The medical, health, and fitness communities rely on data to determine a person’s peak health and optimal weight. To make things easier to find, we highlighted some of the most essential tools and formulas and pointed you to resources for digging deeper.

That said, anyone who’s spent time in health and fitness knows that trends come and go. Further, these tools and formulas focus on large populations, not always matching an individual’s goals. New theories, tools, and approaches constantly emerge, so we must continually revisit and refine what we know.

Disclaimer

Before diving in, here are the axioms that drive our statement that each tool is a single lens on where you are in meeting your goals, not who you are. 

• Each human being is a different living, breathing organism. 
• Every health organization and government must try to set standards that are the broadest for all people. 

Also, we aren’t here to judge these openly. We aim to discuss what each is attempting to ascertain, how it tracks it, and how it provides insight into your personal goals. Now on to the tools!

Body Mass and Composition

So, like us, you are curious and want to understand your body weight and makeup. These tools help answer questions like “Am I heavy for my size?” or “How much of my weight is muscle, fat, or bone?” They do this by measuring parts of your body and comparing them.

• BMI or Body Mass Index Calculator: A calculator for adults to gauge if they are over-/or underweight. 

• Skin Fold Test: This test uses calipers to measure specific skin folds to determine a person’s muscle-to-fat ratio.

• WHR or Waist to Hip Ratio Test: Another body composition test that relies on a difference in the circumference of someone’s waist relative to their hips. 

• Dunk or Hydrostatic Weighing Test: This test uses your buoyancy to determine your body composition. It uses Archimedes’ principle to make its determination.   

Calorie Intake and Consumption

• BMR or Base Metabolic Rate: A calculator that estimates the total number of calories your body burns daily at rest. Rest means eating, sleeping, and performing normal respiration and blood pumping. 

• TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure: This formula is roughly BMR with activity added. That being said, activity is also not a standard because it is based on you and your current state of conditioning or fitness. 

• DRI or Daily Required Intake: DRI is BMR calories broken down into fats, proteins, carbohydrates, macronutrients, etc., according to the USDA MyPlate.gov standard. 

But Wait, There’s More!

We didn’t get into activity calculations, such as the RPE (Rate or Perceived Energy) Scale for perceived exertion, nor Bone Density scans, such as DEXA (sometimes called DXA), to determine body composition. Why? We wanted to focus on those most available to the average person just looking for basic guidance, like we were. 

An Important Point To Note

Remember that post on serving size we wrote? Yes, take a look at your BMR and TDEE. You may find that you are not what the USDA terms the ‘average’ person who needs x calories daily. This is where most problems with weight management start for people. Once you have done some research, you will find your number.

Wrapping Up;

This post collects a variety of tools commonly used to guide weight and health management. Each can be helpful, but each has pros and cons. We aren’t here to decide what’s right for you, but if you choose to use them, remember to research them. None of these tools is an authority on you unless you fall into the exact ‘average’ they are targeting. Instead, see them as valuable tools, helping you shape and refine your approach to your goals.

The post The Truth About Fitness Calculators first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Setting Up our Goals

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

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

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

Buckets of Hours for Balance

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

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

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

Logging our Time

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

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

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

Celebrate the Wins

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

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

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

An Actionable Feedback Loop

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

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

What, No Example?

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

The post How To Be Successful Via A Time Card first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Just Nuke It! 

When at work I have never seen anyone in the company kitchen use anything but 100% power to nuke to oblivion whatever it was they were heating. This was my standard operation of a microwave as well. You select Add a Minute, or whatever time you need, hit go, and wait. After the time elapses, it beeps, and you open the door. If it is hot enough you pull it out and if not you repeat the steps until done. There isn’t a lot of magic there. 

Time and multiple attempts have convinced me that the popcorn setting on microwaves never produces good popcorn. In my opinion, the button needs to be labeled Destroy Popcorn. Let’s face it, you would think there wasn’t that much variation between companies in a standard bag of microwave popcorn but there is. For us using the bag’s advice of listening until popping slows was a far better method than the popcorn button.

