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.

Setting Up our Goals

To begin with, we got honest about our goals, which was an outcome of reviewing our habits. After some conversations and ideating, we made a list of our 3 to 6-month goals with attainable outcomes. Achievable and actionable goals are key to driving real, attainable outcomes. These items went into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t easy because we had to be honest about trade-offs and priorities.

In that process, we found that there are things we think we want to do and things we will do. Many of us have things we say we want but will never achieve because we cannot take action or are unwilling to suffer for them. We may want to be rock stars or master gardeners, which takes time and energy. 

If we pursue those goals, we must trade off other things we want to expend energy on. By focusing on what we wish to in a measurable and actionable way, we make sure we focus our energy on things we won’t simply drop just because something got ‘hard’. Unfortunately, growth isn’t easy, but by focusing on actionable items, you can prove that you are progressing due to your effort.

Buckets of Hours for Balance

We assigned each goal a bucket of hours each week. Those buckets of hours allow us to stay balanced and manage multiple goals simultaneously. We are rarely engaged in one single goal at a time. There will usually be an attempt to attain various goals simultaneously. 

Even if you want to be an Olympic athlete, you will not be training every minute of the day. You will also need to build your brand, do interviews, and find a way to earn income later. The sport may be the primary focus, but it can’t always be the only thing you can focus on. 

Before the week starts, we put what we will work on on the sheet and tie those items to the larger goals. We then estimate each item to make sure it can make it happen. Further, we make sure the goals are attainable that week. We can’t plant a garden if the weather isn’t expected to cooperate. This work creates an actionable weekly plan with no foreseeable blocking dependencies.

Logging our Time

Every day, we ‘bill’ our time against the tasks we have for that week, just like any other project. We log this for every day we work on one of the tasks. To be realistic, we also bill our daily duties, such as making dinner, doing dishes, or even going to the gym. Let’s face it: those things also take time and limit our capacity for the bigger goals.

As the week goes on, we add notes about wins, losses, and learnings as things progress. These become items to review every Friday to gauge how the week went. Our time logging creates a data-based way of determining how things are proceeding. 

 If something happens and we can’t get through an item, we want to ensure it doesn’t keep recurring. If it happens repeatedly, it is feedback that it is not actionable or can’t be done right now due to some dependency.

Celebrate the Wins

We have learned that we must also celebrate our wins if something has gone well. If we have made a huge gain or overcome a hurdle, we want to recognize and reward ourselves; otherwise, working towards long-term goals can feel like an overwhelming slog. If you’re going to become a great baker, you want to make sure you recognize when you have made something great so you know how to repeat it. 

The point here is that we want to remove the stigma of failure. By documenting learnings, we see how we are growing, while celebrating wins, we see our progress. This helps us through positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement, which can lead to cognitive biases like Survivor’s Bias that block our growth.

This approach has made us feel more productive and focused. This isn’t a new concept per se. We do Scrum events in software engineering to help teams build their products. Initially, that is where the idea of our personal time card started, but it is not what it has become.

An Actionable Feedback Loop

Our timecard has become a constant feedback loop that helps us address the question, ‘Am I doing everything possible to achieve what I want and what is truly important to me?’ That question can be tricky to answer when we are the judge and jury looking at our performance. It always feels like more must be done, which isn’t always actionable or possible.

A timesheet that tracks progress toward our personal goals gives us a practical gut check and a way to examine our approach to goals and the trade-offs between them. We have real numbers to look at when we ask ourselves if I am doing enough about <x> or should focus more on <y> this week. It then becomes much more about data than about emotional context or mood.

What, No Example?

No, we are not going to give an example. Why? We don’t want to focus on the tools. You can take notes on a whiteboard, a Google calendar, an Excel spreadsheet, or even sticky notes. The point is that the tools don’t matter, but the process does. All you need to do to succeed is:

• Create a set of actionable goals you want to work towards.
• Create a bucket of hours for each.
• Log your time daily.
• Have a win, a learning, or a failure? Take a note!
• Review once a week to celebrate what got done and learn from what went wrong.

Wrapping Up

We know punching a clock can feel tedious. However, we have found this approach a huge help. While your mileage may vary, it has been beneficial for us in balancing our march toward multiple goals. It has helped us realize where we want to be and, more importantly, how to estimate our progress.

The post How To Be Successful Via A Time Card 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.

This post is a work in progress with the intent that we cover what is working for us. It is one step in cataloging all of our staples so that we can understand how to optimize our storage space, time spent cooking, and economies of scale in making purchases. This is part of a larger list I wanted when we first started cooking around how to stock a pantry. Since all our searches came up with nothing that spoke to us or our style and calorie budget, we decided to make our own. 

