When we first started traveling, food was simply part of the experience. We wanted to try new restaurants, sample local specialties, grab a few snacks along the way, and enjoy ourselves. Whether something was particularly healthy did not really enter into the equation. Over time, that changed. We started paying more attention to our weight and wanted to maintain the progress we had made at home while traveling with our diet goals. This lead to a surprise fix for our problem with travel and diet.

First instinct; Eat healthier.

That seemed like the obvious answer, but it created a problem. The more we tried to make every meal a healthy choice, the less enjoyable some of those meals became. We would eat something that looked like the responsible choice, still feel unsatisfied, and then find ourselves compensating with snacks or treats later.

Eventually, we realized we were solving the wrong problem.

Instead of trying to make every meal healthy, we needed to understand how the food we were eating fit into the entire day.

We, to this day, have a tough time with the word “healthy” for the reasons we will discuss.

First, We Figured Out What We Actually Needed

The first step was figuring out our approximate daily calorie needs. That gave us a baseline and made it possible to start making decisions based on something more useful than whether a food had a reputation for being healthy.

From there, we stopped thinking about food as good or bad. We started looking at the basic breakdown of a meal: calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

For a while, we tracked what we ate. The goal was not to track everything forever. We wanted to learn what a particular portion looked like and get better at estimating calories when we did not have exact information. Our experiment was simply to figure out how much we ate when we ate out.

That exercise led to one of the more surprising discoveries in our travel diet.

Healthy Can Mean More Calories, Temptation

Fried chicken and potato wedges from a gas station could fit our goals much better than a Cobb salad at a restaurant.

Obviously, that does not mean fried chicken is healthier than a salad. The point was that the label “healthy” told us very little about how much we were actually eating. A Cobb salad can come with cheese, bacon, avocado, dressing, and a large portion. The fried chicken and potatoes might be a much more predictable amount of food.

Once we understood that, we stopped asking whether something was healthy and started asking whether it worked for the day we had planned.

That was a much more useful question.

The Trap We Had Fallen Into

Trying to eat healthy while traveling created another problem that took us a while to recognize.

We were often overeating because the meals themselves were not particularly satisfying.

A lighter meal might leave us thinking about food an hour later. After spending the meal making what felt like the responsible choice, it was also easy to justify a treat afterward. The result was sometimes a healthy meal followed by snacks that we would not have eaten if we had simply had a more satisfying meal in the first place. Yeah, that is the lizard brain at work which is a real problem for many of us.

It’s Not Exercise, It Is Fatigue Talking

Travel added another complication: we had to get better at distinguishing actual hunger from being tired.

After a long day of driving or flying, it is easy to interpret fatigue as hunger even though you may have sat all day. On a day when we had been hiking or walking around a city for hours, however, the extra hunger was real. We found, those situations could feel remarkably similar even though our bodies had very different caloric needs.

The other major problem was that we were not planning.

When we waited until we were hungry to figure out what we were going to eat, the available options made the decision for us. Maybe there was a fast-food restaurant nearby. Maybe the only convenient option was a large restaurant meal. Either way, we were making a food decision at exactly the point when we had the least patience for making a good one.

We needed to plan before we were hungry.

The Fix Was Planning, Not Restriction

Before a trip, we started looking at what each day would involve. A day spent hiking called for something different than eight hours in a car. A day spent walking around a city called for something different than an afternoon sitting by the pool.

That gave us a rough idea of how much food we were likely to want, but it also helped us decide where we wanted to spend those calories.

We started planning meals before we left, while we still had the luxury of being thoughtful about our choices.

Just as importantly, we put everything on the menu.

Chips were on the menu. Jerky was on the menu. Granola bars were on the menu. Grocery store fried chicken was on the menu. So were beer, wine, and ice cream.

Consistent Calories, Not Health Food

The difference was that we knew roughly what those foods represented in terms of calories.

That made some foods that we might normally consider less healthy” incredibly useful for travel. Chips and jerky are easy to carry, do not require a restaurant, and can be portioned into a known number of calories. Having those foods available meant we could keep moving without reaching the point where we were desperately hungry and willing to eat whatever was in front of us.

The indulgent foods also served a purpose. A bag of chips or some jerky might not be the most nutritionally impressive meal, but it could give us a predictable amount of food while leaving room for something we really wanted later.

We Stopped Trying To Be ‘Good’ Every Day

Another change was realizing that every day of a trip did not need to have the same food strategy.

Some days could include a great dinner, drinks, or dessert. On other days, we could keep things simple with our snacks, a straightforward breakfast, and an easier dinner.

That approach worked better than trying to be disciplined at every meal. A day of simpler food gave us room for an indulgent meal later. Conversely, after a big restaurant dinner, there was no reason to make the next morning another food event.

This also meant we could enjoy treats without feeling like we had blown our calorie goals.

If we had kept our food fairly simple during the day, there might be room for ice cream in the afternoon. Knowing that the ice cream was part of the plan made it easier to enjoy it without turning the entire day into an unplanned eating spree.

Hotel Breakfast Became Our Easy Win

Hotel breakfast was another tool we started using more deliberately.

