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.

Rock_N_TN wrote: »

Sorry I posted that. Seems many are here to shame and degrade, not help. I’ll not be back on the community boards.

Whereas I'm glad you did post it, as it was a valid question. As with anything there are differences of opinion, but all of the above answers give food for thought.

Re the point above about some people thinking that a 3 mile walk gives you free rein to eat a pack of biscuits or an entire tub of ice-cream or whatever, part of the reason why I log my exercise is that it highlights how little I burn. During lockdown, I've done a regular brisk half hour walk to get the newspaper. I get less than 100 cals for that. However, several hours of gardening gave me a lot of cals - a lot more than I thought was reasonable, but it makes sense that that is actually based on heavy digging, not mowing the grass, raking up leaves or cutting branches off shrubbery. The suggestion to use 'light cleaning' would enable me to log something, whilst not being excessive.

My daily activity varies. Somedays I do almost nothing and other days are quite active (for me). What I found works best for me is to set my activity level sedentary and then log everything that feels like it required a bit of an effort. After a few weeks I adjusted my calories up 100 calories per day because I was loosing weight faster than my goal. It works for me.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

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.
[snip]

I agree with everything you say here, including the part I cut for space, but I can't resist noting that in nearly seven years on the MFP forum, I don't remember a single time when someone complained that logging exercise calories was tedious. As far as I recall, it's always the "calories in" that they find to be a grind to log.

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?

If you had correctly logged the mile or two as exercise, you would then have been easily able to see that it didn’t burn enough calories to cover a giant bowl of ice cream.

There’s a wide spectrum of regular. And not everyone beginning a weight loss journey falls into “regular.” When I set out to get healthy, it was a rare day when I walked to the mailbox, my house was definitely not cleaned regularly by me, and I barely moved. I had lupus flares which caused debilitating vasculitis, and an ovarian tumor, and many days I was bedridden except for walking to the bathroom. Mine is an extreme case, but there are plenty of people for whom a day walking around Target shopping is an exhausting, unusual day. When I started moving more you can bet I counted everything, and I was right to do so, since for the first four months of using MFP I lost at more than twice the projected rate.

Overcounting is a definite risk for many people. If you log a bunch of exercise calories without ever breaking a sweat, and your weight loss is not what MFP says it should be, take stock and reconsider. But not all exercise happens in a gym.

How many calories does running around the house and yard looking for the cat for over an hour burn? Asking for a friend...

No idea where his secret hiding spot was, but it was not here: