The medical, health, and fitness communities rely on data to determine a person’s peak health and optimal weight. To make things easier to find, we highlighted some of the most essential tools and formulas and pointed you to resources for digging deeper.

That said, anyone who’s spent time in health and fitness knows that trends come and go. Further, these tools and formulas focus on large populations, not always matching an individual’s goals. New theories, tools, and approaches constantly emerge, so we must continually revisit and refine what we know.

Disclaimer

Before diving in, here are the axioms that drive our statement that each tool is a single lens on where you are in meeting your goals, not who you are. 

• Each human being is a different living, breathing organism. 
• Every health organization and government must try to set standards that are the broadest for all people. 

Also, we aren’t here to judge these openly. We aim to discuss what each is attempting to ascertain, how it tracks it, and how it provides insight into your personal goals. Now on to the tools!

Body Mass and Composition

So, like us, you are curious and want to understand your body weight and makeup. These tools help answer questions like “Am I heavy for my size?” or “How much of my weight is muscle, fat, or bone?” They do this by measuring parts of your body and comparing them.

• BMI or Body Mass Index Calculator: A calculator for adults to gauge if they are over-/or underweight. 

• Skin Fold Test: This test uses calipers to measure specific skin folds to determine a person’s muscle-to-fat ratio.

• WHR or Waist to Hip Ratio Test: Another body composition test that relies on a difference in the circumference of someone’s waist relative to their hips. 

• Dunk or Hydrostatic Weighing Test: This test uses your buoyancy to determine your body composition. It uses Archimedes’ principle to make its determination.   

Calorie Intake and Consumption

• BMR or Base Metabolic Rate: A calculator that estimates the total number of calories your body burns daily at rest. Rest means eating, sleeping, and performing normal respiration and blood pumping. 

• TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure: This formula is roughly BMR with activity added. That being said, activity is also not a standard because it is based on you and your current state of conditioning or fitness. 

• DRI or Daily Required Intake: DRI is BMR calories broken down into fats, proteins, carbohydrates, macronutrients, etc., according to the USDA MyPlate.gov standard. 

But Wait, There’s More!

We didn’t get into activity calculations, such as the RPE (Rate or Perceived Energy) Scale for perceived exertion, nor Bone Density scans, such as DEXA (sometimes called DXA), to determine body composition. Why? We wanted to focus on those most available to the average person just looking for basic guidance, like we were. 

An Important Point To Note

Remember that post on serving size we wrote? Yes, take a look at your BMR and TDEE. You may find that you are not what the USDA terms the ‘average’ person who needs x calories daily. This is where most problems with weight management start for people. Once you have done some research, you will find your number.

Wrapping Up;

This post collects a variety of tools commonly used to guide weight and health management. Each can be helpful, but each has pros and cons. We aren’t here to decide what’s right for you, but if you choose to use them, remember to research them. None of these tools is an authority on you unless you fall into the exact ‘average’ they are targeting. Instead, see them as valuable tools, helping you shape and refine your approach to your goals.

The post The Truth About Fitness Calculators first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portions Vs Meals

In another post, we discussed the difference between portions and meals. We also discussed what a serving size is and isn’t. Since we know a serving size is something based on what others eat, we want to define a portion as the amount of something you eat based on your calorie budget. For example, you may order a pizza but may only eat two slices of an extra-large pie. Was that a portion or a serving of that pizza?

We are calling that out intentionally as we know there is confusion around the definitions of portions vs servings. This becomes a bit more problematic to talk about in multi-course meals where we have proteins, starches, and usually a vegetable as a main entree plus sides. 

This gets more problematic because when building an a la carte meal, you will need portions that make up all three. When you take home leftovers from a restaurant, you may see all three as one portion of a meal. This portion thing begins to sound a little weird but, no worries, we will clear it up a bit later. 

Portion Planning 

To plan for a month of meals we need to extend the number of items we need to have on hand.  Don’t worry, they don’t necessarily add to our work. Remember we can gain portions from simply cooking a little more or taking home leftovers from a restaurant. Before we get to that, let’s give ourselves a definition and again a little harmless math.