It was not necessarily the most exciting meal of the trip, but that was exactly what made it useful. WE could chose our portions and options from what was there. Over time, we found these breakfasts were pretty routine across hotel chains. We generally knew what would be available, and we could put together a predictable breakfast without spending much time or money figuring out where to eat.

That gave us a known calorie supply to start the day and left more flexibility for lunch and dinner. Sometimes, we could use them to grab some fruit to take for the day ahead as well.

Not every meal needed to be memorable. We were traveling to experience the destination, not to make every breakfast an event.

We Planned Dinner Before We Were Hungry

Dinner planning made an even bigger difference.

Rather than waiting until we were hungry and then looking for somewhere to eat, we would research restaurants the night before. Reviews helped us narrow down the options, while photos gave us a surprisingly useful idea of portion sizes.

Restaurant descriptions can only tell you so much. Seeing the actual plate gave us a better sense of whether we were looking at a modest meal or enough food for two or three people.

By the time dinner arrived, we already had an idea of where we wanted to go and what we might order.

That removed a lot of the decision-making that happens when you are hungry, tired, and standing in an unfamiliar part of town.

We Planned Our Drinks Too

Drinks were another place where calories could sneak up on us.

Buying beer or wine from a grocery store gave us a much better idea of what we were consuming than ordering whatever happened to sound good at a restaurant or bar. It also helped us avoid turning a couple of drinks into a surprisingly large calorie expense.

There was another benefit: it usually cost less.

The goal was never to eliminate drinks. We simply wanted them to be a deliberate part of the trip rather than something we added without thinking.

The Unexpected Result

The irony was that eating a little less “healthy” helped us manage our weight better while traveling.

First, it cut costs because we were not relying on restaurants for every meal. Second, it controlled calories because we knew what we were eating before we got hungry. Most importantly, we still ate food that felt fun and different from what we normally ate at home.

Nothing about the approach required us to go hungry.

We also did not feel cheated. These were not our everyday meals, and we were not trying to recreate our normal routine while traveling. We were making room for the things we wanted to experience.

That could mean fried chicken one day, a great restaurant dinner the next, or ice cream in the middle of the afternoon.

The important part was that those choices fit into the overall plan.

What We Actually Fixed

Looking back, our original mistake was thinking that eating well meant making the healthiest possible choice every time we were hungry.

Travel taught us that a better approach was to think about the entire day.

We learned how much food we actually needed and got better at recognizing the difference between being hungry and simply being tired from a long drive or flight.

Planning ahead made a bigger difference than we expected. We could decide where to spend our calories before we were hungry, keep convenient foods with us, and look at restaurant portions before choosing where to eat.

Even our drinks and treats became part of the plan. Rather than feeling like we were breaking the rules, we knew when we had room for something we wanted.

Evolution Not Revolution

None of that sounds particularly revolutionary.

The surprising part was what happened when we put it all together.

Our calorie intake stayed relatively stable. Our weight stayed where we wanted it. We spent less money. And we got to eat plenty of food that was more interesting than the meals we would normally make at home.

In the end, we did not need a perfect travel diet.

We needed a travel diet that accounted for the fact that we were traveling.

Once we stopped trying to eat “perfectly” and started planning how we wanted to spend our calories, we found that we could enjoy the food, enjoy the trip, and still come home in roughly the same place we left.

The post The Surprise Fix To A Bad Travel Diet first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

You can easily quantify how much you weigh or how much money you make. Some goals that maximize your potential are not as easy as they seem to quantify. For example, ‘I want to be in good shape’, but putting a pin in for an outcome is hard. Because of those challenges, we decided to take a different approach to how we viewed success, blocks, and missteps via habits.

How This Idea Came About?

It was simple. We were looking for new hobbies during the winter when the weather wasn’t conducive to our regular sports and traveling. Being frugal and conscious of waste, we didn’t want to do things to keep busy. We had a few conversations back and forth about things we wanted to do, but we were worried about cost and space. 

In one of those conversations, we realized we didn’t want another hobby to do another ‘thing. ‘ There had to be more to it than simply entertaining ourselves. Those activities aren’t bad, but we have enough of them. It had to be something that created value in our lives. 

Value Add was Key

The idea of creating value stuck. Value was the key to unlocking a more philosophical approach to all our activities. As we refined this idea, we saw larger implications of that approach. Value was tangible even if it wasn’t easily quantifiable. As with any investment, we wanted to understand how we would be rewarded so we could rank our activities. If you spend time doing something, you want to be rewarded by it in return. The better the return, the larger the reward.

We decided to start ranking our activities by value. Did we get the same value out of watching a movie that we did out of going to the gym? What was the investment for each time? How did the outcomes of doing the activity benefit us? We started to realize that not all activities benefit us. Some activities we found valuable, but they were more maintenance than fun hobbies. 

Out of this, the three habits were born. So what are they?

The Three Habits of Us All

There are three habits all of us have. That is not a judgment because what you value and do is up to you. We only label them to help us define ourselves. The habits are:

• Creation: Habits that create something.
• Stability: Habits that maintain our current state.
• Waste: Habits that have negative sides to them.

Let’s get to defining them.