The ‘plan’ we originally came up with was ambitious. We wanted to be able to bake any time we wanted and only go to the store every other week. We also wanted a way to make sure we had items that were shelf stable or had a decent shelf life in the fridge so we didn’t waste food. Why have such lofty goals? It was an experiment to see how off-grid we could live when we retired as well as how much food we could make ourselves.

We also bought items such as cake flour and mixes even though I believe I have made two cakes in my life. While I thought it would be worth trying I had to force myself to make a sheet cake just to use the mix which was a year past its use-by date. When we started our journey in baking, we could make our own baked goods to create the proper portion sizes for our limited calorie budget. It wasn’t that the mix didn’t allow it, but rather we realized we enjoyed cookies, dessert bread, and homemade candy over cakes. 

We realized though, if we hadn’t started this big, we wouldn’t have figured anything out. By investing money into ingredients we forced ourselves to use things rather than waste them. As a result of the forcing function, we learned what we liked, what we didn’t, how much we could make ourselves, what we couldn’t, etc. 

Where We Landed

It turns out it took fewer one-offs for baking than we thought which was an outcome of a couple of things. First, most of what we needed to bake with we used for general cooking anyway such as AP flour, canola oil, and eggs. We hadn’t sat down and realized how few extra items it took until we started tracking our staples for everyday meals.

We also started to realize that bread is simply water, flour, yeast, and salt prepared in different ways and found America’s Test Kitchen Book ‘Everyday Bread’ is a good read on why.  You only need a couple of types of procedures such as the creaming method to create different cookies as well. We also learned that if we wanted chocolate chip cookies we only needed a handful of ingredients to make multiple types. When we switched to oatmeal the next week, again, only a couple of ingredients changed. 

Further, what we think of as ingredients of baked goods can be used in many other things which makes them more general staples. For example, you may make chocolate cherry cookies or whole wheat bread with pepita and sesame seeds for an extra crunch. Would we consider the dried cherries and pepitas as baking staples? Not at all, because we use them to dress up a boring salad or even coleslaw.

Here is a list of items we keep on hand that play a role in not only baking but are staples for other types of cooking. This is not an inclusive list of all items we keep but rather the ones needed for most of our baked goods.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • AP Flour
  • Cornstarch (Sometimes called Cornflour) 
  • Buttermilk Powder
  • Corn Meal
  • Old Fashioned Oats
  • Baking Soda
  • Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• Oils and Fats
  • Canola Oil
  • Olive Oil
  • Butter
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Whole Milk
  • Eggs
• Sugars
  • Light Brown
  • Dark Brown
  • White
  • Molasses 
• Salts
  • Kosher
  • Sea
  • Non-Iodized Table
• Nuts, Seeds and Dried Fruits
  • Raisins
  • Cherries
  • Cranberries
  • Walnuts
  • Pepitas 
  • Sunflour
  • Peanut Butter
• Canned goods
  • Pumpkin
• Spices and Extracts
  • Ginger
  • Cinnamon 
  • Allspice
  • Clove
  • Cayenne 
  • Vanilla 

Baking Staples Add-ons

It turned out, that for us to bake a large percentage of additional items we only need the additional items below. Again, this is not inclusive but they are our most used items to produce roughly 80% of what we make.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • Bread Flour
  • Whole Wheat Flour
  • Baking Powder
  • Instant Yeast
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Heavy Cream
• Sugars
  • Confectioners (Powdered Sugar)
• Inclusions
  • Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
  • Butterscotch Chips
• Seasonings and Extracts
  • Everything Bagel (EBS)
  • Poultry
  • Mint Extract
• Starters
  • Whole Wheat Bittman Bread
  • Sourdough which right now is in progress. 

From the Broad To Specific

When we started to catalog, we saw obvious patterns occur. The patterns we found were a group of items that applied to all cooking and a separate list of baking staples. This helped us understand what we needed to cook, and then add baking which is an important distinction for us. After making recipes that had multiple exotic ingredients that led to waste we wanted to learn what needed and could reuse over and over. 

First, we will look at Everything Bagel Seasoning (EBS) and canned pumpkin. We only use EBS for making bagels or bread. That’s fine since it has a long shelf life and is fairly inexpensive so we don’t mind storing the one-off. While many only use canned pumpkin for pies, we use it more often for Pumpkin Spice Sloppy Joes, making soap, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, etc. Yes, there are a lot of uses for it so we keep it on hand even though it may sit for a while, it is a visual reminder to mix things up. 

