilly movie theater, are you?
Count the activity in your MFP settings (unless you're only doing this 1-2 days a week). I do not recommend considering housework calories as part of your exercise calories.0 -
Out of the ordinary housework, such as cleaning out the garage (non stop lifting and moving boxes/heavy items) I will log half the amount of time I spent. I only eat back exercise calories if I'm STARVING though.0
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daaaaaanielle wrote: »I watched a BBC documentary about calories where they got three families to do different activities for the morning. One family had a personal training session, another just sat about all morning and the others did housework. They found that (after controlling for BMR and such) the people doing housework burned a substantial amount of calories in comparison to the sedentary people. The only problem is that it's really hard to estimate - the BBC used heart rate monitors. If you're going to track it, maybe look it up on Google and see what sort of figures you can find, then when you log it, seriously underestimate it because if you eat your exercise calories back, there's too large a margin of error to be able to eat all of them and still maintain the same overall deficit.
For me personally, I find it to be too much hassle so I just wear my Fitbit and let it count my steps and that's all I sync to MFP. The estimated burn will be almost definitely wrong but if I am working hard, it'll be very low in comparison to actual calories burnt and it just means my deficit might be larger that day.
Since a HRM wouldn't be even remotely accurate to measure calories for being sedentary and especially for house cleaning, that kinda renders that test on BBC pointless. They are known to overestimate "intervally" type workouts which I feel that house cleaning would fall into.
I think it is still pretty obvious though that you're going to burn more calories moving around, cleaning, lifting stuff around, etc than siting on the couch all day. Depending on what kind of cleaning you're doing, there could be a reasonable burn involved (I don't mean reasonable as in comparable to deliberate exercise, but reasonable in the sense that it would be more than just walking around the house). I don't personally see much value in recording it, as I said, but that's why I said OP should severely underestimate the calories should they choose to track it at all because of the difficulty in getting a remotely accurate read of the burn involved even with HRMs (I didn't say the HRMs are accurate to the calorie, just that they indicated that their heart rate was increased significantly enough to show they were burning more calories than the sedentary people - for whom they pretty much just used the BMR I think).
Unless you're saying that you don't burn more calories moving around than you do sitting down, it seems you're just picking on semantics here really.0 -
daaaaaanielle wrote: »daaaaaanielle wrote: »I watched a BBC documentary about calories where they got three families to do different activities for the morning. One family had a personal training session, another just sat about all morning and the others did housework. They found that (after controlling for BMR and such) the people doing housework burned a substantial amount of calories in comparison to the sedentary people. The only problem is that it's really hard to estimate - the BBC used heart rate monitors. If you're going to track it, maybe look it up on Google and see what sort of figures you can find, then when you log it, seriously underestimate it because if you eat your exercise calories back, there's too large a margin of error to be able to eat all of them and still maintain the same overall deficit.
For me personally, I find it to be too much hassle so I just wear my Fitbit and let it count my steps and that's all I sync to MFP. The estimated burn will be almost definitely wrong but if I am working hard, it'll be very low in comparison to actual calories burnt and it just means my deficit might be larger that day.
Since a HRM wouldn't be even remotely accurate to measure calories for being sedentary and especially for house cleaning, that kinda renders that test on BBC pointless. They are known to overestimate "intervally" type workouts which I feel that house cleaning would fall into.
I think it is still pretty obvious though that you're going to burn more calories moving around, cleaning, lifting stuff around, etc than siting on the couch all day. Depending on what kind of cleaning you're doing, there could be a reasonable burn involved (I don't mean reasonable as in comparable to deliberate exercise, but reasonable in the sense that it would be more than just walking around the house). I don't personally see much value in recording it, as I said, but that's why I said OP should severely underestimate the calories should they choose to track it at all because of the difficulty in getting a remotely accurate read of the burn involved even with HRMs (I didn't say the HRMs are accurate to the calorie, just that they indicated that their heart rate was increased significantly enough to show they were burning more calories than the sedentary people - for whom they pretty much just used the BMR I think).