• Number of Diners per Meal (NDpM) which is, you guessed it, the number of people you need to feed.
• A complete Meal we define as a meal that approximates proteins, starches, and vegetables to approximate the USDA MyPlate standard.

Let’s also use the table and definitions we had in the previous post to work through our math.

Running Total of Meals Worksheet

The Math

Let’s assume 4 diners for our NdpM. What we then have for the total number of portions we need to make or have on hand for four weeks is 4 x 84  or 336 individual portions correct? That is not exactly the right number as we had defined a complete meal as containing 3 items. This means our Made To Order, A La Carte, and Snack-style meals all may be constructed of individual items such as a portion of chicken, rice, and say roasted corn. The Made To Order may also be complete as is such as fried rice with pork and vegetables. 

That leaves us with roughly a need for the following minimum and maximum items for a meal. 

Min and Max Items per Meal Worksheet

Putting this all together we would need a minimum and maximum number of meal portions, as shown below.

Combined Totals Worksheet

When we multiply those totals by our NDpM of 4 you will notice that we get absurd numbers of between 352 and 672 portions of food to feed a group of 4 for a month. In our case, we are only two so we get between 176 to 336 portions of food. 

They Are Real Numbers

They are real but not scary. Remember that is how much you need for 4 people for a month. We also need to realize that If you buy a 2lb bag of corn, depending on your and your diner’s calorie budgets, you may get eight 4-ounce portions of vegetables from it. When you cook a 3lb roast, after water loss, you may get ten 4-ounce portions from it. What happens if you throw in some mashed potatoes which are just as easy to create twelve 4-ounce portions?

What happens is that you have just covered a Made To Order meal that covers creating up to two complete meals for four plus extra portions left over to use for another meal. You just knocked out 20 portions in one meal. Wait, it gets better. What about pre-made or takeout? In each of these cases, you may end up with more food than can be eaten in one sitting. Those extra portions can be used to make meals later as well.

Well Duh! 

We spent a lot of time telling you something you already knew….maybe? We all inherently do this type of planning from week to week but maybe not month to month. By being cognizant of how we can plan longer term, and reduce food making to portions we need rather than having not enough or too much. 

As we started to cook at home more, we thought we needed a lot more than we did. We found ourselves cooking and storing too much. We arrived at thinking about portions over serving size or complete meals to help us plan. We also focused on a calorie budget to make sure our meals were appropriately sized. This began to save us time and money over the aggregate. 

This is also a rolling plan meaning after a while, the meals you make help support the extra portions. This happens more naturally as you learn to think about the trade-offs of say doing individual items such as a roast vs a casserole. It also eventually leads to having a larger mix of items you want to eat at home which can reduce dependency on eating out. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed the nuances of planning with portions over just meals. At first glance the numbers are scary however they are simply numbers. Once you understand this is a month of food numbers aren’t that absurd.

Further with some lifestyle tweaks, we found we could quickly fill them with very little effort. They do give us an approach to managing our food, shopping, and eating out with a goal of efficiency and reduced waste. Lastly, this approach helps us keep an eye on our calorie budgets whether we want to slim down, maintain, or bulk up. 

The post How To Make Meal Plans With Portions first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

To start thinking about a plan, we needed to break down our meals into some taxonomy so we could talk about how many of each type we would want. As discussed previously in our budget post, this will give us a rough idea of how many of each we want and the trade-offs of making them.  Here is our meal taxonomy:

• Made To Order: Any meal we are preparing to eat when done cooking
• Homemade One Dish: Any meal containing protein, starch, and vegetables in one dish such as Beef Stew.
• Pre-made One Dish: Any meal such as frozen store-bought lasagna or burritos purchased to be cooked by us that contained protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables.
• A La Carte: Individual portions of protein, starch, or vegetable such as roast turkey, mashed potatoes, or corn but not mixed.
• Snack Style: Any meal that is composed of items we think of as snacks like crackers, cheese, smoked fish, etc. 
• Restaurant: Any meal where we plan to go out to eat which can run the gamut from a 3-star Michelin restaurant to the local convenience store hot case.

