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.

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.

In another post, we talked about trade-offs with organic produce. In this post we revisit organics but from an animal and meat point of view. Topics of animal welfare and environmental issues are emotional for many. Let us just acknowledge that right out of the gate. We will discuss some of that and what organic means when it comes to livestock and what it doesn’t. We found that organic meat gives us all better options but they come with costly trade-offs.

Emotional Callout; You Do You

We will start with the emotional part first. Many of us are happily far removed from how our food is raised and slaughtered. The reality is, that an animal must die to produce meat and nothing can change that outcome. If you eat meat, that must occur. How the animal lives and dies and whether it is humane or not is the question of organic meat. Even if not slaughtered, as in the case of dairy and eggs, organics look for humane conditions for the animals.

We assert emotions are born out of personal ethical context due to this process and not in our purview to discuss. A person’s morals and beliefs are personal in nature and subjective. What is humane to one person is inconsequential to another. Even if someone wants to purchase organic food to support the humane treatment of animals their finances may not support paying the premium. This is why we are not going to try and persuade anyone one way or another what is right and wrong for them.

What does Organic Mean?

The USDA defines a set of rules that define organic known as Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards (OLPS). Animal welfare advocates had a part in defining these rules. There is no need to restate what the USDA has written so we won’t. In summary, the organic program is really about the environmental impact of and issues with raising livestock in factory farms. 

We started to look into this subject for our health based on our calorie budgets and economics. We could find very little evidence it was other than an increased risk of becoming resistant to antibiotics. Yes, some items sound terrible in non-organic production such as ionic radiation and sewer sludge. Taking a completely emotionless look at this subject proved challenging though. Every straight answer had a counterpoint or felt like marketing over fact.

It’s Opinion not Facts

What we ran into was all of this is opinion and debate. Unfortunately, opinion and debate are not facts. The name sewer sludge sounds terrible which is why it is being called Bio-solids now. It is used as fertilizer, is highly regulated, and is tested for safety. It is not allowed to help grow crops for organic meat to graze on. On the flip side, many people take pride in using Zoo Manure in home gardens. Zoo Manure is regulated composted fecal matter. Both are regulated, so why is one better than the other?

This leads us back to the subjective problem based on our understanding and risk factors. There are trade-offs when reading up on both of these types of fertilizer. Is it a case of words and perceptions that we are dealing with? The reality is, that even farm labor has caused outbreaks of E. Coli. It isn’t simple. 

No on GMO?

We also ran into other statements around synthetics (chemicals) and non-GMO-based foods. Again, organic farming may bar GMO-based foods from organic labeled products however, there is no real evidence of GMO-based products harming a person. In the sciences, it takes years and years of evidence before something is labeled ‘correct’ so again this is subjective.   

In terms of synthetics, some may still be part of organic food. The USDA does limit but does not bar all chemical use in organic foods. There are specific limits and requirements around their use but it is not necessarily 100% chemical-free. 

We Gave Up Here

Because everything was becoming subjective we simply gave up on some areas of this topic. We felt like we were looking for an answer to the unanswerable. The more we read, the more it felt existential and personal over scientific. It was like asking are cars good? We decided instead to look at the animal welfare and environment parts of the story.

The Animals and Environment

Organically raised livestock does have benefits. These benefits include

• The animals have more room and a better quality of life.
• Raising animals in a  much more environmentally friendly
• Limits the possibility and impact of outbreaks of disease.

All of that is great. We don’t believe anyone wants to be less humane or less environmentally friendly. Here is the problem, it costs more and yet still has problems. When we looked into organic for our needs we expected to find it was simply better. There are trade-offs to it as well. 

Buy or Don’t, That’s Up To You

Unfortunately, the more we tried to peel the onion, the bigger the onion became. Because data takes time to accumulate, and we are discussing planet-scale problems, it is hard to have a simple yes or no answer for everyone. There are over 8 billion of us running around on this planet. No one choice fits all. 

