Counting calories from household work??
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manders_b
Posts: 44 Member
I have my profile set to lightly active and lose 1 lb per week. I move around a decent amount at work daily in addition to running. I log calories from steps and running, and just started logging them for housework like cleaning or mowing the grass.
Do others log those tasks as exercise or just count them in your base activity level? I was surprised that an hour of cleaning was 179 cals.
Do others log those tasks as exercise or just count them in your base activity level? I was surprised that an hour of cleaning was 179 cals.
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I have my base level set to sedentary since I am wearing a garmin fitness tracker/watch which syncs back to MFP as exercise so I am not recording any specific exercise in MFP or it gets counted twice.4
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I have my profile set to lightly active and lose 1 lb per week. I move around a decent amount at work daily in addition to running. I log calories from steps and running, and just started logging them for housework like cleaning or mowing the grass.
Do others log those tasks as exercise or just count them in your base activity level? I was surprised that an hour of cleaning was 179 cals.
If what you were doing before (not logging house and yard work, if I understand you correctly) was working for you (i.e., you were losing a pound a week and were happy with that, if I understand yippy correctly), why would you change what you're doing by starting to log calories from house and yard work?
Your body has already been "counting" those house and yard work calories (assuming the house and yard work isn't a new addition to your life), so if you start logging it and eating back those calories, your weight will slow, stop, or reverse to a weight gain, depending on how many calories from house and yard work you are logging and eating.
Personally, I log yard work, as it's not part of my regular routine, and I've been logging like that for nearly six years, but I didn't wait and start doing it after I already had a system in place where I was losing as expected and desired.
If you eat more calories than you have been doing while losing a pound a week but the activity you are logging is the same activity you were doing while losing the pound a week, you should expect your rate of loss to slow.8 -
Generally housework is considered part of your daily activity. I wouldn't log it unless you do something really extra - i.e. dig up a garden, chop firewood, move furniture, paint, etc. Normal cleaning is just part of life.6
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I don't log it.0
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I only log it if I’m doing something out of the ordinary everyday stuff, like deep cleaning the house and moving furniture around, hauling rugs outdoors and such, otherwise not.0
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I don't count the first hour of cooking I do, which is about how long it takes for me to make a normal breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I do count everything over an hour. I spent three hours cooking today, and counted two of those hours.
For gardening, I give myself credit in a range from no credit to full credit. If there's a shovel involved, I take full credit. If I'm clipping roses like Annette Bening in "American Beauty", I take no credit. However, if I am pruning up a storm, that's different.
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It's part of your daily activity, so I wouldn't log it. Maybe consider changing your base activity level to active and logging only purposeful exercise.0
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I may log mowing if I am really working hard, but not the rest1
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The answers given to similar questions sometimes have a moral connotation based on whether an activity is deemed worthy of being logged.
The actual answer is a-moral.
Logging is an accounting exercise with the ultimate goal of generating a deficit, or overage, or finding a balance point where calories in and out are equal.
If you believe that accurate logging is important to you in order to achieve results, your goal ought to be to record your caloric expenditures correctly, without double dipping.
While I personally have offloaded the task to Fitbit and just employ an on the fly correction factor (Based on observations of my long term results) of about -5% for very active days and +2% for less active ones, there is nothing incorrect about logging household tasks as an activity if they are not already captured within your base activity level.
MFP Sedentary (activity factor of 1.25) observationally includes less than 1 hour of total non sitting/not in bed activity per day. If you do more than that it SHOULD be getting captured... somehow.4 -
The only time I’ve logged chores is when I did something really out of the ordinary, like loading/unloading the moving truck. Everyday activity should be accounted for in your activity setting.0
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kshama2001 wrote: »I don't count the first hour of cooking I do, which is about how long it takes for me to make a normal breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I do count everything over an hour. I spent three hours cooking today, and counted two of those hours.
For gardening, I give myself credit in a range from no credit to full credit. If there's a shovel involved, I take full credit. If I'm clipping roses like Annette Bening in "American Beauty", I take no credit. However, if I am pruning up a storm, that's different.
Not calories burned in gardening unless you are dirty and sweaty. Annette with perfect hair and not a speck of dirt on a white outfit isn't doing *kitten*.0 -
If you’re following the MFP model, chores are part of your daily activity level and you log purposeful exercise only. Then eat back about half of those calories because they’re often overstated.3
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Correct! 😃0
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I'll typically log mowing the lawn as walking since it's pretty well above and beyond my day-to-day, but I wouldn't log any other household chores, personally. For me, they aren't intense enough for a long enough sustained period to really put me above my set daily activity.0
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If you log your steps and have your BMR cals as part of your calculations, then 90% of the cals from cleaning would already be included.
That 179 in an hour, is misleading, as you would have burned 60-100 had you just sat on the couch, so really cals from cleaning are more like 75-100, but since you count cals from steps, that would be most of the rest of the cals anyway1 -
I just let Fitbit track the steps I take doing housework. I add something like exercise bike where I don't get credit for steps.0
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If you're set to lightly active that is already taking into consideration that movement/calorie burn from things such as cleaning. Personally I would only log legitimate exercise.0
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I count an hour of mowing the grass. It takes me about 4 hours and it's tough and I have 2 large patches to push a heavy petrol mower around and it's exhausting. I think counting the full 4 hours would be way too much, so I just put down an hour. Other house hold jobs I don't count as extra exercise.0
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