Schedules change. Activity changes. Food options change. Even the role of meals can change depending on where you are.

This series comes from our own experience trying to maintain a calorie budget while traveling. We are not chasing perfection. We are trying to understand why habits that work at home become harder on the road. Over the next several articles, we will look at common travel situations and how to think about them. A key idea is that a small amount of planning can make a big difference.

Travel will always be unpredictable. But it is often easier to set a rough plan for food, activity, and timing than to make every decision in the moment. Before we get into strategies, it helps to understand the core problem.

Travel does not just change where we eat. It breaks the routines that make it easier to make eating decisions.

Why Travel Disrupts Eating Habits

Most people are creatures of habit. We go to bed at similar times, wake up on a schedule, and eat meals at set times. Our days often follow a pattern. Life can be busy, but it is usually predictable.

Travel is not predictable.

Before you even arrive, you are on someone else’s schedule. Flights leave at fixed times, and sometimes they are delayed or canceled. Traffic can change plans. Delays happen. Meetings move. Tours start when they start. Food is available only at certain times. This removes the structure that normally supports eating habits.

Travel also adds new choices. Trying local food is part of the experience. Whether for work or vacation, there is often a desire to try new meals and restaurants. Work travel adds more layers. Business dinners, client lunches, hotel breakfasts, and events all shape when and what you eat.

Food is also less consistent. In some places, options are limited. Sometimes airport food is the only choice. Other times, you eat what is available between plans.

Even when food is available, it may not be familiar. Portion sizes also vary. A normal meal in one place may be much larger or smaller than what you expect. Some meals are shared. Some are served in courses. Meals can also serve different roles. In some places, dinner is a large main meal. In others, food is shared on small plates over time.

Your body does not separate cultural and social eating from calorie needs. It still counts intake in the same way.

Why This Matters

These changes are neither good nor bad. They are just part of travel.

Most nutrition goals depend on consistency. At home, we know when we will eat. We know our activity level. We know our food options. Travel removes that stability. This is where a calorie budget becomes useful.

A calorie budget is not about restriction. It is a simple way to think about tradeoffs during a trip. If you plan a large dinner, you may adjust earlier meals. If you walk more in a day, that changes things, too.

The goal is not a perfect plan. Travel rarely allows that. The goal is to avoid reacting to every situation in the moment. A small amount of awareness makes travel easier to manage.

Understanding why travel disrupts eating habits is the first step. Next, we will look at how to use a calorie budget when your schedule and food choices are always changing.

The post Why Travel Is A Diet’s Strange Trap first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Flashback to Where We Started

We started to cook for ourselves over eating out to help us handle our calorie budget through portions over serving size. It was also a way to lower costs as we started to break out of the economies of convenience. As we made our bread, yogurt, and crackers, we found things didn’t taste the same. Over time, we found our food more to our liking than what we purchased or ate when out.

Was it better? Is homemade better? That is subjective because it is a judgment based on personal taste. We noticed most food we bought or ate out was significantly more salty and/or sweet. We eventually had to limit our eating or purchase of pre-packaged food because we started not to like them. 

Nope, We’re Not Haters

We are not here to discuss whether homemade food is better than factory food. There are so many different ways to compare the two that it is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. This is not a post about ultra-processed food vs. farm-to-table organics. We won’t examine how food is wasted through the supply chain. 

The reality is, I still love myself some Taco Bell once in a while. Big Macs are a great treat once every six months. You can’t tell me Taco Bell tastes like genuine Mexican or Tex-Mex cuisine. I don’t consider a Big Mac to taste like any real hamburger, homemade or not. They are both delightful nonetheless. We will treat fast food or large restaurant chains as factory food, even when they produce it fresh in-store or in restaurants. We will get to why in a bit.

Factory vs Home

The fundamental difference between factory food and homemade food lies in their goals and production methods.

Factory food aims to maximize sales by appealing to the broadest audience. Producers must ensure the food stays as consistent as possible. That means every frozen pizza, box of crackers, and block of cheddar must meet specific standards. Even fast-food restaurants must maintain these standards. For example, a Whopper in California should taste the same as one in Kentucky.

Factory food producers must use consistent ingredients in their production lines. When you buy frozen fries, the producers have selected potatoes of a specific variety, size, and water content to ensure a uniform product. Additionally, many factories use machines and processes that home cooks lack. These machines enable instant freezing and more consistent deep frying. It doesn’t stop there. They also have tools and packaging for less spoilage by using, for example, things such as nitrogen gas in a bag of chips.