Wrapping Up

We started this seeking clarity but found enough unanswerable questions that do not allow a simple answer of whether organic is good or bad. What we have discussed is the positive aspects of organic in terms of animal welfare. We also know that, in general, organics help preserve local biodiversity. Organic-raised meat also provides checks and balances for stopping disease outbreaks. All of this comes at a premium cost-wise. That leaves this subject as being a personal decision to pay the premium for those benefits. 

The post Get Better Options With Organic Meat first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Big Meals Can Mean Big Calories

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

Not Everyone Does It

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

Getting Past Old Habits

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

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

Change the Portion, Not the Balance

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

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

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

Snacks Aren’t Evil, Choices Can Be

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

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

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

Are We Saying Eat UHP Foods?

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

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

We’re Deconstructing a Meal

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

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

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

Is it all that or is it Marketing?

Two things sparked a revisiting of these topics. I have spent time on marketing. From my experience, I know many things get sold to people as premium lifestyle choices rather than the reality of the true limited benefits of an idea. We had also been talking with one of our local farmers. We realized how much agriculture had changed over time. These two things are where our investigation into organic or not started. 

Turns out, it is Subjective

In the US, the USDA has numerous regulations on what can be certified organic and what can’t. The simple version of what organic means is here. It however does get more complex quickly once you dig in. But really, is organic better for you? That depends on your definition of better.

Better is a subjective term. Is it better for us from a nutrition point of view? Are the animals and plants treated more humanely? Does it fight climate change or the use of chemicals in the environment? Why is it exactly that organic is better is the question. 

Is Also Complicated

We learned there are multiple different types of organic farm production. Each type of production such as fruits and vegetables vs livestock has its trade-offs. For the sake of brevity, we will focus on produce in this post.

Nutrition and chemicals (pesticides and fertilizer) are the things most often discussed when it comes to organic produce. The answer to if they are better in these three areas is maybe. When we remove all emotional context and simply look at data and studies, according to the experts they show some improvement over other farming methods. 

Nutritional Advantage is a Maybe

Nutritionally, studies have shown there just aren’t major differences. There is evidence of organic farming methods producing slightly better nutritional value but there are small differences. Yes, that word is subjective, and therein lies the challenge of saying they are better or not.

Chemicals Are Problems

The area in which they can have an advantage is synthetic fertilizers. The primary element talked about here is cadmium used in those fertilizers. It is generally (there is that subjective again) agreed upon that non-organic produce can have more cadmium. How much is worth it to you, and if that is worth it to you, is again subjective. According to the USDA, Cadmium absorption is also based on the area the product is grown, not just fertilizers.   

Enter the Clean Fifteen and the Dirty Dozen in the discussion of chemicals. Both are lists that contain produce that contains more or less chemicals. The irony here (no pun intended) is that many of what are considered plants that are good for us such as spinach, kale, and strawberries make up the Dirty Dozen. These lists also make no distinction between organic and non.

It’s About Balance Though

Interestingly enough, even the USDA is aware of the challenge of this subject. Let’s take this out of the farm and into the sea. Seaweed can be about as organic as it gets. I do love sushi, sashimi, and miso soup, all of which usually contain seaweed.  The unfortunate reality is that seaweed can contain both arsenic and mercury as well as other chemicals. Do those offset seaweed’s nutritional benefits? It depends on your personal risk tolerance and if you are in a high-risk population segment like pregnant women or young children. 

Environmental Impact Can’t Be Ignored But…

In terms of environmental impact, it would be very hard to argue that less pesticides and fertilizers is a bad thing. Irrigation water, can the chemicals it carries, go somewhere. If the irrigation in the area drains back into surface water, the leftover phosphates and nitrogen can increase the risk of toxic blooms. This is a known problem for large systems like the Mississippi Basin. It can also be a problem for smaller lakes and irrigation systems such as the Columbia Basin Project in Washington. These blooms can be harmful to both people and animals. 