Just a quick review of the basics of how a microwave works. If you want to get into the details of how a microwave works you can read about that in depth on other sites. A microwave uses a magnetron to excite water molecules. The more agitated the water gets, the more the heat it produces. The thermal limit of water at sea level is 212℉ before it turns into steam. This upper limit is why microwaves can’t brown food via the Maillard Reaction.   

The key technology used here is the magnetron. The microwave is rated by its power. It is simple enough to understand, that the more power, the faster it can heat food. How fast it heats food has positives and surprisingly some negatives. More power is fine, however, too much power isn’t great at times. It turns out too much power can lead to some overheating with messy results.  

Last, no matter what a manufacturer tells you, a microwave can’t roast or air fry. If the manufacturer states it can do those things, you are buying a hybrid with two separate machines built in. If you do some homework you will see it is simply a traditional oven with a microwave. A magnetron can only excite water not create convection or conduction via the dry heat needed for those cooking types. It is not simply not possible for a magnetron to roast or air fry.

Popcorn, Defrost and Vegetables, Oh My!

If you are like us, then you probably have only played around with all the presets, like popcorn. Let’s face it: We use a microwave to save time. What saves time? Full power!! True as that is, it is generally at the cost of something else. But first, about those preset buttons. 

In an attempt to apply the right power and time to provide the proper heating of your food, manufacturers create those preset buttons. Most microwaves do this through a set of mathematical equations by approximating how much water and mass the food has. With that approximation, the microwave then decides, based on its power output, how much time and power to use. Great because we all know exactly how much our frozen leftover lasagna weighs! No, most of us probably don’t unless we are dialed into how it was made, for what calorie budget, and the portion sizes we cut it into. 

Higher-end microwaves may use humidity, infrared, and sound to monitor cooking.  Oddly enough, popcorn seems to have driven a lot of this innovation.  If you have ever overcooked popcorn in a microwave, you understand why it is so critical not to have that happen. When popcorn is cooked too long in a microwave it will turn to a tar-like material and also produce an acrid smoke and smell. It can be so bad that you may need to replace your microwave. I know this from personal experience.

It’s Not Just About Water, Power, and Time 

All presets and management of cooking in a microwave is still about balancing power and time to increase the temperature of the food through the excitement of water. You will also read that they excite the molecules of fat and sugar. Realize those are mostly composed of water hence why we say water not all three. The last important key is the mass of the food. This is why you will see presets such as defrost by weight or bag size for popcorn. 

In these cases, the microwave adjusts the power and time to make sure it slowly raises the temperature of the food. Why slowly? If you have melted cold butter in a microwave and had it explode you know the reason. The cooking of the food is based on how deep the microwaves penetrate the food, where the water is in the food, and how much water is in the food.

Microwaves actually can only penetrate from one to one and a half inches. That means in small pieces of food they cook from the inside out whereas in large they cook from the outside in. In the case of outside in, the interior is done by conduction from the hot part of the food, not the microwave. This is why it is easy to overcook the outside of food and still have a cold center. 

A Pair of Examples

For example, butter has a lot of water and is small. The microwave cooks the melted butter inside out. As the butter superheats the water flashes to steam at 212F which expands rapidly creating an explosion. If you have made this mistake then you know what it is like to clean butter out of every nook and cranny in your microwave. 

My nemesis, Lasagna, is on the opposite side of the reheating problem. For us, frozen lasagna is a block of high-moisture frozen food usually stored in a plastic container. It is large enough that it cooks from the outside in. In the past, we would nuke this at high power. As a result of that reheating process, the outside bits got hot enough to destroy plastic containers. 

Back to the Presets

We still shy away from presets and here is why. I want to understand how my food is being cooked so I can use that in other places. If you have a microwave at work that is 800 watts it is not going to behave like your home microwave of 1000 watts. Our guesses and experiences were the ones in our work environment that didn’t have all the bells and whistles as well.   

When we started to understand how to use the microwave more effectively, we wanted to be able to use that knowledge and adapt to other microwaves. Since nothing is standardized we can’t hope the two machines are the same including their presets. Overall though, I am pretty sure we can get close to home if we simply use the same power settings and only change the amount of time we cook.

All Things in Moderation

Since moderation of power and time was key we started our experiments. As with the article on reheating, it doesn’t mean there is going to be an easy button or simple answer. After researching a bit we found Whirlpool puts out a pretty good list to explain power levels, foods, and how they go together.