Why do we need a taxonomy to plan? Because we want to define what we need to store in our fridge, freezer, and pantry in some manner so we can have a known number of things. This classification allowed us to plan how we would use what was stored when we stored it. This eventually led to understanding how much time and money we needed to spend to keep us fully stocked. More on that later.

A La Carte Further Defined

We defined this as a specific way to think about how we stored parts of meals that were interchangeable. The point of a la carte is to have multiple ways to address both our Daily Required Intake (DRI) while attempting to handle ideas covered by MyPlate. Let’s work through an example.

If we have roasted corn as a vegetable side frozen, we can use that corn with many different things. The same for store-bought frozen carrots. We can have them with turkey, steak, or pork tenderloin. They also pair well with starch such as rice, mashed potatoes, and a dinner roll. Due to this mix-and-match form, we stuck to calling it a la carte as each was an individual item to be eaten on its own.

Doing Some math

Okay, we have to do some math here. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine, you can skip ahead to the table. For those feeling a need to understand how we got there, here is the skinny. Also, note we are discussing meal plans first and leave total portions for another part of the post. First some definitions:

• The number of Meals per Day (MpD) and Total Days to budget for (TD) should be self-explanatory. To develop our plan, we will assume most people eat 2-3 meals daily and consider a week 7 days. 
• The Total number of Meals (TnM) is MpD x TD so if you have 3 meals a day for 7 days you will have 3 x 7 =21 meals to plan. 
• Weeks to Plan (WtP) is how many weeks we will be planning for.

Let’s do some math now. We want to plan for 4 weeks of eating 3 meals a day. Based on our math TnM = MpD x TD x WtP. We then get 3 x 7 x 4 = 84 meals. That means from our taxonomy of different meal types we need to decide how to fulfill 84 meals over four weeks. Let’s not let the numbers scare us yet. We will prove that creating that amount of food is easier than it sounds. 

We Figure You Already Know This

There is nothing rocket science here in the math we have discussed so far but we feel we need to start here. Anyone can come up with the above in some shape or form. We started here to set a baseline. As planning grows in complexity, with the number of dinners, calorie budgets, portion planning, etc. we wanted to have some set of initial kick-offs to ground us. Those nuances will follow in additional posts.

Breaking It Down

Let’s put that into a table spread across our meal types. This is our ‘plan’ for what we need. We did this with a spreadsheet but you can visualize this any way you like. This is an example as you may choose different combinations for your needs based on calorie, time, and financial cost of meals.

In this table above, the keywords are running the total needed and we can dig in there a bit harder to explain. 

The running total means the total number of meals we must have in stock for the next four weeks. It doesn’t mean the number of meals we must make for the next four weeks. What this gives us is an idea of how much we need to buy, make, or eat out to satisfy our calorie budget goals for the next month. It is also a predictor of how much we can use in the next four weeks. 

Part of the challenge we faced was overstocking. We want to keep enough meals around to fit our needs without making so many we need a large amount of space to keep them. We found ourselves having too much at times which took forever to use up. Also, we found we would become unbalanced which caused us to spend more time making one-offs than we wanted. 

The totals are not related to the number of meals we have to make from scratch. We can get economies of scale here by making extra portions for a meal, buying multi-portion meals like frozen pizza, or even taking home some leftovers from say our favorite Thai takeout. 

Portions vs Meals 

What we have intentionally avoided discussing portions in this post. We will follow up in another post on how portions play into planning. It is in the portion sizes that the economies of scale start working for us. Since the number of portions needed is a function of how much we make, which style of meals, our calorie budgets, and the number of diners we have, it is best to have it in another post. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to make a basic plan for the amount of meals you need. This planning helps budget food, storage space, time,e and turnover of items. By doing a little math based on a loose taxonomy of meal types, we can define our needs more accurately. Once this plan is understood, we can look next to how to use it to fulfill our meal and portion needs. 