Habits of Creation

These things we do add value to our lives by creating new things for ourselves. If you garden and grow vegetables to eat, then gardening is a habit of creation for you. You will usually gain something from sitting on the couch and reading a book. That makes reading a habit of creation for you. You practice a creation habit whenever you seek an opportunity to advance a goal. 

Habits of Stability

We must follow these habits, but may not enjoy them or create something new. For example, cleaning the house every week is necessary, but may not add additional value to your life. Another example may be going grocery shopping, which is required to eat. Essentially, any time you perform maintenance or routine tasks necessary to support your life, you practice a habit of stability. 

Habits of Waste

Habits of waste are things we do that create waste. When you go out to eat, only eat half and throw the rest away; you waste food and money. If you have a gym membership, go three times a week, and never push yourself, you get nothing for your time and money. That is what we would call creating waste. Sounds a bit preachy, right?

We’re not Preaching! It is—not—about preaching. It is about honestly identifying areas where we waste our time. Why? Because those areas don’t add value, they still cost us and keep us from doing things we value more. They are, however, sometimes necessary as a tradeoff.

Let’s examine when they are necessary.

You may need to eat out if you are busy working all week, spend your entire Saturday doing yard work, or take the kids to soccer practice. It may be that the only option to eat out is somewhere that serves a larger portion size than you want. Could you have made dinner? Sure! But in this case, you are spending so much of your time with habits of creation that you need to balance them with some waste to stay productive and possibly sane. 

That’s How We Use Them

We use these to review a week or even a year to gauge how things are going. Did we spend more time in habits that created waste, or did we spend more time in habits of creation? Are we balancing the three? When we plan a week and look at the tasks ahead of us, what is the ratio of each outcome of our actions? 

TL;DR: Are we making headway, staying stable, or stuck in a destructive pattern? 

This also applies to longer-term goals. Not all goals are quantifiable or quickly reachable, and life is not linear. Just because we want to do something doesn’t mean something won’t block our path. Things like health, family, and economics are external forces that can hinder our short-term progress. We don’t always control those events but can control how we react. 

The Negative Cycle That These Avoid

The biggest challenge for many of us is recognizing progress. Learning and growing can be frustrating and even painful processes. Many times, to succeed, you must know by failure. When focused on the short term, those failures can lead us to feelings of negativity. We are wired for negativity, and that wiring protects us in the short term. To succeed and grow, we need mechanisms to rewire us to see opportunities. Canonizing these three habits can help us with that rewiring. 

When we try and fail, it is easy for us to assume we learned nothing. Worse yet, there are times in life when we can lose track of our gains due to the duration or challenges of our goals. I will never be an Iron Chef; however, I did learn to cook and do meal planning. It was not a linear progression of learning. There were times I filled the house with acrid smoke, and we ended up going out for fast food.

I was, and always will, be learning. That failure and the lessons learned from it could have been wasteful. In these cases, my ‘Habit of Creation’ is to note what went wrong, why, and how to avoid it the next time. In that act, we take something that was a waste and make it something that creates learning. 

Progress Indicators

Because life and learning aren’t linear, it isn’t always easy to know if we are succeeding in our goals. When we review progress on our goals, we look at what is trending. Seeing more of the week or month with more Creation than Waste indicates that we are progressing, even if we have another year or more to accomplish our goals. This is what some would call ‘working a plan’. 

If life forces a pause due to financial, medical, or other external forces, we may see an uptick in our Stability over Creation. That is still a positive outcome over waste. Sometimes, we might have to wait and see what little we can do alone. For example, economic downturns are not something you, as an individual, can do anything about. What is important is that you can keep a positive mental picture by being able to see what you are doing to stabilize yourself and reduce waste.

Our Check In

We keep a log occasionally, especially when unsure of our progress. Every week, we take 15 minutes to write out 2-3 of each habit we have acted on. For example, we might have done research that turned into a blog post. Out of that research came learning. Maybe we planted a garden but underestimated the time needed to do that activity, so we ate out. Out of that, maybe there was a mix of waste and creation. 

Over time, we want to see a more create-than-waste trend. If we know no stability, we probably let some things go that we shouldn’t. While we don’t love doing maintenance work, sometimes we must stop and change our lawn mower’s oil. Maintenance doesn’t stop there. It may also mean doing a portfolio tune-up to ensure your financial goals are met. Stability comes in many shapes and sizes. 

Wrapping Up

We discussed three types of habits to help guide our definition of progress. By canonizing tasks into Habits of Creation, Stability, and Waste, we can help measure our progress. We can use these as a reality check when we feel we aren’t making progress or learning. It is easy to get discouraged without feedback on successes. These tools can help us define success and overcome that problem to stay focused and positive, or make changes so that we can be.

The post How To Build A Road To Better Habits first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We travel a lot on weekends. For us, it was normal to eat home-prepared meals all week, and then eat out on the road. That was a simple tradeoff for us. We couldn’t or didn’t want to maintain a specific schedule or may have no way to heat something we made on the road. Let’s face it, road food was also a treat.