Interestingly though, farmers have no love of chemicals either. Why? Because they cost money and take time and equipment to apply. All of that takes capital and eats into their profit margins. Farmers have used crop rotation as a way to limit their need for additional chemicals but that comes at the cost of leaving a field fallow.  As agriculture adapts, new technologies are becoming available to help them reduce their chemical footprint. Still, we as consumers have expectations of perfect produce which is not always easy to grow that creates waste. That however is another complex subject.

Wrapping Up

This post has discussed some of the nuances and challenges of organic produce. It is up to you to decide if you should pay a premium for organic food. There are pros and cons to both organic and non-organic foods. If there is little difference and nutritional value and you are not in an at-risk group, maybe you won’t pay the premium. You may feel the extra cost is truly worth it for other reasons. 

The post Make Better Choices With Organic first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Separating Fact and Fiction Takes Clarifications

In an earlier post, we talked about the big three and why fat was important for the Body. If that is so, why does fat have such a bad rap? As with everything, the devil is in the details. Not all fats are good, bad, or created equal. 

Let’s start with a quick 411 on the  major types of fats

• Monounsaturated
• Polyunsaturated
• Saturated
• Trans Fats

What we found challenging was understanding what was in what. In another post, we talked about where calories hide in items like nuts. Of course, this led us to stop eating nuts since they have so much fat. Oh wait, salmon has fat as does olive oil. There goes the salmon and pesto dishes. The home-fried chicken was right out! Not so much. 

We are not going to try to explain as these fats have been studied extensively. We have linked to several really smart folks who can explain their chemistry and their impact on your body and health. All we want to do is give people a heads up of where to look why you need them and why ‘low-fat’ doesn’t always mean good for you. According to many such as Harvard Health and the USDA, you need fat as part of your DRI we mentioned in another post. Here’s the TL;DR: we walked away with:

Trans Fats Are Out

Let’s get Trans Fats out of the way first. There are two types; non-artificial and artificial. There are natural sources of trans fats that come from unaltered saturated fat. These are not the ones we have heard of as being bad for you. According to experts, while it may be best to avoid them they don’t have the same impact on our health as artificial trans fats. 

Artificial trans fats are a non-starter in terms of being good for us to the point they have been banned in some shape or form in some countries like the US. Trans fats are also known by their other name which is PHO or partially hydrogenated oils. PHO is created by putting vegetable oil through a chemical and heating process to keep the fat solid at room temperature.  Originally thought to be better than regular fats, that opinion has changed. You can make your own decisions on trans fat but they are now specifically called out on nutrition labels to help us avoid them. 

Unsaturated Fats Are Good

All fats contain the same calories per serving. It is not that one is ‘less’ fatty than the other.  Monounsaturated and Polyunsaturated fats are triglycerides your body needs. They can be grossly generalized as fats that stay liquid at room temperature. Think nuts, vegetables, and olive oil as well as fish. If the fat comes from something that grows in the ground or it swims, the fat from it is fat your body needs. The exception to this generalization is the oil of fruit of tropical plants such as coconut or palm. 

Saturated Fats Are Problematic

Saturated fats tend to come from meat, dairy, or tropical plants and are generally solid at room temperature. The labeling of unhealthy saturated fats is due to their impact on cholesterol levels. Of course, they are plentiful in some of our favorite foods like red meat, cheeses, and baked goods. 

We found some evidence that newer studies are challenging the opinion that saturated fats are 100% bad for everyone. Cholesterol, and its impact on the body, maybe as much genetics as it is the food we eat. In any case, we still want to know how much we can have since they come at a high risk-to-reward ratio.    

According to the American Heart Association, the guideline is only 6% of the fats you eat should be saturated. As usual, many health professionals disagree and we have seen as high as 10%. Let’s take the harder road and go for 6% for the sake of an example. For someone on a 2,000-calorie-a-day calorie budget that is 120 calories from saturated fat or 13 grams.  At first glance that is a terrifying number. That is about a single slice of cheddar cheese, right? 

Let’s Do Some Math

This is where we feel things get sideways. No, it is not a single slice. We need to revisit our nutrition label and do some math. Bear with me as we get nerdy with numbers and a word problem. 