The post How To Make Usable Meal Plans first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Big Meals Can Mean Big Calories

As we looked to reduce our calorie intake we faced a big challenge in our three full meals a-day diet. When growing up, we were trained to eat what were known as three square meals (considered high-calorie and hardy). While in decline, we still have a cultural norm around it. Remember, food isn’t just about the intake of calories. For some, it is also a time for family and socialization. 

Not Everyone Does It

The reality is not all cultures share this type of meal. In other cultures, the day’s main meal may historically be mid-day. This was the case with the Canadian half of our family. Other cultures such as Greek and Spanish may share later meals or multiple smaller meals.  Our mention of that is to point out that there is variance in our world in styles and times of eating.  

Getting Past Old Habits

For our goals, we started to question what a full meal was and how to create a similar nutrition profile with items that many consider snacks. For us raised where a meal has a main dish and sides that shift can be hard to break through mentally. A meal could be a ham sandwich and chips with pickles or a steak with green beans and baked potato. This differs from what we would call snack items such as cheese, trail mix, and even beef sticks. In the snacks as a meal model, there is no primary entree to build the meal around. There is only the balance of items such as those recommended in the USDA’s MyPlate. 

Do we need to have a full meal main and side dish prepared by ourselves or others? More and more people are saying no, however, the 3 a day is a simple way to break up caloric intake evenly over our waking hours. More importantly, how we change our perception about meals can have a large impact on our calorie budget. As America has become more of a snack culture, the challenge has become that those snacks are not healthy choices. 

Change the Portion, Not the Balance

This is where snacks get a bad name but they don’t have to be. We aren’t saying to eat chips, candy, and soda as a meal replacement. If we revisit the idea of a meal with sides its origin was a balanced plate. This is not different from the idea of tapas or the USDA’s MyPlate. We can drive that need for the big three in a diet through snacks without the challenging portion sizes.

Why is this concept important? How do snacks as meals benefit us?  When homemade or created from from foods we already have on hand they can:

• Allow flexibility in meal schedules.
• Use existing staples such as cheese, nuts, fruits, and crackers already on hand.
• Align our intake of food to our nutrition needs and calorie budgets. 
• Help manage hunger spikes without over-eating.

Snacks Aren’t Evil, Choices Can Be

What foods are we talking about? Are we talking potato chips, clam dip, and pizza rolls? No. But you do you if that is what you like, is in your calorie budget, and fits your nutrient needs. Our guess is they won’t. What we are talking about is more about balanced food created or on hand at home. Here are a few examples of meals:

• Tuna salad, crackers, pickles and cheese.
• Jerky, trail mix, dehydrated broccoli florets, yogurt.
• Beef sticks, granola bars, fresh vegetables such as carrots or cucumbers.
• Hard-boiled eggs, tortillas, cheese and salsa.
• Smoked fish, crackers, cottage cheese, celery.   

Each of the above has a mix of items that contain the big 3 and can be kept readily on hand. Are they healthy? Healthy is a subjective term based on your needs and life choices. Many of the items discussed can be produced at home to have better control over ingredients.  The more important thing is that they can all be created from items that can be kept on hand, and are mostly shelf-stable or refrigerate/freezer-friendly. 

Are We Saying Eat UHP Foods?

We understand that items such as beef sticks, jerky, and even fruit-flavored yogurt are now considered Ultra-High Processed Food. These new guidelines include granola bars, ham, ice cream, and candy. Our approach to dealing with these guidelines is to keep all things in moderation. We know that there is mercury in Tuna therefore, not being in an at-risk group, we may only have it twice a month. 

We also produce items like jerky, bread, and granola bars so we can control much more of our food supply. You do you because it’s your body. You will make me give up my homemade jerky, ice cream, and candies when you pull them from my cold dead hands.  We want to live simply and still eat better more often than not.