Yeast and baking powder are a different set of examples. You can not create many baked items without them. If you want leavened baked goods, at least for most recipes to work, you need them. You won’t need them if you aren’t baking. There is no reason to buy and store them then especially since yeast has a somewhat short life expectancy. 

This post discussed some of our mistakes and realizations on our journey. From that, we have given a starter list of ingredients that are used by many in general cooking. We have also added on a minimum, for our tastes and recipes, a set of additional items for making baked goods. With a little observation and forethought, we believe it becomes easier to avoid wasting space, time, and money on ingredients used only once a year or so. 

The post Important Staples You Need To Bake 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.

With winter and holidays, many of us find ourselves eating above our calorie budgets. That is easy to do considering what fall and the holiday cycles bring. We find ourselves tempted by the treats, and for most a bit more sedentary due to the weather changes and decreased sunlight. Instead of denying this or worrying about it and feeling bad when we go over it, let’s embrace it for growth.

Grow, cut, maintain, then do it again. That is a very oversimplified way to think about how bodybuilding works. Yes, there are a lot of nuances and other parts to body building but let’s use this over trivialization to simplify our holiday eating dilemma. Let’s use this type of formula to talk about a yearly cycle as if we were going to train for a yearly competition. 

Most of us want to maintain some sort of mobility and physical capability. For many, it starts with a New Year’s resolution. Other people may have a life-changing event or news that challenges them to do something. That was my case. In any of these cases, the catalyst and starting point are usually random. 

Because the starting point in the year can be so random, we can end up fighting things that we don’t need to. Let’s be honest, cutting weight during holidays is harder than when we have a more fixed diet. You can do it, but it will be harder. What if your goal was to grow in size? That seems like it would be a no-brainer to do in the fall. If you are trying to gain, the longer and more active days of summer create other barriers. 

A Year At A Glance

Let’s try and bring some order to the year to stop making it so hard. What if we looked at the year as if we were training for a competition? We will use the idiom ‘Sun’s out, guns out’ as our goal where the beginning of summer is our ‘competition’ we are training to be in shape for. This is how we define our year:

• October to February: Use the additional treats and food to build lean muscle.
• March to May: Work on the definition of body structure by cutting unneeded fat. 
• June to September: Maintain target weight while working to increase mobility

In the sequence above we are working with the seasons to make our goals easier.  Whether you are gaining weight or losing it, each season can help you in your goal. We would assert that this is what most of us want to accomplish. We want the strength and mobility of increased muscle while limiting the unneeded fat which is not considered healthy. 

It’s Your Routine Not Ours

There is no way we can write a routine for this. Why? It’s your body and your goals. This is a roadmap for us to think about our goals and easier ways to attain them. For example, we can give an idea of why this helps with an imaginary routine set to those periods.

• October to February:
  • Increase time under tension and progressive overload to grow lean muscle.
  • Expect to gain 2-3% of body weight as a mix of lean muscle and some additional fat.
  • Use additional sedentary periods as recovery cycles to push muscles to grow.
• March to May:
  • Lower working weight and increase reps as well as tempo to increase calorie burning.
  • Manage a diet closer to the calorie budget for weight loss to reduce unneeded fat to achieve the body weight you desire.
  • Use improving weather to increase activity levels outdoors.
• June to September:
  • Focus exercise on full range of motion and optimizing for proper form.
  • Monitor weight to verify it is not spiking high or low and adjust the calorie budget as needed.
  • Work to improve symmetry over producing more lean muscle to recover for the next year. 

But I Don’t Want To Get Swole Bro! 

This is what we hear commonly from many people as soon as we say anything about gaining lean muscle and increasing weight. It seems counter-intuitive but we are not talking about bodybuilding to gain size per se. Bodybuilding uses these phases very efficiently to train for a competition. We can use that format but for a different purpose.

You can choose the intensity of your workouts to create the muscle structure you want. We don’t feel most would argue that increased lean muscle helps us. That being said, I don’t want 23” biceps so my muscle goals are not about bulk. I want to be able to lift a bag of concrete and carry paint cans up a ladder and not feel worn out the next day. That can be achieved by simply having more lean muscle over fat. At the end of the day, you do you is what this is about.

Back to the Cycle

Our point is that if you are in a seasonal cycle like many of us, why not simply adjust your goals to take advantage of it? Trying to exchange fat for lean muscle through body recomposition is not realistic for many of us. You will find sources that say you can but the devil is always in the details nutrition and exercise-wise. It takes a great deal of dedication to make body re-composition happen.