We also tracked our weight every week. If you are traveling, scales weren’t always in the picture for weekends. What we noticed would be Friday we would be at weight X. On Monday morning we would be up 2-4 lbs. By Tuesday or Wednesday, we will be back at X. Maddening to see what happens every week. When we decided to start tracking our calories, we started to see an obvious trend. 

On the weekends our calorie intake went up. Yay! We found our smoking gun. It turns out not so much. Since we know the 1000-calorie rule has lost favor, we knew weight gain wasn’t that instantaneous. Ok, maybe you would gain a couple of ounces but not up to 4 lbs from having some extra calories over a weekend.   

The Bigger Picture

It would be easy to simply place the gain on the additional food. We did that at first and tried lowering our calorie intake because math is math. After a bit of time with no changes, we saw no differences. We decided there had to be more at work than just food. After thinking about it we realized our weekly routine was drastically different from our weekend routine.  Some things we noticed the differences and changes:

• Water intake was lower.
• Physical exertion was higher.
• We drank more alcohol on weekends. 
• Sleep patterns were disrupted. 
• We ate food that was higher in fat and salt. 
• As physical exertion increased so did hunger which pushed our calorie intake higher.
• A completely sedentary pattern of traveling for 3-5 hours either via car, plane, etc.

How this happens is pretty easy and it isn’t always obvious. Let’s say we get up early for a raft trip. We spend a day in hot weather and probably don’t drink as much water as we should to compensate. For food, we bring some salty snacks like jerky or nuts that can survive the warm day. Getting in and out of the boat, going down the river, etc. uses muscles in ways we don’t usually use them. That’s just the day. 

After the trip, we stop at the local restaurant and wolf down a huge burger to compensate for the light eating day. That night we would sit out late on the deck have an extra glass of wine or beer and reminisce about the day. The next day we would be starving as our bodies are now repairing muscle on food that probably isn’t balanced. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the kale chips we would be reaching for at that time.

We tried changing up our food to be ‘healthier’ but it didn’t help. Ordering a chicken footlong from Subway instead of a big burger didn’t help. Oddly enough, we noticed lower weekend gains when we ate fried chicken and jo-jos as an emergency meal from a gas station hot case than we did trying to eat healthy choices. For us, it still was about controlling portion size and finding hidden calories such as are in sports drinks.

As we monitored our weight bumps, we would occasionally see the opposite result. There were weekends when we would have the exact opposite result. We would start the weekend high, and then, magically, find our weight the same or lower after the weekend. As we dug through our data we found the weekends we stayed with smaller portions, we had less dramatic fluctuations. There was more to it, however.

At first, we thought it was the extra calories which included more salt and fat. We also theorized it was due to additional calories. Sometimes we thought it was the extra physical exertion putting our bodies in ‘threat’ mode to store calories.  In some ways, we felt these were all contributors however not any one of these on their own seemed like a true ‘smoking gun’ to point at as a cause.

Want an Answer?

We do too and we have a theory but no simple answer. While not doctors or dieticians we were pretty sure it wasn’t simply the calories we ate. We did some experimentation and research and found a correlation between keeping our calorie intake moderated to what we have during the week and the weekend. Shocker, correct? Not really. It didn’t tell the full story and we still had some fairly large swings in weight despite modifying our eating habits.

We noticed we could eat more and still not have our weekend ‘bump’ sometimes. On those weekends we consumed extra fiber and made sure we consumed water. Hotter weather and alcohol seem to also contribute to the bump. The paradox was we were expending more calories, eating only a little more, and gaining 2-4 lbs. It didn’t make sense. 

Your GI Tract

Our GI tract is responsible for moving everything we eat and drink from inlet to outlet so to speak. Most of us have heard it takes anywhere from 6-24 hours to process our food. We know this to be true since we get hungry sometimes fairly soon after we eat a meal. If you have ever had food poisoning or the 24-hour flu, you know symptoms show up rather quickly. Those numbers are both less than a weekend correct? Yes, but what we think of as digestion is only part of the process. 

For some people, the full food ride from the fork to the bathroom can take between 14 and 73 hours according to Healthline.  That means whatever you have eaten may stay with you for up to 3 days. Like any machine, when we are operating routinely, with known inputs, we expect known outputs. If we change that routine on the weekend by increasing load (eating more) while decreasing lubrication (water and fiber) we can’t expect the routine processing times. 

That is our Empirical Theory

Let’s play our raft adventure back and see how this can happen. In our example, hotter temps and lower water intake can increase digestion time. Having salty snacks that are low in fiber, high fat, and protein can cause digestion to take longer. The use of alcohol can cause dehydration as well. All of this can slow digestion. We then add more calories in the form of a burger and fries than we are used to processing. All of that can cause our GI Tract to come under additional pressure and slow down. 

If you are carrying extra weight on Monday and Tuesday after a weekend binge this is one plausible cause. As we started to see this pattern we became more focused on how to stay hydrated and eat more appropriately when on the road or out doing our sports. We tried to keep as much of our routine, well, routine as we could. Most importantly, we learned to keep hydrated and get more fiber to help mitigate the ‘weekend bump’.

This is still an ongoing experiment for us. When we can come up with more concrete findings we plan on updating this post. Until we do, do your experiments and research. At worst, you will find what is causing you that weekend weight gain in your situation.