We’re Deconstructing a Meal

In truth, all of the above are very similar in concept to deconstructed meals.  Let’s take the first one with tuna. Isn’t this simply a tuna melt which is tuna salad, bread (a starch, but we use crackers), pickles, and cheese (which makes it a melt)? Doesn’t the one with hard-boiled eggs and tortillas seem a lot like Hueveo Rancheros? That is the point. 

By using a snack approach to balanced meals we can reduce the amount of time we spend cooking. To do this look at a meal and break it down. Can you substitute different parts of the meal for other items? If you can’t then can you use the ingredients on hand together as a full meal? Balance is the key.

Many of us have one-off items such as grabbing an apple as a snack. The challenge is balance. This is not to say we don’t enjoy a bag of chips or cookies once and a while. Our blog’s premise is not about right or wrong or healthy or not. We want to reduce the barriers to simplifying getting to your goals by pointing out alternate ways of getting your Daily Required Intake or DRI. When we hear snacks there is a perception it isn’t healthy. 

Wrapping Up

We have discussed many aspects of snacks as meal replacements. As with all health and food-related topics, it is your choice. We assert that eating 3 big meals a day, even if homemade, can be outside our caloric needs. The timing of the meals may or may not be the best for your body and lifestyle. Rather than sitting down to a full plate of food, it may help to just grab some roast deli chicken crackers, cheese, and some trail mix instead. 

The post The Best Meals Can Be Simple Snacks first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

When you change your activity levels you change the amount of calories your body needs. Based on your goals, you need to adjust your intake accordingly. The goal of this post is to help you understand the impact of your activity levels on your goals.

Making it Personal

If you have gone through the BMR exercise in this previous post you know physical activity impacts how many calories you need. The more active you are, the more calories you burn. When first distilling this for our own needs, much of what we found was maddeningly unhelpful information.  

I like going to the gym and lifting weights. For me, it is a stress release. It is also a lifestyle choice because I want to be able to do certain things. If I have to move a 60 lb bag or concrete, I don’t want to have to call someone. It gives me independence. This has a direct impact on my weight and my calorie needs.

I can’t stand going to the gym and walking or running on a treadmill. I do it because I have to. My partner loves running on a treadmill or outside. That is her stress release. She can outrun me and doesn’t become as winded as easily. This activity has a direct impact on her calorie needs. Though she does it, she doesn’t enjoy lifting heavy weights. She can’t carry a 60 lb bag of concrete very far.

Different People, Goals, and Abilities

 Different people, different activities, different impacts on burning calories. We also have different goals and outcomes we want for our specific lifestyles. This is not a post on weightlifting or cardiovascular care so we won’t go into that. We also recognize that both are important in holistic health. Our point is simply both are activities and both impact calories needed and therefore our weight management plans.

Activity isn’t necessarily tied to a gym. Activity can be in multiple forms such as climbing stairs or mowing the lawn. This is what we read when trying to analyze our personal activity levels for the BMR and that makes sense. What we found missing in those explanations was the personalization. 

If you lead a sedentary lifestyle and you climb 2 flights of stairs, you may be winded. A person who runs all the time may be able to climb 50 flights of stairs and not feel winded. Let’s now add one person who is shorter than the other with a smaller step. Do they both get the same physical activity from walking up those steps? 

This is the main issue; we are not all the same. What is a hard activity for one person is not the same as another. This is another reason why people can fail at managing weight; lack of information specific to them. Here is an example of what we find. It gives information for someone who’s 154 lbs. I am not 154 lbs and I don’t want to be. If I was, I doubt I would be able to carry my concrete very far! I was there once and had no muscle structure!  

Ways to Define Activity

We like the definition given here on activity level that takes into account heart rate and breathing. That is for a later post. For those starting, the talk test provides very initial ideas about what moderate and vigorous activity is. It also will give you some idea of what others see as moderate and vigorous activity. This will help give you some guidelines as to how your weight management plan is affected by your activity levels. 

Understanding what activity is to you based on your current abilities is an important piece. It will change as your body changes. You can change it as your goals change. By knowing what it means you can now do an apples-to-apples comparison for what it means to others, This allows you to make a more informed decision about how many calories you need based on BMR. 

