Is housework considered exercise?

I do this tidying thing where I zoom around and put stuff away a couple of times a day. In the morning I make my bed and start laundry and clean the litter box and take out the trash, etc. before bed, I load the dishwasher, fold laundry, wipe counters… whatever needs to be done. I do it kind of fast on purpose. It registers as a few extra Fitbit steps!

No but it’s part of your NEAT which burns more calories than exercising.

I do not count it as exercise. Steps, yes. So if you're doing a fair number of house chores, perhaps above average, and getting your steps up there, it may increase your general daily activity, but that's about it.

Exercise, IMO, is something that is strenuous (either getting your HR up or strengthening muscles) and not a "typical" activity most people do every day regardless.

HoneyBadger302 wrote: »

Exercise, IMO, is something that is strenuous (either getting your HR up or strengthening muscles) and not a "typical" activity most people do every day regardless.

I voted ‘No’ for the reasons others have mentioned, it’s in your general activity level setting, mostly.

But! Try being a 5ft woman and wrestling a king size duvet into a fresh duvet cover and tell me it’s not strenuous and doesn’t raise your heart rate and make you sweat! 😂 I’ve been known to say it should be an Olympic sport! (Not to mention turning the mattress!)

I also find cleaning bathrooms is strenuous when it involves balancing on the side of the bath and scrubbing, rinsing and drying the tiled walls at full stretch, again due to being short I cannot reach any other way!

In my Life Kit, all movement counts, one minute at a time. Ambling, moseying along, climbing stairs and mountains, racewalking, sprinting, running. Dishes, laundry, mopping, waxing, cooking, cleaning bathrooms, mowing, irrigating, shoveling snow. Low, moderate and high intensity movement counts. Exercise is not all or nothing for me. If I can't spend an hour in the gym, why bother at all? I don't spend any time in the gym and all of my movement counts.

This ain't little house on the prairie. I can't sit around and wait for someone to blow smoke up my prairie skirt. I'm moving and I have functional muscles. My house is neat.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

I still agree with those saying that routine (average week) kind of housework is best accounted for in activity level (rather than logging separately as exercise). However, I'm prodded by recent posts to add something that's a bit of a tangent to OP's question, but maybe relevant in a different way.

People do often discount the importance of daily life movement. To those of us calorie counting and trying to increase daily life movement, it tends to become clear that daily life (non-exercise) activity has both TDEE-increasing value, and capability-maintenance (basic fitness) value.

Beyond that, though, there is one study that tantalizingly suggests that how we think of our daily life activity may have physical effects.

Here's the abstract:

In a study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one's mind-set, 84 female room attendants working in seven different hotels were measured on physiological health variables affected by exercise. Those in the informed condition were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/

I heard about this from an episode of the radio show/podcast Hidden Brain, which did a really interesting two-parter on the importance of mindset. (Another interesting study showed differential levels of appetite/satiation hormones after subjects were told that the very same milkshake was "healthy" or "indulgent". Brains are weird.) The podcast is close to an hour each time, not brief. If anyone cares, here's a link to part 2, where these studies among others were discussed.

https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/reframing-your-reality-part-2/

Oh, that was interesting and I recommend it, and if your brain works like mine, start with part 1, which was interesting as well.

Do you think if I charge a membership fee and make him scan a card when entering my husband will help clean the house?

That's the ticket to free cleaning! SMART! Make him pay for the privilege too!!!!

Let's compare antibiotic free, pasture raised, vegetarian fed, free roaming, bright yellow polka dotted eggs and good old plain industrial bleached white eggs we would rather not know much about other than the price!

Other than a couple of small improbability issues having to do with calcium carbonate, bleach, and bright yellow polka dots.... eggs from chickens are still just about 78 Cal per 50g.

Calories are very good at not caring about human value judgments.

IS your activity already included in the base level of activity you've selected? The sedentary level already includes activities that could be compared to walking approximately 3500 steps in a day. By the time you hit 5000 steps, most people have exceeded the level known as sedentary.

The way MFP is designed to work, you WOULD eat (i.e. mark as exercise) calories that are in excess of your selected activity level.

Regardless of what generated them.

That said: MFP is not a calculator. It is an ESTIMATOR. Your own n=1 experiment with logging and weight change is what determines how close you're tracking to your estimates and when and how you should adjust.

springlering62 wrote: »

All my adult life my house has been spit shined.

Most my adult life I was obese or overweight.

Just sayin’.

That regular exercise doesn’t automatically mean you’re thin?

I can go all day cleaning the house, cooking, canning, gardening...etc. I do set my calorie goals at the lowest though and I'll log maybe an hour or two of gardening or such. But if I had set my calories to very active then I wouldn't log that activity. There are days I'm not as active so this works for me. I try to keep a balance. If it was a very active day, I log the activity and eat more. If it's not so active of a day...I don't.