Ewww…gross

We are biological creatures with biological processes. It is neither gross nor pretty. What we are talking about is something that is part of being human, animal, and most other living organisms. Digestion is simply the breakdown and separation of food into what we need and what we don’t. Sometimes, you have to simply be ok talking about it so you can understand its effects on us. 

Wrapping up

We talked about how the GI Tract is impacted by changes in routines. We have also drawn an empirical correlation between GI Tract health, changes in routine, and weekend weight gain. In the articles we have linked, there are many steps on how to avoid the ‘bump’ so we won’t re-iterate them. While there is no quick answer, this post has given some insight into one possible cause of our weekend weight gain. Do your research to decide if that is what is affecting you. 

The post Do We Really Get Big On The Weekend first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Questions Needing Answers

Over the last couple of years, I have been following many Facebook groups to learn from others. The primary areas I am interested in are homesteading, food, and fishing. In all three, when an argument starts, you see two points of view: someone who has been doing something one way forever and someone who quotes a resource. I swear World War Three will start from an argument around whether water bath canning is safe or not. 

You would think this was basic science. Canning, and what method to use, is based on the PH or acidity levels of the food being canned. The safe level of PH in food to allow for water bath canning according to science, extension offices, and health experts is 4.6.  It is that simple because it is a specific PH combined with heat to kill and stop any new nasties from growing in the canned food. Some people refuse to believe this. Why is the question I have?

Beginning to See the Myths

As we started to revisit cooking, the age-old argument of how to care for cast iron cookware came up. Caring for cast iron has its own almost mystical mythology around how to care for it. That we can cover in another post. Being an engineer by trade and schooling, I have learned to trust but verify so I did some reading. Again, it is pretty simple.

The manufacturer of Lodge cookware, who is a well-known manufacturer of cast iron has a great page on the care and seasoning of cast iron. What I received for advice from others was contrary to their advice which is why my pans weren’t working well. Why then were there so many people still doing it, in my perception, the wrong way?

Keeping it Real 

First, a statement to keep this positive. No one is dumb. We all have the facts we have. Those facts may differ from others. Even the word fact is somewhat subjective if it is based on context. We have to start with these tenets or we devolve into unwinnable arguments quickly. That is not a path that helps us. 

It’s About Muscle Memory

Growing up, we learned about many things. These things became truths. Those truths became re-enforced. The more we relied on them, the more ingrained they became and the more ‘truthy’ they became. At some point, they became chiseled in stone and could not be changed. That is the problem but that is being human. 

Once solidified, these truths become reality even if they are not logical. Unfortunately, there are many times we make illogical arguments. That is life with us emotional humans. Fighting logical fallacies with facts turns out to be problematic as logic is based on facts and usually, the facts are what are being contested. That is still not really where the disconnect of muscle memory is most prevalent. 

Breaking The Concrete

Pro-tip, the world changes and adaptation is key for any species’ survival. Just because something was, doesn’t mean it still is. When working in software this was the basis of agile methodologies. My least favorite thing to hear is when someone claims to have been doing something for some extended period as a justification to continue doing it. That argument, to me, is the basis of many animal extinctions through specilization. 

Two axioms come into play here:

• We stop learning when we stop questioning. 
• We stop adapting when we stop learning. 

No matter what is true today, that truth can change tomorrow. Unfortunately learning is usually painful. Learning comes out of trying and usually failing at first. That is why we believe so many of us want to accept yesterday’s truth as non-changing. 

But My Great Grandma Used To

As we discussed in another post we started to get back into things like working out and cooking. We had to re-learn many things in that process. We found that over 10 years nutrition, health, and exercise information had changed. Eventually, we simply decided to start over and research our own. We challenged ourselves to not take things we knew for granted. It turns out many things that we struggled with were old information that others had discounted over time. It was an eye-opener. 

As we started to talk with others we saw the same patterns. The way they canned food was based on how their great-grandmother did. Same with seasoning their cast iron. Some would talk about how their favorite lake no longer produced the same fish. Others would talk about how it was in the old days. They started sounding old before their time.

It’s a Trap!

We started to see these patterns as a trap as we all have a lot of ingrained knowledge combined with traditions. We don’t want to relearn everything as that takes time. That requires questioning ourselves and possibly failing or finding out we are wrong. While it’s good to have knowledge to rely on and traditions to hand down, it doesn’t necessarily push us toward growth. As the world has grown, not all is as it was whether it be cooking or fishing or any other subject. 

In the book Built From Broken, the author talks about how the body protects itself when injured. To rehabilitate something, you sometimes need to acknowledge those signals and create a plan to deal with them. You can recover from injuries and improve mobility and strength if you are willing to work through some level of discomfort to do it. I know, I have personally done it.

The trap we all can fall into is not identifying when we need to re-learn. This is where the disconnect occurs. As time goes by we forget to seek new information. 

The Escape Plan

We learned some basics from our observations. These helped us break out of old habits and refresh our knowledge base. In essence, we learned to learn again to adapt to the new world we found ourselves in.