This post gives you another tool in your weight management toolbox. You can define what you need to meet your weight management goals. You know what you need without activity and you know the impact of activity on the calories you need. The problem is becoming definable.

The post Easily Pair Your Activity To Goals first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We all know water is vital to life and health. In this post, we discuss our water needs and why it helps us manage our weight goals. After reading this post, we believe you will understand the need to be consistent with your water intake to help you meet your goals.

We’re Talking Management Not Diet

First, this is not a blog on diet or nutrition. Because there are several places you can learn how water affects or does not affect weight loss, we won’t discuss those specifics here. We would rather you take from this post that water is an integral part of making your goals attainable. We learned that being consistent with water helps keep our weight management consistent.

When approaching your goals through data you need to keep your water intake stable. For example, if you exercise you will also use water faster than if you don’t. When you exert yourself that water needs to be replenished. Not everyone may realize the same happens with digestion. Without proper hydration, your digestive processes may not be consistent. Because we are not experts, we will defer better-informed sources on the subjects.

• How Much Water To Drink Based On Your Weight
• Drinking Water Helps Weight Loss
• Why Water Is Important

Why is Consistency Important?

In our journey, we found water intake is important to properly understand weight management. As we learned in science class the human body is composed of 60% water. The water is stored in our blood, fat, digestive tract, skin, brain, etc. of our body. If you have been dehydrated you know there are signs that things are going wrong. You feel thirsty, lethargic, have cramps, or have a hard time getting food to, well, move along. As a result, we found if we weren’t consistent, our weight jumped around a lot more.

As an exercise, let’s do some water math. If you are 200 lbs. and are composed of 60% water, 120 lbs. of your weight is derived from water. What would happen if you go camping with friends and forget to pack enough water? Adding to the scenario, you do a little hiking on a hot day. You would expect the outcome would be that you become a little dehydrated but surely survivable. Becoming mildly dehydrated drops your water content to 58%. The delta between 60% and 58% is 2% resulting in 2.4 lbs. of water weight lost. All of that is fine but it does make for noisy and unreliable results tracking.

Don’t Believe Us?

Manipulating water intake in some sports is a way competitors use dehydration to drop 5%-10% of their body weight for a match. The technique is known as water cutting. What they use is intentional extreme dehydration over missing a few glasses but at its’ core, the principles are the same.

DO NOT TRY WATER CUTTING INTENTIONALLY TO LOSE WEIGHT ON YOUR OWN. IT IS DANGEROUS. PEOPLE HAVE DIED USING THIS TECHNIQUE.

When tracking our daily progress, hydration is a real problem we face with weight management. Our home scale won’t be able to distinguish what that 2.4 lbs. is. The reverse may happen if you over-hydrate afterwards. You may see a spike in weight gain. We had to learn to form good habits so we didn’t ride this rollercoaster.

Forming Good Water Habits

Eliminating the variable of water’s impact on weight is fairly easy; be consistent. Here are some simple steps to make that happen:

• Understand your water needs based on your body, exertion levels, and ambient temperatures.
• Find a container to hold that much water ( or a known quantity ).
• Divide the amount of water by some meaningful amount so it can be consumed during waking hours.
• Set a timer or reminder on your smartphone, kitchen timer, or other audible device.
• Every time the timer goes off, pour the amount of water you divided the day into a glass and drink it.

If this seems prescriptive and rigid it’s because at first, it is! Why?

This is building muscle memory and good habits. Habits are formed by repeating the same thing again and again over time. You’re making a positive life change here by forming this new habit but it takes repetition to stick.

Having the container helps because it is a visual record of how you are meeting your goals over the day. The goal here is consistency over time.

All Liquids Are Not Equal

One gotcha here worth talking about. Not all liquid is created equal. 24 oz of lemonade is not the same hydration as 24 oz of water. Lemonade, soda, and other liquids have other ingredients in them such as sugars, pulp, salts, etc. that don’t hydrate the same as water. It doesn’t mean don’t drink them but they may or may not bring other things to the party. We will discuss this more in a post on hidden calories.