Home cooking is about tailoring food to your specifications. That means creating something for you, by you. For example, you may prefer spicier or sweeter food than the general public likes, so you tailor your cooking to your palate. You often need to work with inconsistent seasonal ingredients as a home cook. You generally prepare food without highly specialized equipment designed for one specific dish. For example, you may have an ice cream machine; however, it can’t create the same overrun as a commercial machine. 

By definition, home cooking can’t taste 100% the same as factory food because of these reasons.

How We All Got Here

Over time, we have shifted from an agrarian to an industrialized society. If you were an early pioneer or homesteader, you often cooked simple meals based on what you produced. As we moved into larger populations living in cities, this changed. People in cities didn’t have room for a garden and chickens, so they had to seek out local vendors. This was part of the tradeoff of working long hours in a factory versus homesteading. 

As we progressed post-WWII into a level of affluence combined with leisure, we entered a time where convenience and consistency became key. We had abundance, were traveling more, and let’s face it, cooking three hot meals a day plus goodies isn’t easy. In a family at that time, that job was usually the work of one person: the woman. Convenience, or factory food, was part of her emancipation. This was where things like TV dinners and pre-packaged meals gained ground over home cooking. 

Fast food, another form of factory food, was born then. It came from travelers’ need for consistency. The age of the motor car and family road trips began with the construction of the interstate highway system. People wanted to trust what they ate and stayed, so many companies like McDonald’s, White Castle, and Howard Johnson catered to that need. 

Changing Over

Because home-cooked foods aren’t the same as factory foods, they will taste different. Learning to store and reheat foods becomes essential to make the best use of them and reduce the time we spend cooking. There is also a period of adjustment to the change of taste. Here’s the strange part: once you become used to what you make, factory foods taste very strange. Why?

By cooking at home, you tailor your food to your tastes, not the larger populations. Remember that factory foods are created through a rigorous series of consumer testing. That testing decides what foods have the broadest appeal to sell. Making anything for a large population or least common denominator can’t be polarizing in any one direction. It can’t be excessively sweet, spicy, salty, etc. It also has to be a certain level of these to be liked by many. 

For example, we cut out a lot of salt from our diet. We didn’t go to zero; we just dialed it back. As we changed, we found that eating out or purchasing something was much more salty than we had remembered. Our tastes had adapted to what we produced rather than what others liked. We realized that the more we made at home, the less we liked out. Your tastes adapt. That wasn’t an overnight thing; it took time. 

But Why?

Food isn’t just about consuming nutrients. When we eat things that taste good, our brain releases dopamine. Factory food companies design their products to trigger this response, and they prove it through consumer testing. We promised not to preach, but the reality is that ultra-high-processed food deliberately aims to do this. People often see home cooking as made with love, but love doesn’t always win—at least not at first.

We Didn’t Go Cold Turkey

For us, breaking with factory food meant rewiring our brains in how we thought about food and the rewards our brains got from eating it. To switch, we found ways of approximating factory foods but with our twist and customized to our liking. We had fried fish and fried chicken, made our egg rolls, and even katsu chicken. They were experiments. Even our bread recipe tries to approximate a local loaf we used to buy in the store. 

As we tailored our food to our needs, we found when we had to purchase something or eat out, we were less satisfied. The food was more expensive, saltier, or too sweet, or something that was becoming less familiar. We had essentially rewired our brains to enjoy what we produced over what was created for mass consumption. 

However, we will never produce a Big Mac or a crunchy Taco Bell taco. Those are still basic treats for once every few months. But now, those tastes and the rewards from them are different. They have become substitutes for times when we travel and need something consistent if we can’t bring our food. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why homemade and factory foods taste different. It is tough to produce that ‘factory taste’ at home. Instead of trying to imitate, you can create for yourself what rewards you and helps you meet your dietary goals. Factory foods have a purpose, as do homemade foods. We don’t believe that making everything from scratch scales in the modern world. Still, by investing a little time in learning, you can create food tailored to your needs over the general population.  