Question: How much cheddar cheese can I eat if I have a 2,000-calorie-a-day budget and want to control my saturated fat?

Additional Info Needed: According to Google a single slice of cheddar cheese averages 30% or 6 grams of saturated fat per ounce. 

Answer: Right now I could eat 3 and ⅓ ounces of cheddar cheese to meet that 6 percent goal if I had no other saturated fat in my diet that day. That is simply adding up something from 30% to 100% which is straightforward.  Crisis averted. We can even have a ⅓ lb. burger made from 80/20 beef with a slice of cheddar and stay within our goals if our calorie budget allows it. 

We Can But Should We?

But should we scarf down that cheeseburger? What about switching to home-fried chicken to avoid trans fats? Empirically what we found was that we cheated on our diet less when we ate some level of fat in our meals. We found a good middle-of-the-road approach by creating that same sense of a ‘fat’ budget like our calorie budget. While that may not work for some with specific medical conditions, it worked for us. We aren’t into taking chances so we do get our cholesterol levels tested every year to make sure our choices are staying healthy. 

Closing Thoughts

We discussed many of the high-level pros and cons of fat in our diets. Based on everything we read we we learned for our goals we shouldn’t fear fat. This post gave the evidence that we used to support the decision that our bodies need some fat. We also have provided information about some of the myths of fat through the disambiguation of the different types we learned. Based on all the learning and evidence we found, we embraced fat in our diet. Armed with this knowledge you can make your own informed decision instead of simply avoiding all fats unless otherwise directed by a health professional.

The post Our New Perception Of Fats In Diets first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

What we call the big three of diets are fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Like many people, we have tried to lower carbs and fats to lower our weight. We have also tried using extra protein, and mass gainers to add more muscle to add weight. We found the results inconclusive so we decided to learn about each of them instead of relying on pundits claims. This post will cover our learnings and why we returned to a balanced diet over any other based on our new understanding.

Let’s Start High Level

We will begin with a high-level understanding of the big three; Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrates. In other words, we don’t feel the post is going to help a super athlete tune their macronutrient balance information for performance enhancements. Instead, our goal is to use basics and simplicity to understand how to reach our goals. That means if you’re training for the next Olympic games probably need to seek a nutritionist’s help. 

Like any machine, the human body needs fuel to convert to energy. The body also needs lubricants to keep the machine operating without damage. Unlike other machines, the human body must grow and repair itself. It also has to produce its fuel. Each of our three items plays a role in that machine’s operation. 

We are taking a 10,000-foot view here on purpose. There are extensive studies on each of these elements of our diets and their impact on our personal goals. There are also extensive and egregious misunderstandings around them. These misunderstandings negatively impact our perception of balanced diets. That is another post that comes after basics.

So What do the Big Three Do

 Protein: 

• Rebuildes and grows the body.
• Acts as a chemical messenger to help the body run.
• Helps block cravings and hunger.
• Forces the body to use energy to digest it creating calorie burn.

Fat:

• Creates a calorie battery of stored energy. 
• Used to support organs and internal structures.
• Necessary for absorption of some vitamins.
• Helps regulate temperature. 

  Carbohydrates:

• Help create the fuel to run your body.
• Keeps our plumbing clean through fermentation in digestion.
• Provide and direct energy to the brain and cells.
• Preserve muscle.

We found that unless we had some specific dietary restrictions or medical conditions we needed all three. Why then do we hear about cutting carbs or low-fat diets being all the rage? With all things human, because it is not so cut and dry. It is how much, and of what type, of each of these you need to support your goals.  Let’s start with an extremely contrived example of why to store fat to kick that train of thought off. 

A Hyperbolic Example

Animals store fat for hibernation or migration. They have to actively seek out their food which requires energy so they are consuming a portion of it while trying to add weight. That fat is their calorie bank for their fast. They eat as much as they can of carbohydrates and fats until it is time to hibernate. The better their stores, the better their chances of survival. In other animals, the layer of fat they have also helps regulate their temperature. There’s a reason seals, whales, and other animals have a layer of fat for harsh conditions. They need that fat.