But turning down the power means cooking longer, correct? It can, however, be more of a trade-off. By turning down the power, and increasing time, we get more predictable cooking times. This leads to being able to walk away from the machine rather than babysit it. For example, for our serving size of Lasagna, we can put it on for 10 minutes at 50% power and walk away. In our previous cooking style, we would microwave for a minute, wait 30 seconds, and repeat until cooked through. That left us babysitting our food for 7 or 8 minutes. 

This is not the case in popcorn which I don’t trust. For me, no matter the preset, sensor, or other dark arts, I babysit it. There are some items like this where full power and babysitting are needed. I will wait until I hear that popping slow down before I stop it. 

Wrapping Up 

In this post, we discussed some ways to use a microwave more successfully. By moderating power and temp you can achieve better cooking and reheating of food. By not using presets you also learn how to adapt to other microwaves that you use. These two points make the microwave an even more powerful tool in the kitchen.

The post How To Make Good Use of a Microwave first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Limiting Scope

This post will kick off a series of other more specific posts. Unfortunately, we feel you could write an article per type of food on how to reheat it. That is problematic time-wise and doesn’t run the steel thread of understanding the processes so others can self-help. It also doesn’t take into account a person’s individual calorie budget and serving sizes. We will get to how those change the art of re-heating. 

The Basics

For brevity let’s limit our discussion to some simple ideas that we can expand on later. We would assert that most of our cooking falls into 2 main ways of transferring heat:

• Convection is the transfer of heat from the air to the food such as happens in an oven.
• Conduction is transferring heat to the food by direct contact between the heat source and the food.

  We would also add there are only two ways of applying heat to cook food.

• Dry methods where the cooking process does not rely on a large amount of liquid to transfer heat. These, in our definition, are methods such as sauteing or roasting.
• Wet methods where the primary transfer is based on liquid such as water or oil. This type of cooking is how boiling, frying, and microwaving work.

Mix and Match

Almost all the food you cook will be a mix of these elements. Most cooking is about water management and reaching a safe temperature for the food. Taking that ride from raw to done imparts flavors and textures that please us such as caramelization via the Maillard Reaction. We may concentrate flavors via reductions of water as well such as in, well, a reduction. This method also applies to items like chicken stock or jams.

Where the confusion arises is that most things we cook are hybrids of the four bullet points above. What we want to do is understand what the outcome from our methods produces to reheat it. Did our cooking create something that needs to be reheated vs a dry method or a wet method? This begs the question do we reheat it through convection or conduction?

Hybrid Examples 

Let’s examine two hybrids, lasagna, and fried fish, to understand what we are discussing in terms of methods vs outcomes. We found it easy to ruin both lasagna and fried fish if reheated incorrectly. When we think of lasagna we see it as a dry convection method. For fried fish, it is usually a wet conduction method. The output is a bit different though.

We would classify lasagna as a wet method like a stew. Why such a weird idea? Lasagna cooks by method provided by its water content even though the heat is powered by dry convection. It is the same process that happens when making a casserole or braising meat. Dry heat in an oven raises the temperature of the fluid in the lasagna to cook it through boiling and/or steaming. A microwave is a wet conduction method as it uses the water in the food to heat it. Practically speaking a microwave steams or boils food from the inside out. That makes lasagna a perfect candidate to reheat in a microwave. 

Have you ever tried to microwave fried fish or fries? They turn out pretty nasty in our opinion but why? They are both technically cooked as wet methods of conducting cooking. The outcome of frying food is to drive most of the moisture out of the exterior of the food and create a crust locking moisture in. If that moisture is then released as steam, you get soggy fries and fish. What does a microwave do, well, it produces steam. That is why those foods need dry convection heat to reheat them

Two Other Variables

There are two other variables in our reheating discussion. They are the concepts of thermal capacity and safety. Most of us want to reheat food to preserve its original quality. In concept our matrix of methods above accounts for most items. Thermal capacity and food safety get in the way of that at times so we will set up how to deal with them here. First, let’s identify them

• The USDA states that all leftovers should be reheated to 165℉ to be considered safe.
• The surface-to-mass ratio of the food dictates how much thermal capacity it has and how long heating it thoroughly will take.