Unless you're saying that you don't burn more calories moving around than you do sitting down, it seems you're just picking on semantics here really.
The problem with HRMs and intervals (and since scrubbing varies in intensity, it counts) is that your heart rate remains elevated even after you start performing at a slow pace or sitting down.
Do you burn more calories doing housework than sitting down? Obviously. Do you earn enough to earn extra calories? I'm not sure about that.
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daaaaaanielle wrote: »daaaaaanielle wrote: »I watched a BBC documentary about calories where they got three families to do different activities for the morning. One family had a personal training session, another just sat about all morning and the others did housework. They found that (after controlling for BMR and such) the people doing housework burned a substantial amount of calories in comparison to the sedentary people. The only problem is that it's really hard to estimate - the BBC used heart rate monitors. If you're going to track it, maybe look it up on Google and see what sort of figures you can find, then when you log it, seriously underestimate it because if you eat your exercise calories back, there's too large a margin of error to be able to eat all of them and still maintain the same overall deficit.
For me personally, I find it to be too much hassle so I just wear my Fitbit and let it count my steps and that's all I sync to MFP. The estimated burn will be almost definitely wrong but if I am working hard, it'll be very low in comparison to actual calories burnt and it just means my deficit might be larger that day.
Since a HRM wouldn't be even remotely accurate to measure calories for being sedentary and especially for house cleaning, that kinda renders that test on BBC pointless. They are known to overestimate "intervally" type workouts which I feel that house cleaning would fall into.
I think it is still pretty obvious though that you're going to burn more calories moving around, cleaning, lifting stuff around, etc than siting on the couch all day. Depending on what kind of cleaning you're doing, there could be a reasonable burn involved (I don't mean reasonable as in comparable to deliberate exercise, but reasonable in the sense that it would be more than just walking around the house). I don't personally see much value in recording it, as I said, but that's why I said OP should severely underestimate the calories should they choose to track it at all because of the difficulty in getting a remotely accurate read of the burn involved even with HRMs (I didn't say the HRMs are accurate to the calorie, just that they indicated that their heart rate was increased significantly enough to show they were burning more calories than the sedentary people - for whom they pretty much just used the BMR I think).
Unless you're saying that you don't burn more calories moving around than you do sitting down, it seems you're just picking on semantics here really.
Not picking on semantics. Not even sure how my post could be considered picking at all, honestly. It's a discussion.
You would obviously burn more calories cleaning than doing nothing. I was just referencing that you said that the BBC show used HRMs as if they are accurate. HRMs are somewhat accurate for steady state cardio, but are not even remotely accurate for much else. An HRM was never designed to give calorie estimations for activities such as this. Increased HR does not directly correlate to calories burned which is why an HRM would give over inflated numbers for things like house cleaning.
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I don't count cleaning as exercise for a lot of the reasons above. I do count push mowing my lawn though. It takes 2 hours to mow and it's all at a considerable incline (20°-30°) because I live on a spine of a foothill.0
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daaaaaanielle wrote: »daaaaaanielle wrote: »I watched a BBC documentary about calories where they got three families to do different activities for the morning. One family had a personal training session, another just sat about all morning and the others did housework. They found that (after controlling for BMR and such) the people doing housework burned a substantial amount of calories in comparison to the sedentary people. The only problem is that it's really hard to estimate - the BBC used heart rate monitors. If you're going to track it, maybe look it up on Google and see what sort of figures you can find, then when you log it, seriously underestimate it because if you eat your exercise calories back, there's too large a margin of error to be able to eat all of them and still maintain the same overall deficit.
For me personally, I find it to be too much hassle so I just wear my Fitbit and let it count my steps and that's all I sync to MFP. The estimated burn will be almost definitely wrong but if I am working hard, it'll be very low in comparison to actual calories burnt and it just means my deficit might be larger that day.