For most people, our food rarely runs out and we have learned how to control the climates in our homes and workplaces. We don’t need to store that extra fat that occurs in those extremes. If you want to for some personal reason, you can. Our food can be found easily and everywhere. We expend very little energy in getting it as well. For most of us, there is no need to store excess calories. Sadly no one told our body that we have evolved so we still store the excess. 

But We Need Fat and Carbohydrates Right?

But we have guidance from medical professionals we do need some fat and and carbohydrates. Why the carb-cutting diets? Why the low-fat diets? Each attempts to leverage one aspect of the trio to leverage its outcomes in the body. By limiting or increasing one of the three, the diets attempt to place you in a specific state however we found that to backfire on you.

The idea is simple. The more protein you eat the more you feed your muscles. Protein also is calorie sparse so it is harder for your body to convert it to fuel. Doing so causes further calories to be burned due to the thermogenic actions needed to do so. Now picture you are trying to gain lean mass and burn fat. Don’t carbohydrates deliver energy or does protein? Can you work out efficiently without some? Don’t they help preserve muscles to keep you from cannibalizing them for energy? 

Oddly enough, cutting carbs and fat has the same net effect. The premise is that by eliminating carbs and fat your body will consume the fat it has stored over time. You are effectively reducing the amount of calories your body can turn into energy and at some point, your body will use what it stores. What it stores is not only fat but muscle. When it starts to consume that fuel, it will let you know.

You Won’t Read This in the Fine Print

This is the part that is generally not discussed in these plans. When you are hungry, your body will tell you. If it has no fuel, you may feel tired. Most of us have been hungry to the point of not being able to think at some point in our lives. Like any machine running on fumes, you can’t be working at an optimal efficiency. What happens then? You may not feel like you can function and give up as this article discusses at the end around high protein diets.

We feel this is what we learned the hard way. By keeping balance in our meals, and simply reducing portion size, we learned to manage this. Whenever we become extreme in one area, the negatives cancel out the positives. We found ourselves not being able to sustain the diet requirements. This led to the diet roller coaster problem. 

Wrapping Up

You now have the basic building blocks of diet in your back pocket. You also have some tools to help you evaluate diet choices. With these two items, you can start to question if the diet you are looking at will help you or not. We have also provided you with a set of links that will give you deeper professional advice to help you tailor these building blocks to your goals.

The post What Are The Big Three In Diets first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portion or Serving Size, which is the correct way to discuss what you eat? We use portion size because there is an established convention of serving and serving size. Portions are a way to capture what we eat, not the serving size. We discuss why serving size is based on a different calorie per day intake than is currently used here.

Why is it so Small?

I have a frozen lasagna I like. I also love a certain brand of pot pie. Both of these items were in the frozen food aisle at our local grocery store. As we became more conscious of our goals with our calories, we started reading labels. As we alluded to in an earlier post, they weren’t what they seemed to be. Becoming more curious we started some experiments.

We bought and cooked one of the lasagnas. We then proceeded to portion it out based on what the company called a serving size. It was tiny when compared to what we were used to eating. It was also tiny compared to what I was used to at my favorite restaurants. We had the same issue with the pot pie. 

You Can’t Eat That Junk Then Right…Maybe?

That means we stopped eating it, correct? Not the lasagna. The lasagna serving size was simple to adjust the portion size by cutting it differently. It did make the pot pie a non-starter as it wasn’t sharable. This led us to another understanding. The nutrition label changes based on how much you eat. If you aren’t eating the recommended serving size, you aren’t getting what is on that label. 

In the case of the lasagna, we simply did some math and adjusted to our meal size. Their serving size was about 330 calories. We wanted 500 per meal. That was 1.5 times their serving size. That meant everything on the label went up by 50%. If there were 20g of protein per serving, our 500-calorie portion had 30g. If it had 1000 grams of sodium, that went up to 1,500 grams for our portion size. 

