Atlanta ? Even when sweeping, waiting tables and tossing a Frisbee count as exercise, most Americans still aren’t getting enough of it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, believing earlier studies failed to accurately measure Americans’ fitness because they focused on intense exercise, lumped everyday activities such as housework and gardening with jogging and weightlifting.

But even by including playing with children and raking the lawn on the list of moderate-intensity activities, the 2001 phone survey released Thursday showed that 55 percent of adults still didn’t get the recommended minimum: 30 minutes a day, at least four days a week.

“It’s surprising,” said Harold Kohl of the CDC, who authored the study. “There’s still more than one out of two Americans who are not active at a level we think promotes health. From an overall health standpoint … we’ve really got to move the needle substantially from where it is right now.”

The 2001 survey results were better than under the old definition of exercise used in the 2000 survey, when 74 percent of adults missed the recommendations, but still too low, health officials said.

The survey found little change in the proportion of adults who said they didn’t do any kind of significant exercise — 26 percent in 2001 and 27.4 percent in 2000.

The recommendations are just the minimum to prevent people from developing chronic diseases such as high blood pressure or diabetes. The Institute of Medicine says people should double the CDC’s recommendations — 60 minutes of moderate exercise a day — to drop pounds.

“If you really, really want to lose weight, you have to do more than that,” said Mary Kay Sones of the CDC.