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.

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.

Food, Furniture, or Software, it’s still a Recipe

We spent many years in the software industry writing requirements for engineers to create systems, applications, and features. You would think that was easy. All you need to do is tell them I want a web page that displays a user’s items in a user’s checkout cart.  Can they change the items in the cart? How do they check out? What are the colors of the error messages? It gets to be a bit of a rat hole quickly. 

Why is it so problematic and how does that relate to recipes? TL;DR, the reality is while we may use the same terms those terms may be defined differently by two different individuals who never ask about the context they are being used in. What we are talking about is how one individual, who may never meet the other, gives that person their knowledge in a reproducible way. 

A Recipe Is an Instruction Set

Recipes are an instruction set or formula that has specific ingredients and processes in an order. To be reproducible they must include the ingredients and the process to make something. This makes them no different than putting together Ikea furniture or a DIY shed kit. Sounds complicated right? No one wants to sit down, go through every step, and maybe watch a video as well. You want dinner and you want it now but that is exactly where things go wrong. 

Details Matter and Lessons Learned

Mia Culpa I know this first hand. I love Baklava so I bought an old-school cookbook, followed the recipe, and threw it in the oven. The hours started to go by and I kept checking it from 7 pm until 10 pm before deciding something was wrong as it wasn’t turning brown. After re-reading the recipe about 10 times I had a face-palm moment. 

While the entire cookbook used standard measurements such as cups and teaspoons, it had cooking temperatures in Celsius. I set my oven to 180 Fahrenheit instead of 350 Fahrenheit because I didn’t pay attention to the notation. It was a simple mistake back before we were a more global society and had things like the internet. Luckily it was savable, but I still use that as an example of the importance of reading the fine print. 

Breaking it Down to Tips and Traps. 

Helpful Tips:

• Read the recipe end to end and make sure you aren’t surprised by a step. The writer may not tell you that you need to have something like an ice bath ready until they hit that step. 
• When you see a term you don’t know, search it. Terms such as sweat and saute are very specific forms of cooking.
• Measure as they measure and use the ingredients in the manner they use them. If it is two cups of diced carrots you will significantly alter the recipe by substituting sliced carrots due to the volume change.
• When possible use recipes with weights such as grams or ounces over volume units such as cups and teaspoons. Weight is considered more accurate than volume measurements.
• Read the comments on the recipe to see how many people made changes and why. 
• If you need half a cup of celery or onion, you will have leftover ingredients you have paid for. it would be good to be able to plan for their use before they end up wasted.
• Follow the steps of the recipe as precisely as you can. Many times the writer may not know they are doing something that has a specific name and outcome. I have read many recipes that don’t state clearly why you may be doing something like creaming or kneading. 

Traps to Avoid:

• When the recipe has ambiguous terms such as ‘until fragrant’ or ‘at a sizzle’ make sure you are aware of their intent. For example, when fragrant is the only indication of doneness, it is very easy to burn spices which only have about 10 seconds from ‘fragrant’ to charred.
• Read the number of steps and inactive prep time, not just the active minutes. Some recipes are way more involved than simply the time you are preparing them. Bread is notorious for having 12-14 distinct steps most of the time is for the dough to rise. 
• If you have special dietary needs, verify you can make the appropriate substitutions in the recipe. Simply changing from say buttermilk to skim milk can cause an acid imbalance that keeps proper leaving from occurring. 
• Follow the steps of the recipe as precisely as you can. Many times the writer may not know they are doing something that has a specific name and outcome. I have read many recipes that don’t state clearly why you may be doing something like creaming or kneading. 
• If you don’t have the pans types (manufacturers don’t matter) don’t make the dish unless you do some research. When cooking, some pan types, shapes, and materials they are made from imply specific methods of cooking. You can use one pan for many things but you have a better chance of success if you are keeping close to what the recipe calls for.

In Closing

Circling back around, a recipe is two things; ingredients and a process to create something with them. These sets of instructions are no different than doing DIY kits such as furniture. Once that is understood you can understand very quickly which will work and which won’t by reading them. It is really easy to fall into the trap of seeing a pretty picture on a site or book and not paying attention to the details. The details are what are important. Unlike furniture, you can’t simply unscrew something and flip it over once you see the mistakes. 

The post Be A Better Cook By Seeking Details 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.