Recipes Have Serving Sizes Too

We also started looking at the recipes we were cooking. Most recipes online have the number of servings they make, the calories in them, and a rough nutrition breakdown.  We got downright geeky about it and started to weigh our portions for a while. Think that is a little too far? It was one of the most important exercises we ever did to get an idea of what we were eating.

If you are staying on a calorie budget, spend 2 or 3 weeks weighing portions. Knowing what 4 oz of chicken or beef looks like is important. Love eating mashed potatoes? Weigh out a portion of them to see what it looks like. Gravy is calorie dense so it is best to know what ½ cup of gravy looks like. 

No matter if you are losing, gaining, or trying to maintain your weight it is very difficult without knowing portion size. Because we aren’t selling a new diet or a miracle pill we won’t say it is easy. It is a pain in the backside to do this. Once you do it you will never look at food shows, restaurants, and even what you make the same. 

Go Forth and Feed!

Once you understand portion sizes, the calories, and the nutrition in them, you are empowered to control your eating. You can now make more informed choices. Want a protein boost, you know what that looks like on your plate. Carb loading for an event, you know how much pasta that is. At a company party, you have an idea of the difference between the tuna sandwich and the roast beef sandwich.

In this post, we covered how to start understanding portion sizes. We have also covered why understanding them is so important to weight management. Lastly, we have covered how nutrition is based on portion size and why changing that size changes the nutritional value of that meal. You should now feel empowered to make decisions based on your needs.

The post Serving Size Is Not The Best Guide first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We are constantly bombarded with pseudo-facts and misinformation. As consumers, we care about product tradeoffs so we can make informed decisions. The domain of food is challenging as we can’t compare two items, even with the same name, in terms of calories. In this post, we will give you some ideas on how to compare disparate but similar items. 

First, Were Sticking to Calories

This post does not pick on any company or food choice. Our purpose is to raise awareness of the disparity of claims and perceptions of serving sizes versus what is actually on nutritional data or labels. As a result, we leave debating the nutritional value of any type of food to others. Whether you choose fast or organic vegan or anything in between is up to you.

Incongruencies of Agency Goals

First, let’s note a difference. Nutrition labels use the FDA 2,000 calories a day which was the old standard of measuring the amount of calories the average adult needs. That is the overall generalization for how much the average person needs to consume a day. The USDA is now using MyPlate. You may recognize it to be similar to the BMR work we discussed. The plan also moves away from the food pyramid to what is considered a visualization of what should be on our plates. The issue is the calories don’t match.

Because this is not a post on nutrition, it doesn’t help or hurt what we are going to discuss. We bring it up as another point of how people are set up to fail through packaging. When you read a label and it says serving size containing x, y, and z you expect it to be accurate. If there is 30% of your daily protein in the serving, it should be 30%. If your calorie intake needs to be 2,400 calories, not 2,000, then it is only 24% of your needed protein.

The more we learned, the less trust we had in labels and experts. There were simply too many incongruencies across all of them. All the incongruencies pointed to the same problem. It is about you as a person and your goals and you have to be an informed consumer.

A Serving May Only be Part of a Package

Serving size is where many hidden calories lie. You will see a package advertising that says only 100 or 150 calories per serving. But what is the serving size? Bags of chips, crackers, and individually packed items are usually the foods you see this on. In one package of Milton crackers we like, the serving size was only 2 crackers for 70 calories.  Comparing this with Gardetos we also like, it was 150 calories for a 1/2 cup.

You may ask why does that matter and what point are we making? By logging our calories we quickly learned our expectations of portion sizes were way off. When we buy a small bag of chips, rarely do we eat half and leave the rest for another day. I don’t think I have ever eaten just 2 crackers. As the Lay’s potatoes chip commercial used to claim ‘I bet you can’t eat just one’. We found truth in that statement.