Since a HRM wouldn't be even remotely accurate to measure calories for being sedentary and especially for house cleaning, that kinda renders that test on BBC pointless. They are known to overestimate "intervally" type workouts which I feel that house cleaning would fall into.
I think it is still pretty obvious though that you're going to burn more calories moving around, cleaning, lifting stuff around, etc than siting on the couch all day. Depending on what kind of cleaning you're doing, there could be a reasonable burn involved (I don't mean reasonable as in comparable to deliberate exercise, but reasonable in the sense that it would be more than just walking around the house). I don't personally see much value in recording it, as I said, but that's why I said OP should severely underestimate the calories should they choose to track it at all because of the difficulty in getting a remotely accurate read of the burn involved even with HRMs (I didn't say the HRMs are accurate to the calorie, just that they indicated that their heart rate was increased significantly enough to show they were burning more calories than the sedentary people - for whom they pretty much just used the BMR I think).
Unless you're saying that you don't burn more calories moving around than you do sitting down, it seems you're just picking on semantics here really.
Not picking on semantics. Not even sure how my post could be considered picking at all, honestly. It's a discussion.
You would obviously burn more calories cleaning than doing nothing. I was just referencing that you said that the BBC show used HRMs as if they are accurate. HRMs are somewhat accurate for steady state cardio, but are not even remotely accurate for much else. An HRM was never designed to give calorie estimations for activities such as this. Increased HR does not directly correlate to calories burned which is why an HRM would give over inflated numbers for things like house cleaning.
No, I said that it's hard to estimate and stated what the BBC used to get their figures (or what they said they used). This was for a prime-time BBC documentary on calories and a lot of the science was naturally presented in a simplistic manner to make it easier for the average viewer to follow along with - they had a professor from a university overseeing it as part of a study he was doing so I doubt the HRMs were literally the only thing used simply in the name of fact checking. I did not say they were necessarily accurate as to the actual number of calories burned, just that it showed that they did burn more calories which they would because they're moving around, hence why I said that the OP would be better to severely underestimate.
I am still not advocating for the OP to bother even attempting to estimate their burn and log it. As I said, the margin of error is too large to make it worth their time and it would be a paltry amount of calories logged.0 -
I have a cleaning person clean my house normally. When I end up doing the heavy cleaning a few times a year, I don't necessarily log it as exercise but I'd probably be more apt to eat a bit more that day.0
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Map My Ride/Map My Walk has varying levels of House Work and Yard Work (Mowing lawn, etc.) listed as a type of workout. It's up to you. I consider mowing and weed whacking or mowing and fertilizing my lawns a workout and log them as such. I walk more than a mile and half doing so, heart rate is somewhere between 95 - 110 (Depending on how hot out it is), and I'm at it for over an hour (To do front and back- I have a big back yard and use a push power mower).0
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We have a housecleaning service that comes every few weeks - they clean full time - probably more than 8 hours a day - and it doesn't seem to have an affect on their weight - I haven't seen a skinny one yet. I'd be cautious if I were planning to eat back those calories.0
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Yeah....I don't even count mowing because that's already included in my daily step count.... and I still remain challenged to reach my daily goal of 12,000 steps. I only count cycling and other cardio activities where my heart rate reaches and remains in the Fat burning zone for at least 30 minutes. If a high exertion activity like cycling does not last for a full 30 minutes, I just think of it as part of my TDEE. And I don't purposely eat back my calories anyway. So if you're seeking a way to increase your daily calorie intake, well.... just don't do it if you hope to lose weight. Because I believe you'll regret it in the end.0
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460mustang wrote: »Sure, you have to do it like this!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moGFeRtLqHk
I was thinking of this exact video when I scrolled down. It came up yesterday from the "Greatist" website that I follow! Awesome *Smiles*0 -
If you listed your activity level as Sedentary, you can count your housework as exercise. If you listed your activity level as higher, then some of this background activity is already figured in to your calorie budget.0
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