
TL;DR: housework doesn't count as exercise because it doesn't raise your heart rate consistently enough.
Well.
Big surprise.
How many of us have used this sort of exercise as our daily exercise?
I'll bet most of you know somewhere actually
you're kidding yourself.I know that it's tempting to log this sort of exercise
as actual hours worked out - I remember when I first started tracking my
exercise levels I logged EVERYTHING. Absolutely everything. Cooking, cleaning,
standing up waiting for the bus.....
I still lost weight because, of course, I was in a caloric deficit. Eating 1400 calories
a day meant that I could log this sort of exercise, eat back those calories and
still lose simply because my BMR is closer to 1700 calories a day and my TDEE
would have been around 1900. It would probably work now even if I was eating
1400 calories simply because my TDEE is much closer to 2300 calories a day these
days however, I eat 1940 calories a day (16 for every Ib of body mass, which is
a moderate amount off of my TDEE) and I don't bother counting how many calories
I burn. Works for me.
I don't log housework (well, I'd have to do any to be able to log it....). I don't even bother logging
my walks to and from work anymore as it's such a part of my routine. I
stoppedlogging housework after about a month knowing that I was kidding myself
with every log of that exercise. It sort of ties in with what I was saying
yesterday about personal accountability in weight loss. You have to be
accountable for yourself and what you're doing. If you're kidding yourself that
you're "working out" when atcually you're only performing your daily tasks then
you're not being honest with yourself or accountable for your lack of
exercise.
Eating a sensible amount of calories
for weight loss and being responsible for getting your body into shape is
important. Of course you can lose weight by just eating less and not working
out, but if you're doing that, be honest about it. If you want to exercise,
exercise. It *might* seem scary. Goodness knows it did when I first started
working out OUTSIDE. People don't always help either (log one incident of
someone shouting out of a car "run fatty" or another of a kid calling atfer me
"haha I can see your knickers" - that's another article in itself!!) but YOU are
responsible for your choices. You choose either to ignore them and get on with
it, or you choose to hide away from the world and let those ignorant idiots
win.
Activities like logging housework lead you to be dishonest
with yourself - about your exercise, about the amount of calories you're
burning, about how hard you're *actually* working....don't fall into that trap.
Do it, do it well and do it right - remember, you don't get what you wish for,
you get what you work for.