For those of you using My Fitness Pal (or similar calorie counters), do you put in your daily activities as exercise, and if so how? For example, this morning I went grocery shopping and did a few loads of laundry which means up and down the stairs a lot. While this isn't typical working out, it should count for something right??

MFP encourages the input of daily activities, so you can definitely put them in as exercise. I walk my dog twice a day and they have a category for that, so I use it. For grocery shopping, I wear a pedometer so I know exactly how far I walk and use the 2.0 leisurely walking category for that exercise. You may just input how long you were walking to get an approximate count on the number of calories burned. MFP has a category for cleaning, both vigorous and light, so you may want to use that. It has other categories for housework (e.g. lawn mowing, gardening) as well. View the exercise database and see which fits your particular daily activities. I hope this helps.

Thanks! I wasn't sure if those sorts of activities were included in the daily count. I put in that I am lightly active, so I didn't know if that would cover it. But going up and down the stairs doing several loads of laundry is definitely exercise!

Yeah, I'm tending to log anything I count as over and above 'normal'...so washing the dishes or tidying away toys wouldn't get logged, but a full-on move of all the furniture, sweep and mop the living room floor would be logged under the cleaning option. I do log walking around the supermarket...which I'm not sure if I should or not?!

I just log exercise because I figure my daily BMR takes into account for my daily activities.

This is how I do it as well.

I put my lifetsyle down as sedentary, sitting at the computer for most hours of the day, so anything "extra" I do I log it lol
That incluides, cleaning, cooking, doing dishes also, most sties calculate calories you need to maintain or lose weight by the type of lifestyle you select...

I only log actual execise. My figuring is that even though I can log daily activities (which helps the numbers on MFP look more attractive) in the end my butt will really be the judge.

I think that's a good way of looking at it. I've added some movement to my day that I'm not tallying--stairs to/from my 1st floor daily meeting (I'm on the 3rd floor). I used to take the elevator. Now I'm taking the stairs--but I'm not counting that as 'exercise'--it's just additional activity.

I had a 7 minute walk each way to a meeting in another building today. I toyed with counting that instead taking my normal 8-9 minute morning lap of the building, but I decided it was a slippery slope--and I wasn't going to count it, for calorie purposes. So, I took the walk and counted that!

I can still give myself credit for the additional movement and activity, though--the more active I am, the higher my metabolism will be, the fast I'll lose weight.

I listed my activity level as lightly active and since my job is sedentary I count all the extra things I do as the activities that create my lightly active day. If I had listed myself as sedentary then I would count everything I do other than work though. I myself like to leave it as lightly active because I tend to be a little lazy about doing housework, so if I know I need to do it all to meet my "lightly active" goal then it gives me that motivation to get up and do it!

Same here :-)