• Trust but verify your information. If you learned something 10 years ago, it usually takes no time to Google it to verify it.
• Don’t think of new information as being wrong or right. The way to view it is by seeing it as current. 
• When you find yourself starting a sentence with ‘I have been doing this for a long time so you should…’ question yourself. 
• Seek the delta between the past and present to see if what you know is still relevant. Buggy whips are still applicable to carriages but are no longer relevant to getting to work in the morning for most of us.

 Bring it Full Circle

We don’t realize that a lot of information has a timestamp. It is easy to fall into the trap of letting what you know get stale. We assert stale information is what is contested in most arguments rather than the other person’s point of view. We can improve ourselves and our interactions with others by learning to re-learn. This opens us to adapting rather than becoming entrenched in defenses. This doesn’t mean you have to throw away traditions or even what you are currently doing. It allows you to make more informed decisions about what is currently correct for you. 

The post We Need To Revisit Facts For Growth first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

There is a Lot of Noise Now

With the growth of the internet, we have more and more information available to us. The consumable data created and available to us will be 175 Zettabytes (10^21) in 2025. That is expected to increase to 394 Zettabytes by 2028. This number includes a lot of user-generated content (UGC). Anyone with a keyboard, a little knowledge, and some time can try to become an influencer. Interestingly, data indicates that we are much more likely to believe other than authoritative bodies such as companies and organizations.

Search engines use various strategies and techniques to help us determine what is authoritative and what isn’t. However, this can also cause problems, such as affirming the wrong information based on reliance on ‘experts,’ which has had notorious historical examples. It takes time to discover what is real and what isn’t; sometimes, we can only speculate. The outcome is that we read, hear, and see conflicting things.

Good vs Bad is All About Context

You will hear that fat is bad, yet we know that fat is a necessary part of our DRI. One site will say you shouldn’t eat dairy, while another organization may say yogurt is considered healthy. Which of the pundits is correct? Sometimes, it is both. What matters most is the context of the statement and who the actual target audience is.

What exactly do we mean by context? Context means understanding the problem the particular statement is attempting to solve. Understanding context also means understanding who the target audience is and, more importantly, is not. For example, if you are at risk for high cholesterol, you may want to listen to a medical professional. On the other hand, if you are trying to be a bodybuilder, that information may not pertain to you. Let’s take a look at two articles about the Keto Diet. 

Note: We are not giving our opinion on the diet but rather using two different points of view to illustrate why you must read the fine print when looking at this type of information.  

A Tale Of Two Ketos

The first article by Healthline is a resource that gives the full details of the keto diet. The article paints it positively regarding how it can help you lose fat. It also talks about the challenges of getting into a ketosis state. As a resource, it does a great job of breaking this down for different types of people with varying levels of health. 

The second article by Harvard Health Publishing (Harvard Medical School) is not as keen on the keto diet. It discusses its origins as a way to help a specific group of people and many more of the diet’s challenges around nutrition deficiencies. Further, it speaks to the fact that it is a short-term approach to health.

Apples to Peaches?

To compare apples to apples, let’s consider that both articles were written and reviewed by equally reliable authorities. Accredited professionals wrote and reviewed both articles. So then, which is correct? Both! Why? The articles are both written for a different purpose and in a different context. This is where we feel all the information we are bombarded with gets confusing. 

Written by and from the point of view of a Dietician, the Healthline article takes a dietician’s point of view on Keto. The Harvard article takes the point of view of a medical doctor. They are two different roles, with similar but different points of view. The former wants to help you with your dietary needs. The latter wants to help you holistically with your health and may ask you to seek a dietician’s help. These are two different lenses on the same topic. When looking at the two, it is that context that matters. 

Why does it matter? We need to be objective when seeking information to help us. It is very easy for people to end up in the trap of confirmation or negative bias. We hypothesize that these biases protected us at one time in our evolutionary history. Learning isn’t always easy. When seeking knowledge, we must be careful to be open to new information and challenge preconditions. If we are not, we can end up as expert beginners, which gives us a measure of success but limits our true potential.

Some Things To Help Be Critical

Here are some context-setting tips for reviewing information to help you be critical:

• Understand why the person is telling you the information. Do they stand to gain something by influencing you, such as selling you a diet plan or product?
• What lens is the person putting on the subject, and are they critical in their judgment? Does that lens help align the information with your goals?
• How old is the information? For example, health and fitness information is constantly changing, and an article, such as the 3,500-calorie rule, may be out of date.
• Confirm that you are in the target cohort or audience for the information. In our example, a significant difference exists between a person’s long-term medical needs and a short-term diet plan.
• Challenge anything without scientific evidence or non-emotional evidence quoted by the article. It isn’t that some influencer or pundit is wrong, but, without any sources, ‘it’s like…just their opinion, man.’ (Big Lebowski quote, apologies, but I had to use it.)

Wrapping Up

Bringing it back to where we started, the more research we did on our health and goals, the more we found this level of contradiction. By applying some basic scientific principles and being critical of the information, we could understand that misinformation wasn’t misinformation. Much of the information didn’t apply to us or our sustainability goals. 

Further, we also had to look at what group was publishing the information. The American Heart Association can have a different agenda than the USDA. They will publish information based on that agenda, which may be focused on an area that is not your need or cohort. For example, the USDA probably doesn’t publish information targeting bodybuilders, while someone working in sports medicine may. 