Also, hydration needs for exercise, heat, digestion, etc. may cause the need for some daily changes to the amount you need. If you are doing a 10-mile hike in 80 F weather, you are going to need more water. Drink it. This point is to be consistent as much as possible but needs may spike from time to time.

Eliminating variables like water levels in your weight management journey helps you understand what your body is doing better. It makes your weigh-ins, which we will talk about later, more accurate and helpful.

You now have another tool for managing your weight should you choose to use it. Consistently drinking the water your body requires will make understanding what is impacting your weight easier. With most things, the goal is to create good habits so you recognize when you are deviating from them.

The post How To Be Consistent With Water first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

You need to understand calories to manage your weight. If you want to manage your weight it means you have to know what your caloric intake is every day. Does that sound daunting or just simply annoying? It is both annoying and at first daunting but it does get easier over time. By the end of this post, we would like you to feel it is necessary and somewhat easy to do.

Making it Easier Through Technology

We found using calorie-counting applications is the easiest and most painless way to do this. While people have legitimate privacy concerns with sharing data, let’s put this in perspective. If you binge eat a quart of triple chocolate ice cream one day, and someone finds out, who cares? I once ate a pound of peanut butter while watching a late-night movie. Not my finest moment but who cares what happened other than me and my doctor?

The Primary Thing to Look for in Phone Apps Is:

• The amount of data they have on food items.
• An ability to scan a barcode or use a picture to log.
• The ability to show the nutritional breakdown of calories.
• Prompts, reminders, and other ways to keep you honest.
• Has the ability to change the serving size.
• Allows you to create your entries.
• A way to tie it in with other wearable technology such as a step or heart rate monitor.

There are many apps out there. We have had success with MyFitnessPal and Lose It. You should seek what works for you based on your needs, phone, and weight management goals. You need to identify what you want the app to do as they vary significantly in price. Before setting one up or buying one, make sure you do your research.

What to Log and Why

When Logging There are Some Tenants to Live By:

• Log what you eat right after you eat it to be accurate.
• Log everything even if it is small like the two teaspoons of sugar in your coffee.
• When there are multiple listings for something, choose the average.
• Have a couple of brews planned for the evening? Log them and build them in before you have them.
• Don’t try to log things such as fats your home meal was cooked unless it was an ingredient in the recipe.

After two weeks of logging, we learned exactly how our calorie intake lined up with our goals. If you can do it for 30 days it becomes a life-changing habit. Why make such a claim? We are lied to by labels, portion sizes, and add-ons that we don’t realize have a high impact on our calorie intake.

You will Probably See Some Surprises

We all want to eat healthy. Many of us will choose a salad as an entree for that reason. There is a misconception that salads are low-calorie or calorie-free. Unfortunately, that is not always true. Dressing, cheese, and nuts all are calorie-dense. Let’s compare a national brand of Ranch vs Oil and vinegar. For a serving size of two tablespoons, the Ranch is 130 calories while the oil and vinegar is 160.

What about those McNuggets? I love McDonalds! When you order a 10-piece McNuggets it is only 410 calories. You also add 3 BBQ sauces and a large lemonade to complete the meal. Those items don’t come without calories. 3 BBQ sauces are 135 calories, and the lemonade is 250. Your meal is now 795 calories. Often this is the case with calorie hidden add-ons and we don’t think about it such as fry sauce. You can find more information here.

With Honesty Comes Actionable Data

We will talk later more about this subject of where hidden calories are. The point of logging everything is to make you aware of what you are eating. The devil is in the details. We never realized how much this was happening until we forced ourselves to go through this exercise. That being said, this is about math and not a nutritional analysis. 795 calories is simply 795 calories. It isn’t wrong or right, it’s calories. You may want them, you may not.

Starting to count your calories gives you the power to understand yourself, what you eat, and where hidden gotchas are. Through the simple ( though annoying at first ) task of logging your food, you become empowered. This will lead to understanding how your goals are met or not met by something you finally control; caloric intake.