We know bodybuilders increase their lean muscle over time through a cycle of building and cutting.  Also, we know that we can’t always be building as we need recovery to maintain our healthy bodies and mobility. If you are going to gain muscle you will probably increase your overall fat which means you will likely want to cut size at some point.

We feel having a yearly goal that is seasonal helps structure the cycles of gain and loss. Every season brings different benefits and challenges. We can use them to our advantage to optimize for our goals if we are aware of them and can align to their benefits. While it is a bit of planning in advance, we feel it can help you avoid the opposite problem which is seasonal failure and giving up during certain parts of the year.  

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed how to take advantage of seasonal changes to optimize your body goals. We talked about how you can approximate a bodybuilder’s build and cut cycle to increase your lean mass and reduce unwanted fat. By doing this you can optimize your workouts while handling seasonal changes gracefully. 

Also, just because it is similar to bodybuilding doesn’t mean you have to ‘get swole’ as some call it. Lean muscle and what your ‘guns’ look like are personal choices. But, by taking a yearly seasonal approach, you can be ready for the time when ‘Suns out, guns out’ comes around. 

The post How To Make Fitness Seasonal 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.

Digging Right In

There is a difference between a portion and a serving even though many people consider them the same. However, they are not synonymous and that fallacy can cause many people to overeat.  We will abbreviate the AHA site here:

• A portion is the amount of something you eat that aligns with your personal dietary needs and goals.
• A serving is the amount of something that is suggested as commonly consumed by everyone based on the USDA’s Nutrition label.

Seems simple? How much you choose to eat vs what the suggested amount is for an item but unfortunately, it isn’t simple. Packaging, marketing, and labeling are focused on serving size and not portion size. Even the AHA will interchange the two in their writing which re-enforces the challenges of the meaning of a serving size. 

Why Does That Matter?

That messaging leads many of us on low-calorie budgets to have frustrating choices between over-consumption or wasted food. Why is that? The reason that is a challenge is that serving sizes are not tied to what we need for our DRI. 

According to the FDA: By law, serving sizes must be based on the amounts of foods and beverages that people are actually eating, not what they should be eating.

As people’s consumption changes, the serving size changes with it. As the serving size changes, the packaging may need to change with it. According to the FDA, this leads to overconsumption. For example, we used to drink 8 oz of soda. We now, as a population, usually consume 12. How did that happen? 

The best way to answer that is by understanding marketing, eating trends, human motivation, economies of scale, availability of products, business, affluence, health trends, etc. We feel that is outside of the scope of this post. While we feel there is a salient thread that runs through this topic, it is only a set of hunches. For now, knowing the correlation between serving size and population generalizations should be enough to make us think about stopping using serving as a size.  

Portions over Servings FTW

One of the most challenging things is learning what the portion size of something is vs the serving size. If you are like us, it is a letdown to see how much less a portion of something is than its serving size. There is a silver lining to less is more we will get to. Right now, let’s talk about how to reset your visual expectations. 

A big challenge when moving from serving size is defining what it looks like so you can recognize it. What irks us is most times that information and visual representation come with opinions on ‘healthy’ alternatives. Yes, we all want to be healthy but change isn’t so simple as snapping our fingers. 

The reason it irks us is the fact that we are already taking something away when we go from servings to portions. We know through experiences that not everyone can change everything at once. To us, this is one of the reasons people who want to reduce their body size may fail to change or ride a diet rollercoaster. I know I can lose weight and eat fried chicken. Whether what we eat is healthy or not is open to interpretation but I know I didn’t cheat on my goals by doing it. 

Let us climb down from our little soap box and get back to the visualizing portion sizes which is much more helpful. We found a good way to visualize portions from the British Heart Foundation which is based on a specific calorie per day calorie budget. No matter what your goal is, this gives you a great visual guide. Eating more, eating less, eating healthy or not, here is a visual of a portion based on a calorie count. You can do the math for your needs.

With Every Cloud

Ah, yes, the benefits of knowledge. By using portion over serving size, we can more accurately buy food. Looking at your plate in a restaurant you can decide how much you need and take home. For us, this increased knowledge has had a direct impact on our food and restaurant budget. It has also made it much easier to stay on a calorie budget as we package our food accordingly. 

When we know what a portion is to us, we can buy it in bulk and then portion it into containers. This is why vacuum sealing became important to us. Restaurant meals now also generally produce a second take-home meal. If the single serving size is too big of a portion, say a 20 oz bottle of soda, we opt for something smaller. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why we tightened up our terminology around portions and servings. Serving Size is a terrible way to understand what you need to eat for your body goals. You are essentially tying yourself to the rest of the general population’s eating habits. Not only are you tied to it, but you are adding to it by positive reinforcements as a buyer in the market. You do you is always what we preach. We believe it is hard for you to do you if you are tied to everyone else’s body goals and calorie needs. 