What you Drink Impacts your Calories

Similarly, let’s talk about alcohol. We like to drink beer so we budget it into our calories. Calories from beer are based on the alcohol content of that beer. When we choose a can of Coors Light or Bud Light, that is roughly 100-120 calories per can. If we go out to a pub or restaurant and have a pint of something like an IPA that may jump to 300 or more.  If I enjoy 3 IPAs by the fire some Saturday night that could be 900 calories. Realizing that you can choose which is best for your calorie budget. 

Reading the Tea Leaves of Menus

You may ask, why a meal at a restaurant may range from 600-1200 calories. The reason is that it includes all the possible combinations of sizes, sides, sauces, or drink choices. Let’s look at two well-known chains. Both of them do a great job of having nutrition labels available but they also both can be confusing. Understanding the total calories of what you have eaten is challenging.

Breaking it Down

By Ingredients

  A Subway Chicken Bacon Ranch 6” on multi-grain bread in 530 calories. Let’s add Pepper Jack cheese and some Creamy Sriracha dressing to it. That bumps the 6” to  620 calories. Bread is all within 10-20 calories of each other so we can have it on anything we like with it. Eat the whole thing like I used to? That would be roughly 1240 calories excluding drinks, chips, cookies, or anything else. Great if you have the budget for it, bad if you don’t.

By Meal Choices

 In contrast, a McDonald’s Big Mac, Medium Fries, and Medium Coke weigh in at roughly 1130 calories when you include ketchup. Switch that to small fries and Diet Coke and we are at 830 calories. That is 210 more than the Subway 6” but less than the 410 less than the 12”. What this starts to show is how important portion size is in setting a calorie budget. We will touch on that in a later post as well.

But They are Consistent

 While fast food has been villainized by many, the reality is, their whole goal is consistency. What you order at one restaurant will be the same as another calorie-wise. Consistency is an advantage of eating these places which we will discuss in another post. In terms of nutrition and taste, well, those are not the subject of this blog. Our goal is strictly around weight management for now. 

But We Only Eat ‘Healthy’ Food

Of course, we are all health conscious so many turn away from processed foods. We want fruit juice and a healthy snack like pistachios instead of all this booze and fast food. Maybe we can add in half a cup of  2% cottage cheese. Based on calories sourced through Google, a cup of OJ is roughly 140 calories. We also found a cup of pistachios is roughly 690 and the cottage cheese is 100 calories. At 930 calories that is about on par with our Big Mac Meal. Whether it is healthier or a better choice is up to others.

Learning this made me grumpy because I love nuts. Pistachios, walnuts, almonds, peanuts (yes, not a true nut, but close enough). I could go eat them all day. To meet my personal goals I had to change how many I ate. I didn’t stop eating them, just the amount and frequency. An aside to think about. Candy bars were marketed as a meal replacement during the Depression. Nutritionally maybe not but you can see it from a pure calorie point of view. Mr. Goodbar, which contained peanuts was marketed as a cheap ‘protein-rich’ meal.

One more for you salad enthusiasts.  A Caesar salad with 4 oz of grilled chicken and a roll can come in at a hefty 760 calories. The salad can be as high as 470 calories, the chicken 170, and a roll of roughly 120. Add butter to that roll and we are in the range of a Big Mac Meal.

Don’t Take Anything at Face Value

The takeaway here is to trust nothing. There is a lot of misinformation out there. Managing your weight is more about understanding what calories come from what. You are the person empowered to make changes in your eating habits. Just because someone says it’s only 100 calories per serving or is ‘healthy’ doesn’t mean it is what you think it is. 

 The realization of where these hidden calories were was ultimately life-changing for us. It was frustrating to learn we had been wrong in our approach to our calorie budget. It is this type of information that allows us to stay on track through informed decisions. That is why we feel it is so important to share these types of things with others.

The post The Surprise Ways Calories Can Hide first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

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

Making it Easier Through Technology

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

The Primary Thing to Look for in Phone Apps Is:

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

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

What to Log and Why

When Logging There are Some Tenants to Live By:

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

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

You will Probably See Some Surprises

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

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

With Honesty Comes Actionable Data

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

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

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

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