This article presented ways to help break through the noise of many health and fitness articles. The human body is a complicated system. Due to that complexity, we must be critical when seeking advice or adopting a new idea. This is why the context of the information given to you is essential. This context-based thinking changes how we start to look at other aspects of our lives. Just because we disagreed with what we found didn’t mean it was false or misinformation. Understanding that ‘noise’ was a lack of context was a game changer for us. We feel it will be for you as well. 

The post Why Context Is Now Key To Clarity first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We know people fear failure and we feel it truly holds people back from being all they want to be. In many cases, failures are more a mindset than a reality. We found way too many opinions (see here and here) instead of facts about the items we were learning about. Instead of trusting the information we found, we wanted to learn our own truth.

Why Failure is Not an Option

To reduce the fear of failure that limits some of us this post will offer a different mindset on how to be ok with experiments. Learning to experiment has helped with weight management and all aspects of new things we have taken on. For us, this mindset has set us free to try new things without fear of failure.

First, let’s talk about failure and align on a simple concept. Failure is doing something wrong. The concept of wrong implies you know what you’re doing and fail to achieve a result despite that knowledge. Nobody knows everything. We learn by reading, observing, trying, and measuring how close we are to a desired outcome. We may repeat this process until we become successful. That is called learning, not failing.

Isn’t That Cheating?

Yes, what we are discussing is a bit of mental sleight of hand but that is the point. For us, it was helpful to remove the idea of failure by being open to creating a learning exercise. These experiments do fail, however, if they don’t improve your knowledge of the learning exercise. To improve knowledge, you have to constrain the learning you are doing. That is how we landed on considering our weight management learnings. With so many competing theories, pundits, and information, we found no one an expert. If everyone and no one was right, how could we fail?

What is an Experiment?

Let’s talk about creating an experiment.  Here are the basic tenets you have to have:

• A hunch or belief is something you can’t prove.   
• An expectation of outcome based on input (cause and effect).
• An idea of how long an observation period should be observed between input and expected output.
• How you will prove you were right or wrong so you can learn.
• Make sure it doesn’t conflict with another experiment that could impact it.

Applying that to weight management here is one example:

• Hunch: I believe if I eat 500 calories less a day for a month I can lose a pound in a week.
• Cause and Effect: Removing 500 calories a day from my diet will result in a reduction of one pound of weight per week. 
• Observation Period: I want to do this for a month so I can see ups and downs over an aggregate to confirm it is working.
• How To Prove: I will record my calories and weight. 
• Eliminating Variables: We will use our current workouts and not add or subtract from them during this experiment.

We Gained an Insight

We did that and it was annoying. In all honesty, it was truly and amazingly annoying but we learned a lot. It was also very telling data. We learned a lot from it. Did we lose 4 lbs. over 4 weeks as the pundits predicted? Um…no. Then why write a post on it?

As we said, we don’t believe in failure if learning comes out of it. It did produce a result of losing 2 lbs but not the 4 lbs expected. What this told us was that a calorie deficit was only part of managing our weight. This created another hypothesis which led to another experiment which created another learning experiment. Not once did we feel like we failed. We also knew that without trying it, and counting the calories, we still would have no answer.

Why it Works

This methodology also allows us to discuss things more publicly with others. Opening up a conversation with ‘I tried to lose 4 pounds last month on X diet and it didn’t work’ feels like a failure for many people. When we spin it into an experiment it doesn’t sound like we failed. ‘I was experimenting and learned that I could lose 2 pounds over 4 weeks by cutting my calories. I also learned about how much I was eating.’  That outcome feels more positive and conversational than something that went wrong.

 While it sounds like ‘feel good’ wordsmithing it is not. We learned how to give ourselves positive reinforcement and create success cycles in learning. In a sense, we gamified it. We learned how to give ourselves positive outcomes even if we didn’t like the results. By switching out our ideas of hard and fast goals for hypothesis, cause, effect outcome, and learning, we created a way to begin managing our weight. That is a win.

Some Tips to Make Experiments Easier

Do:

• Keep an experiment to a single cause/effect. 
• Timebox it to know if it works.
• Look at the data objectively. 
• Write them down and keep notes to revisit.

Don’t 

• Make broad sweeping changes as you can’t understand cause/effect in them.
• Make the time box too short or you may not get enough data.
• Be honest with the results. Something changed or it didn’t.
• Expect to be right all the time. If you aren’t getting surprised by outcomes, you aren’t challenging yourself. 

These experiments were how we started to unlock many aspects of our weight management. They gave us a fearless way to address changes we wanted to make. Further, they allowed us to prove what worked for us and what didn’t through evidence. In an area that has so much information we feel taking this approach will also help others meet their goals without fear. 

Invent the truth for yourself.

The post How To Learn If Your Hunch Is Right first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

In a previous post, we talked about how creating new habits takes courage, dedication, and discipline. Waiting to figure out what worked and didn’t was maddening. When we started, we figured it was going to be simple; change calories and we change our weight. In this post, we will discuss why this approach didn’t work, what we learned, and how we have learned to iterate over small changes over going all in.