The post Here Is How Serving Size Lies To Us first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Weight Loss is a Lucrative Industry

The weight loss industry was worth roughly $90 billion in 2023 according to Market Research. This is just the drugs, programs, and pills. The fitness industry adds another roughly $22.4 billion to that according to Health & Fitness. The sports nutrition market was worth about $44 billion in 2023 based on data from Allied Market Research. Dietary supplements are another huge industry weighing in at $183 billion based on research by Garage Gym Review.

Why is this industry making so much money? Everyone knows meeting your calorie and nutrition intake needs for your goals is not easy. All of us would love it if someone had a pill for that, or a program, or a supplement that made it so much easier right? If someone can give you something simple, for a fee, to help you meet your goals, why wouldn’t we? Well, we chose not to due to sustainability.

Some Things are Legit and Necessary

Let’s also qualify some things. There are legitimate medical drugs and supplements for weight loss/gain. These come from medical and healthcare professionals. For someone who has specific medical needs, some things can be prescribed. There are also nutritional substitutes recommended by your care providers when you are sick. In my case, it was to add mass after a month-long bout of mono left me 20 lbs lighter than I should have been. 

In these cases, the items prescribed or recommended don’t always come without a cost or risk. Some are meant to be used for a limited time. The insurance you have may not cover them which leaves you paying for them out of pocket. You may have adverse reactions to them. Having had reactions with medications I can say first hand it wasn’t a joy ride I wanted to take again unless my doctor told me to.

Some Things are Gray Areas

In our case, we wanted to be ahead of needing such drastic measures. We also looked into some of the more natural supplemental management tools such as Apple Cider Vinegar. With no real scientific evidence to back up the claims, we didn’t trust it (or any of them). It felt like we were being sold snake oil in the Old West. Again, it was another thing that just didn’t seem sustainable to use. The whole area of these types of supplements is worthy of an entire blog post at another time.

We know that programs and diets do work for some people. We began to question the long-term sustainability of the programs and diets. Programs and diets that create a permanent behavior change can create sustainable lifestyles. This was our takeaway from the initial research we did for ourselves.  All of them seemed to point directly back to what we were already learning. At their core, they were a series of goals to meet using controlled portion sizes and nutritional makeup.

Let’s Talk About Two Examples

The Basic: Here’s Your Program Plan

Let’s talk about an example. Weight Watchers has been around for a long time. It has changed and adapted and grown. The medical community supports it. Their big selling point is you can eat any food you like. They have apps, plans, nutritionists, and other professionals on their payroll to help you.  If it fits your points based on your profile, you can make and eat it. 

Will it help you? The answer is maybe. For us, we asked the question of whether it was sustainable long term. The answer for us was only if we were able to learn from it. We decided we didn’t want to invest our time or money in something we could learn ourselves.

For some, the idea of community, gamifying your weight goals, nutritional analysis, and other perks may help. A lot of what they offer is psychological support and mechanisms to keep you on track. At the time of writing this that was $23 a month. Cheap by most standards but couldn’t we do that ourselves?

A Bit More: We’re Your Personal Chef

We also looked at meal replacement programs like Jenny Craig. They have also been around for a long time. For a fee, you create a menu of items from their program, and they ship it to you. It would cut down our grocery bills and make life a lot easier to plan food and nutrition-wise. We travel so our menu had to be portable. The price tag was also around $150 a week per person at the time of writing this. For two people, for 52 weeks, that is $15,600 a year. 

Not Good, Not Bad, Not Sustainable

We realized that these types of diets, programs, and pills weren’t sustainable for us. Are you going to spend that money or stick to a menu someone else creates for the rest of your life to keep your goals? We weren’t.

It isn’t that Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, or any type of plan is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The issue is that if you aren’t learning how it manages your weight goals, it won’t become part of your habits and lifestyle. That means the gains we would make were tied to something we couldn’t sustain.

For us, this is why we invested in understanding these things the hard way. With all the apps, data, and information out there, we could do it ourselves. By taking the time to invest in ourselves we learned how to have healthier habits. More importantly, we learned how to handle situations the programs didn’t cover like when we were on vacation or traveling. 

We have talked about why many aspects of weight management such as diets, supplements, and pills can work in the short term but not the long. At the end of this post hopefully, you start to realize how an entire industry is trying to sell you many things you can do yourself. Not only can you do them yourself, you can change your life habits in the process. The win here is that you also don’t need to spend money to do it.

The post It’s About Goals Not Quick Fixes first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.