No housework in exercises?

I'd count 90 minutes of cleaning too.

When I do an unusually long amount of cleaning I use "Cleaning, light, moderate effort."

(I also use that for light gardening as it has less calories than regular gardening, which I reserve for when a shovel is involved.)

It's part of the everyday movements that MFP is assuming that you're doing. If you're going beyond your daily activity, then you can log it (there are database entries available).

I'd count all of the above as exercise. Apart from wipe kitchen and bathroom surfaces (not counted as anything) I don't do housework daily and vigorous cleaning is definitely not a regular activity, nor is going shopping. Pre-covid, an hour and a half walking around the supermarket, on my once-a-month big shop, even at a slow pace, definitely counted for something. Thanks @kshama2001 for the 'cleaning, light effort' entry - and that's a good tip re gardening - I'd been halving the number of minutes because there's no way my mowing, raking, picking up leaves and carrying a watering can back & forth was burning as many cals as I'd get for 'gardening'.

But does your daily activity setting in MFP reflect that you do all that? I'm set to Sedentary because, 99% of the time, that's what I am. I'm also short and don't get many calories as it is.

I don't count moving around the office or house / going to get cup of tea / going to the toilet / popping down the road to see a neighbour etc, but I do count anything that's over & above my normal day-to-day routine and continues for more than 15 mins. My maintenance cals are only 1340 so I grab all the exercise calories I can!

I'd agree that people complaining that they're not losing weight may be overestimating, but I never had that problem.

You just have to be careful not to double count. If you have already factored it into your daily activity, counting it again can stall your progress, but if it’s not accounted for there, because it’s not a normal activity then you can count it but watch your progress and adjust id you are not seeing your expected results. I clean regularly so for me it’s already part of my lightly active setting.

springlering62 wrote: »

I’m not activity-shaming. I’m being practical and a bit brutally honest.

These are regular things regular people do every day, and should be considered part of your activity setting, ie sedentary, very active, etc.

If you’re running around and crediting calories to yourself for housecleaning, walking at the mall, mowing the grass, all the things you were doing last week before you signed up for MFP, you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

Choose the right activity setting to begin with and you don’t have to muck about with trying to track little things. Make it easier-and more honest- on yourself.

That’s not saying doing it hasn’t worked for @kshama2001 and others, but you’ve got to give yourself a fighting chance to get after it.

I spent decades not understanding calories and weight, and i cringe when I see others making the same mistakes. I’m the person who thought I could walk a mile or two and it would offset a giant bowl of ice cream and a family sized pack of Oreo Doublestuff. Do you really want to be the person who thinks that because they vacuumed, now they can have a few hundred extra calories to play with?

Did you have this thought while logging your exercise and food calories? I get that there would be a disconnect without logging when one does not see "that walk only burned X" and "those ice cream and cookies far exceed X."

I think there are two sides to this, maybe more.

I think some people don't realize that the "sedentary" setting includes the assumption of some routine activity. I think it's maybe in the range of 3500-5000 steps, or equivalent movement. So, on the one hand, there's the possibility that by logging housework, one can be claiming double credit for some activity calories, and that would tend to slow one's weight loss.

I also think there is some tendency to criticize logging housework, either because the critics are more active people for whom it's truly trivial/easy (or a vanishingly tiny percent of daily calories), or because it's not clear that the person logging it does/doesn't have a track record of monitoring loss for a while so may not have a decent handle on what is extra stuff to log and what's not (i.e., critic assumes the person has misunderstood something, without asking about context/details).

I had at least one MFP friend early on who was seriously disabled, and for whom housework was not only an unusual physical victory, but also more actual effort (more effortful movement with mobility problems/mobility aid equipment, probably burned more than average calories, by a little). In a case like that, logging bits of housework - none of which is done routinely - may make sense, once the basic experientially-based routine calorie goal is dialed in.

If someone is just starting out (doesn't have the 4-6 weeks of experiential feedback yet), I think it's a good idea to stay middle of the road in one's practices, but especially important to pick one practice and be consistent with it.

By "middle of the road", I mean not logging routine activity in amounts that one does in a typical week, selecting an activity level at the start that's realistic, etc. One reason I'd advise against logging every little activity is that, frankly, logging gets pretty old pretty fast for a lot of people. So, things that are quite routine (happen every week, basically), it makes more sense to me to include in activity level, and not have to fuss with logging them forever. (If the activity level selection is wrong, that will become evident from the experiential results data, and adjusting activity level is one possible corrective option.)

By "be consistent", I mean, figure out what types of things you're going to log, how you're going to estimate them, whether you're going to adjust the estimates (and by how much) when it comes to eating them back, and that sort of thing. Picking a consistent approach, and sticking with it for that first 4-6 weeks, helps contribute toward clean data, and to more usefully interpreted results, at the end of that 4-6 weeks.

With the information gained from that, that's a better time for a re-think. If no loss happened (or gain did happen), then calorie intake has to drop. It could drop because one stops logging all those details, drops their activity level setting, eats back a smaller fraction of exercise, or simply manually sets calorie goal. In a lot of cases, it won't matter which of those is done. (The amount matters more than how one gets there, usually.)

Same basic deal if loss was too fast to be safe or sustainable: Need more calories, so up the activity level, eat back more exercise calories, log more of routine activity (I wouldn't personally, because more fuss), or just manually increase calorie goal. Doesn't matter.

The basic "test and adjust" process, wth 4-6 week test periods, can happen over and over, experimenting with different approaches to find the most convenient/useful.

Summary: Pick an approach, follow it consistently, evaluate results, adjust the approach. Repeat.

The approach can vary, as long as it's not creating arithmetic randomness.