Our Simple Goals

 We wanted a weight change of 0.5 – 1 lb. a week for a sustainable goal. In transparency, our goal was to lose weight. We found that the same rules apply to gaining weight. It’s known as the 3,500-calorie rule. That goal equated to a change of 500 calories daily for each of us.  Like many things you will read in the area of weight management, it turned out to be more of a guideline. We will discuss this in another post.

Going all in Instead of Iteration

Of course, we didn’t just reduce calories. We went for low-fat, low carbs and high-protein meals. We also decided to increase our water intake. Further, we cut out sweets in exchange for fruits and nuts. If you read our post on hidden calories we would find we were simply changing one devil for another. And of course, we started exercising more.

We are aware that calorie counting is a pain, goes in and out of fashion, and doesn’t take into account nutrition. Still, if we hadn’t counted our calories we would have never learned that supposedly healthy food was a calorie-dense as unhealthy. We had found another place that we felt lied to by so many sources of information.

So What Happened?

  It took roughly 4 weeks to start to even kick in. Why? Because it wasn’t easy to reduce our calories to the desired level. It was very hard to believe the data of what that looked like portion-wise. We were also forcing our bodies to make changes. The faster you try and make the changes the more it will want to fight you. Our bodies tend to want to stay where they are at. 

Here is where the problem came up. After 4 weeks we saw changes. If someone asked us what caused the change and we couldn’t tell them with any certainty. Was it the reduction of fat or the lowering of calories? We didn’t know the impact of water on our bodies as discussed in this post. Maybe it was the increased physical activity. Like other dieters, we cheated a lot as we stopped eating the dopamine fun foods like chocolate.

Lack of Repeatability Left us Stuck

Remember our goal as stated wasn’t about nutrition or being healthy. Our goal was sustainable weight management. For our weight management to be sustainable, it had to be repeatable. If we didn’t know what impacted the changes, we had no way of knowing how to stay on track. At this point, it wasn’t a lifestyle change. After riding the roller coaster up and down, we decided to attack our goals more scientifically.

It is the lack of consistency and multiple changes that create the roller coaster rides. It is easy to lose or gain weight as we stated in our post on the Weight Management Equations. What is hard is controlling or sustaining it by understanding what works for a person. This is what we found from the empirical evidence from our journey.

Here is What We Found: 

• Cutting carbs meant taking away too much fuel for us to work out properly. The workout intensity diminished over time.
• Adding excess protein created a need for more water to digest which created other GI tract problems. 
• Eating healthy, before we started monitoring calories, was adding more calories instead of lowering them.
• We were overworked and didn’t have enough recovery capacity from the exercise. This reduced the dopamine hit that we all get from a workout.  
• We would get injured working out as our bodies couldn’t recover based on our new ‘healthy’ diet.
• The results were initially good, but plateaued quickly and we had no idea what change caused what result.

We found that this was becoming a bad cycle. The cycle reinforced that all the suffering was for nothing. If you don’t see results and are suffering for something, you will stop trying. While we lost weight, we failed to maintain it.

Applying an Engineering Mindset

Coming from the software world, we decided to apply agile practices to our weight loss. This meant changing a couple of things, getting feedback from the scale for a couple of weeks, learning if it worked, and adjusting the course based on our learning. Through this approach, we found a way to understand what worked and what didn’t.

We finally landed on the fact we had to be more scientific.  It took making a small change, waiting for a result, and then iterating over to learn what worked for our bodies and goals. By starting with simple, understandable, consistent changes, we learned what worked for us.

Tips for Keeping on Track:

• Eating well-balanced meals unless directed by a medical or similar health professional helped us. We found unbalanced meals such as fat-free or sugar-free will not necessarily be sustainable long term.
• Be honest. If you enjoy wine or beer you need to count them in your calculations. They add up quickly and can skew understanding if left out.
• Ask the portion size before you order something at a restaurant so you aren’t surprised.  
• Make changes 2-3 at a time. If you change too much all at once it will be hard to understand what happened. 
• Use fast food to your advantage when traveling. They have great nutrition information and their portions are consistent from restaurant to restaurant.
• If you have a bad day, don’t try to compensate. Compensating for a bad day puts noise in your data. Just chalk it up to learning. 

Iteration was Key

With an iterative approach, we found we were able to make connections faster. Connections became learnings we could use. With each learning, we could adjust our course faster. When we hit a plateau, and nothing changed for a few weeks, we knew we had to do some research. As a result, we also realized how much information we received was just wrong.

We learned If we do not see changes after week 3 to adjust our plan. After resetting our calorie budget by 100-200 we would watch it for another week. We learned as we went. If nothing is moving for you, look honestly at what you’re doing. It does take a while for your body to actively feed on its stored calories. Likewise, eating an extra 1000 calories for one day won’t have a permanent impact on weight gain. 

 To be successful we had to learn to do it little by little over time. That is how we got off the cyclical part of diet and exercise. It simply became a game of learning what works for each of us as an individual.  It was the iteration of small changes that allowed us to see and understand changes. These changes lead to sustainability in our weight goals.

The post It’s Best To Iterate Quickly first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.