The problem? That moment rarely comes when or how we expect. And while we wait, life keeps moving. Dreams shrink. Health and youthful drive fade. Bad habits become muscle memory. The next chapter silently slips further away.

Many of us assume that the next chapter in life will start when it “should.” That someday, when the work slows down, the schedule clears, or a milestone arrives, life will suddenly feel easier, freer, more meaningful. We expect clarity to appear overnight, as if decades of routine will magically transform into the life we’ve imagined.

That is a trap.

We liked our work. But we also knew something simple: it wouldn’t last forever. Roles change. Energy changes. Health changes. Change is inevitable. Waiting for retirement or a distant “someday” to build the next chapter is risky—and uninspiring. We weren’t interested in sitting back and watching the days go by.

Recognizing the Trap

We’ve seen this pattern before. When we made a major career change in the past, we fell into the same mental trap most people do: thinking clarity would arrive after the leap. In reality, clarity comes from the work we do before and after a transition, not from the moment of change. That experience taught us to recognize the trap early when thinking about the next chapter.

The key lesson: your next chapter doesn’t have to wait. You don’t need to start from scratch at retirement.

Step 1: Stop Assuming Your Future Self Is a Different Person

The next chapter isn’t about reinventing yourself completely. Growth expands you, but it doesn’t erase your core interests. Your future self shouldn’t be a stranger. Pay attention to what consistently pulls you in—skills, hobbies, or projects you keep returning to.

Step 2: Take Stock and Identify the Delta

Start by listing the habits, skills, interests, and projects you’ve been consistently investing in. Then compare this inventory to the life you imagine. Where is the gap? What is missing?

The bigger the gap, the more dangerous the trap becomes. A large gap can make the future feel overwhelming, strengthening the temptation to wait for “someday” rather than act now.

Once you see the delta, you can create a focused plan of small, consistent actions to move the ball forward. That clarity prevents wasted effort on dramatic leaps and ensures progress compounds over time.

Step 3: Move the Ball Forward Every Day

If something matters enough to anchor your future, it deserves structured time in your present. Even 30 minutes a day dedicated to a skill, interest, or project compounds faster than waiting for a someday leap. Skills deepen. Confidence grows. Options multiply. That is how you avoid the Hail Mary.

Reframing the next chapter as something you build gradually takes the pressure off. The question shifts from “What will I do someday?” to “What deserves more reps this week?” That is tactical, actionable, and repeatable.

You don’t need to leave work you enjoy to prepare for what comes next. In fact, work you enjoy can fund and stabilize the next chapter if approached intentionally.

Build Your Next Chapter: 3-Step Action Framework

Step 1: Stop Assuming Your Future Self Is Different

Growth expands you; it doesn’t erase your core interests. So, start by identifying the skills, habits, and projects you keep returning to.

Step 2: Take Stock & Identify the Delta

First, list what you’re already investing time in. Next, compare it to the life you want. The bigger the gap, the more dangerous the “someday” trap becomes. Then, focus on small, consistent actions to close that gap.

Step 3: Move the Ball Forward Every Day

Even 30 minutes a day compounds faster than waiting for “someday.” Over time, building gradually, measuring progress, and iterating creates real momentum. Finally, reframe the question: “What deserves more reps this week?”

At this point, you’ve already begun taking actionable steps toward your next chapter. But there’s another trap that can quietly undermine progress if left unexamined.

Avoid the “It Will Be Better When” Trap

The real trap is the phrase “It will be better when we…”

• Retire
• Have more time
• Are focused on ourselves

Ultimately, time does not create clarity. Action does.

To get started, consider a simple filter:

• Find what you already spend time on that could scale?
• What skill are you quietly building?
• What interest keeps resurfacing year after year?
• Where can you commit to little, consistent progress instead of a future leap?

Chances are, that is already your next chapter in early form.

Build a Next Chapter You’ll Actually Enjoy

Wrapping Up

Your next chapter should not feel like a stranger. It should feel like a more developed version of who you already are. However, if it feels disconnected from your current habits and interests, reassess the vision. The goal is alignment, not escape.

We recognized that attempting a ‘Hail Mary’ pass into the end zone at the last minute is a trap. That is how we used to think of our future. Instead, we are moving the ball now, a few yards at a time. Measured risk. Compounding effort. So, start moving the ball today. Your next chapter doesn’t have to wait for a distant someday—it’s being built in the choices you make now.

The Future:
Don’t imagine it-
-Build It

The post How to Break the Golden Years Trap first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

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.

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.

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.

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