Where we have landed is that you now have a tool that helps you manage your weight. It isn’t easy. You have to have some level of discipline to do it. It requires being honest with yourself. Up until now, it was easy to fail in managing your weight. Advertising, portion sizes, labels, and hidden calories all conspire against us.

The post Honesty Goes Great With Calories first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Many of us want control over our weight. Some people want to lose weight. Other people want to gain weight. When we reach our target weight all of us want to maintain that weight. In this post, we will explore one of the most simple concepts in weight management. What we want you to walk away with is an understanding of a couple of really easy concepts to keep in mind the next time you think about your weight goals and meal planning

Consider the Following Traditional Axioms

The formula to gain weight is (Ci > Cn) * t == Wg. If you continually ingest (Ci) more calories than your body needs (Cn), over time (t), your body will store some of those. That is how you gain weight (Wg).

The formula to lose weight is (Ci < Cn) * t == Wl. If you continually ingest (Ci) fewer calories than your body needs (Cn), over time (t), your body will use what it stores to supplement those calories. That is how you lose weight (Wl).

The formula to maintain your current weight is (Ci == Cn) * t == Wm. If you continually ingest (Ci) the same calories that your body needs (Cn), over time (t), your body will remain in balance. That is how you maintain your weight (Wm).

That’s a VERY Broad Generalization

Those statements are very broad and sweeping. In reality, there are many factors to calculate how and why we gain or lose weight. We can’t start with all the nuances though. It is the nuances that take time to understand as they are based on your body and goals, not anyone else’s. This is also why so many people struggle with weight management.

Also, these axioms do not hold 100% true when applied to single forms of nutrition. Getting all of your daily 2,000 calories from bread is not going to have the same outcomes as eating 2,000 calories from fish. Here we need to make some assumptions at the beginning of our journey. These calories come from balanced sources including proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

We will revisit these nuances later in our journey because they are important. Right now there are so many they will become distractions.

Your Understanding of Yourself Is Key

Understanding what our bodies need in terms of calories to manage our weight is key. Everyone is so different with different lifestyles, body sizes, and genetics. You may be a male competitive gamer in your teens that incurs long periods of sitting. At the opposite end of the spectrum, may be competitive bodybuilding women over 50. You may drive a truck for a living. Someone else’s vocation may be a logger. Everyone requires something different calorie-wise.

Where to start then with the axioms? Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR. BMR is a calculation based on height, weight, gender assigned at birth, and activity level. The calories it calculates are what your body needs to survive (pump blood, breathe, etc.) plus the calories you need for the amount of physical activity you do.

How to Use the BMR

You must decide how to manage your intake to get the gains you want. For me, and my timelines, to reduce my weight I started with reducing by 1000 calories a day from roughly 2700 to 1700 to drop a pound a week. That turned into a roller-coaster ride of false starts and stops. It wasn’t sustainable. I would find out later that this was more about not being truly honest with what my intake and exercise levels were.

In the spirit of honesty that we learned the hard way, here is a link to what activity is and isn’t.

The key is time and consistency. You should keep a daily log of what you eat calorie-wise. You should pick a realistic amount under/over your BMR + adjusted calorie needs for activity. Too little and you won’t see enough change. Too much and it won’t be sustainable. This also means weighing yourself regularly.

Learn to Experiment

One thing we feel is an important thing to make this work for you. Think of it as an experiment, not something that is one-and-done. You gather data and look at it. There is no failure. If something isn’t working, change one thing, and re-evaluate in a week. Did that change help? If not, that is simply more data, not a failure. Experiment, collect data, evaluate, learn, and experiment again until something changes. In that change, you will see what works for you.

At this point, you have the tools to understand how to gain, lose, or maintain your weight. These equations were the spark of a bigger journey and life change for us. They were the realization that some of the most complicated things could be simplified and distilled.

After many years of trial and error, we started making powerful connections to other parts of our lives we could simplify through some basic research, understanding, and taking actionable steps based on the outcomes we wanted.

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