The post Why Homemade Makes Food So Unique? first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Cooking Only Once in a While was Wastefull

We have always cooked our meals in some fashion or another. When younger it was simply a necessity. As time went by, it was more about food as fun. This change led us to attempt impractical recipes and to a lot of waste of ingredients. Even using one of my favorite magazines, Cooks Illustrated, we had a lot of wasted ingredients. We started to find we had a ¼ jar of this and ½ a jar of that left over from recipes. The more we saw of this, the less practical cooking ourselves became. As a result, if we wanted something special we went out. 

Both wastefully cooking at home and eating out had the same effects on us. They both blew up our calorie budget. Each was also costing us a lot of money. The latter one we will dig into more in another post. As I said in the earlier post the portion problem was such an epiphany, this is why. 

Cooking a Few more Portions Saves Time and Money

We decided to re-learn how to cook and plan. Why? We realized it takes roughly the same time to produce 10 servings of something as it does two. It’s that simple. We would go on to realize once we got good at it, it took about the same time to go out for a meal.

Don’t think it was easy giving up eating at restaurants. Eating out was another dopamine hit for us. It is for many people. Most people will also feel that they can’t cook or make restaurant-quality food. We learned the opposite. I can make a decent bowl of ramen and also can make some mean corn dogs. It took a while to get there but, hopefully, we can shorten the journey for some.

Would You Pay for a Horse You Can’t Ride?

We also started to look at this through a completely different lens. In our case, we were paying for calories we didn’t want. Most of us realize there is a cost to calories. We associate that cost with weight gain or loss. What most don’t equate is the cost of those calories you pay for but don’t eat. 

When you buy food at a restaurant you are paying a premium for the calories. The reason it is a premium is that the food is created for you by others. Would you pay for someone to paint your house and your deck if you didn’t have a deck? Of course not! Then why pay for food you aren’t going to eat?

At the Core of the Issue was Waste

We started to identify both of these issues. Ultimately our calorie budget made us use restaurants as little as possible. We recognized that the cost of the calories we were wasting was very high. As a result, we started to think we should invest our money in ourselves. We decided to get some decent kitchen equipment and start to cook at home more consistently.

Truth be told, it wasn’t just the calories or unpredictable portion sizes of restaurants. We learned quickly that counting calories was a pain. What made it worse was never knowing what was in the food. How much butter was in those mashed potatoes? Was that 4 or 5 ounces of fries? Not only was counting calories becoming more tedious, but it was also becoming completely unreliable.

Our Solution Was Imitating MREs and TV Dinners…Sort Of

Loving or hating the military is up to you. We feel we can learn from anyone. The one thing the military knows is logistics and the importance of food. The MRE or Meal Ready to Eat was the US evolution of food rations. It is designed to be stored for a long time and then used in the field. It has a description of everything in it nutrition-wise. What a brilliant idea for counting calories! Supposedly not too bad tasting as well? You know what, they weren’t too far from a civilian TV dinner either.

Now I’ve never had an MRE but I will make a huge assumption my food was better than a standard MRE. I know what I cook is way better than the TV dinners. We know the idea of an MRE doesn’t sound great to some. To be clear, we weren’t out to re-create them, we only wanted to use the concept.

We started creating our meals and storing them. This was a great way for us to create portions we wanted. We froze most things. The microwave was elevated in importance in our daily routine. They were easy to take to work. We also could put the dish in an app and not have to enter a guess for what we were eating. Because we made it ourselves, we could create it as a meal in our apps, and calorie counting became as easy as selecting it.

Wrapping Up

We had begun solving the problems of waste, and portion size, and making counting calories easier. This led to performing meal planning and learning a system for it. We will discuss how we worked through that in a post that follows.

Hopefully, at the end of this post, you can understand some of the challenges of eating out. It becomes an issue of control of calories and waste. While our previous post details come of the ways to work in eating out, overall, it wasn’t sustainable on a daily or even a few times a week. By re-learning to cook and package our meals we gained back money, time, and predictability. All of this helped us stay on track for our goals.

The post Cooking Simple For Better Control first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

We used to like going out to eat. It was convenient, it was fun and it was entertainment. We also travel by car often which requires either carrying pre-made food or eating out. We generally opted for eating out. Over time we learned this was problematic for our calorie budget. In this post, we will talk about the problem we faced and some tricks to deal with it.

As our life became busy we learned to depend on eating out more and more. Being only two of us, it didn’t seem that expensive. It also made sense with our on-the-go lifestyle. As we started to look at our calorie needs, things changed. While our goals were primarily weight loss, the same problem occurs for people adding weight. We started to realize that portion sizes and ingredients are completely unpredictable. 

