Work?

  So I've read several places that the exercise you get at work doesn't count.  That somehow your body adapts to it and it no longer has an effect on you body.  I was wondering if that is true or not.  I honestly don't think it is, if it was wouldn't your body adapt the same way to conventional exercise?

  I was wondering, because while I don't exercise, I do work as waitress, and it can be a pretty decent workout some nights.

While your body will adapt to activity that it does daily, that doesn't mean that it "doesn't count". It just might not count as much as it did on your first day.

Typically, when people say to not log what you do at work, they mean don't log 8hrs of desk work to your activity log. As a waitress, you most likely will get a more accurate calorie burn if you set your activity level to higher than sedentary - at least moderate, I would guess, if not higher.

Yep, that's what the "activity level" setting here is for.  While I do move around occasionally for my job as a computer tech (deploying 30+ computers and monitors, then running around setting them up can be quite the workout), it's not often enough for me to qualify that as even "light activity."  Since I'm usually at my desk or at someone else's desk, I picked "sedentary."

The activity at work DOES count for something, but don't RELY on it to make significant changes to your body composition if you consciously want to lose weight and get fit, if it's not a job that requires a lot of physical exertion on a regular basis (and by that, I mean stuff like heavy lifting or high-intensity physical labor).

When I was waitressing I would definitely say I was at the very least moderately active, if not very active. Waitressing is physically quite demanding as there is so much running round and carrying involved.

Your body will adjust to the workload but this just means you have become fitter to cope, which is a good thing! Fitter people expend a little less energy to do the same tasks as an unfit person, but this doesn't mean the work "doesn't count" - you are still burning a lot of energy each shift.