Restaurants are Business Competing for Your Dollar

The draw of a restaurant is not just about food. A restaurant is an experience. It is a place where we hang out with friends. We go there to have something unique we may not be able to make at home. We may need a place on the road to grab something. It may also be a place to flaunt some extra cash or reward someone. It’s part of our culture in the US and around the world. 

A restaurant is a business. To keep its customers happy it must provide great service, good food, and most importantly; value. Value is subjective. What many people see as value is quantity; how much did I get for my money? Don’t believe me? Ask yourself why menus have sizes and quantities on items like steaks and prawns and not broccoli. They aren’t there for accounting purposes. The reason they are there is so you know the cost of the additional spend on protein.

  Restaurants have been in their own arms race around portion size for years. We have been somewhat trained to want more. You can read about things like Big Mac vs Whopper here. According to the History Channel, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas also invented 3 sizes of hamburgers just to get people to buy the middle size more often than the small one which increased his revenue. 

Cool Story, so What?

  Why is this a problem for people on a calorie budget? 

• We found portion sizes were completely unpredictable. 
• Understanding the calories of the meal was hard since we didn’t know how it was made

  Coming from families that chastised people for wasting food, we also ran into the problem of not feeling good about leaving food on the table. We will discuss this in another post as a different problem to be addressed. The point is the usual advice you receive is to save half for later. When traveling it wasn’t possible to take home leftovers due to spoilage dangers of being in the zone too long.

It was More than the Calories We were Wasting

As an aside, remember you are paying for a restaurant experience. That includes the server, food, experience, etc. As a result, you are also paying a premium for the calories you are eating. We don’t buy a gallon of milk if we only need a pint. Why? We don’t want to throw our money away on things we don’t use. Ask yourself then, why would you pay for the extra calories you don’t need? 

Hidden in this little epiphany that we were paying for calories sparked some very large changes for us in our lives. It became something more fundamental than weight. We will discuss this in another post but do ponder what your costs are here.  

Some Tips to Help

 The answer you expect when discussing calorie goals and eating out is the normal draconian battle cry Stop Eating Out! That just isn’t sustainable for most in our society. We had to account for our eating out occasionally. Here is how we approached it.

• Review the restaurant online and look at the pictures people took. You can get a good idea of the portion sizes from those pictures.
• While you are seated glance around at plate sizes. The portions will match the plate size. 
• Wait to order until you see someone’s meal delivered. You will get an idea of portion sizes from what you see brought from the kitchen.
• Ask the server for the sizes. Some servers will simply tell you the plate can feed two. 
• Read the menu. When you order a burger realize that portion size follows patty size. There will be a difference in overall plate size of a ¼ lb hamburger and a ½ lb burger.
• Control portion sizes through appetizers. There have been a few times we have decided to split some wings and mozzarella sticks over a full-blown entree.
• Split the plate with someone. This allows you to control how much you are getting. 
• Ask them to leave off or replace a side. I don’t need buttered bread with my hashbrowns. 
• Make only one meal when ordering a combo at a restaurant. We often share a side of fries and drinks at the local fast food and roadside burger joints. 
• Ask for a take-out container immediately if something is too big. This gives you a chance to split the plate for later.
• Leave food on the table if needed. While we both hate doing this, our other goals come first.

But I Want to Gain

This post only seemingly addresses portion sizes that are too large. For people trying to add weight, this may not be a problem. A basic search of Google will show that 100g of home-prepared fries are about half the calories of 100g of restaurant fries. The reality is, you don’t know until you look it up or try to log it in a food app. 100 grams is roughly 3.5 ounces which generally doesn’t cover those portions at many restaurants. Make that 7 oz of fries and cup of gravy such as an order of Poutine and you may hit 800 calories.

We are not nutritionists or medical professionals and don’t feel right discussing nutrition with other people. Still, we think most people would agree that those calories aren’t exactly balanced and you may want to make a different choice.

This post didn’t fully address the problem of travel and restaurants. We will discuss where fast food, food trucks, and gas station hot cases can help when on the road. We have found there is a time and place for them.

The portion problem is real for a lot of us. This post should have given you some tools on how to eat out but maintain a calorie budget. You don’t need to stop eating out. By doing some planning and observations, you can help maintain your goals more easily. Simply being cognizant of the portion problem will help you.

The post Practical Ways To Use Restaurants 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.