The first thing you will notice is that 165℉ is above what some foods are initially cooked to. Let’s talk about that one a little more in-depth

Is It Done?

The USDA has to deal with a broad population which means groups like the very old very young and everyone in between. That means they must put out safety information that others may not suit all. They also must account for all different parts of the food chain from the field where the cow is raised to re-heating leftover roast. That is a lot of places for bad things to happen and bugs to grow.

To us, if a steak is over 135℉ it is overcooked. That is us, not others. We sometimes go as low as 125F for a roast. That is what you will find many people consider rare and is a common way of cooking it.  Personally, fish over 145℉-150℉, unless deep fried where we don’t notice, is overdone. Won’t reheating leftovers push it past the point we like it? That being our pre-packaged hamburger and chicken is getting pushed to 165℉ because we can’t trust it.

We take a ‘let’s be reasonable’ approach and use the USDA as guidelines. We buy food from known sources. When we prep and cook, we have a clean kitchen that gets cleaned regularly. We store food in the fridge or freezer properly. Nothing gets left in the zone for long unless it is intentional. Simply put, we don’t take a lot of chances so we can cook to whatever temperature we are comfortable with. You need to do you, but when you push the temps up, you aren’t re-heating, you are re-cooking. 

Mass to Surface Area

This is one of the most misunderstood variables and one of the most important in heating. Here are the two axioms to know

• The larger something is, the more time it takes to cook. 
• How fast it absorbs heat is directly related to its surface area where it contacts the heat. 

One caveat to that is the microwave but let’s stick to the general for now. Based on these two axioms, we want to reheat food up to temp as quickly as possible without re-cooking it. What isn’t obvious is that it creates conditions where we want to use the lowest heat possible so we don’t overcook the outer part of the food before the interior reaches temp. 

Important Temps to Know

One last piece of the reheating puzzle is two important temperatures. At sea level water boils and turns to steam at 212℉. The Maillard Reaction, or browning of food begins at anywhere from 280℉ to 330℉. Depending on what sugars are present, caramelization follows the Maillard reaction. Eventually, you end up in the burnt stage of Pyrolysis which, in short form, means burnt. 

Why are these temps important? They are important to know so we get what we want from reheating. Do we care about a crust? Then we don’t want to create steam via a wet method. What if we want to raise the temp of something without further browning? In that case, we want to stay under 280℉ 

Back to the Examples

Our serving size of lasagna has a high mass-to-surface ratio. To cook it without further caramelizing, we need to reheat it at a low temp. Because we don’t want to overcook the outside before the inside is warm, we want to take our time but we also want to eat. That is a perfect case for a slow-wet method of cooking so we boil it correct? No, but close.

A microwave, when used correctly, provides a wet method of cooking that steams the lasagna from the inside out. Oddly enough, as water is removed from tomato sauce it is capable of creating a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Those temps can cause caramelization and overcooking to occur. Yes, we have burned lasagna and melted plastic in a microwave when not careful. For that reason, we want to slowly heat our food at 212℉. For our portion size of 4-6 oz, that usually means a microwave on half power for 10 minutes in a lightly sealed container to hold in the steam.

Our fish is the exact opposite as they are usually high surface-to-mass pieces. We add it to a preheated toaster oven that is running at 275℉ degrees for approximately 10 minutes. This low dry heat helps preserve the crust without causing more browning. The fish is small enough it heats quickly without being over cooked. 

Wrapping up

In this post, we have discussed some of the basic physics and chemistry involved in cooking. By recognizing how the food was created, and what it has become, you can decide how to reheat it. Truly, no one wants to eat leftovers that don’t feel close to the original food they were. If we can get them close, we can save ourselves time and energy in making one-off meals. We can also control how much we waste when we overcook.

The post How To Better Reheat Leftover food first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Portions Vs Meals

In another post, we discussed the difference between portions and meals. We also discussed what a serving size is and isn’t. Since we know a serving size is something based on what others eat, we want to define a portion as the amount of something you eat based on your calorie budget. For example, you may order a pizza but may only eat two slices of an extra-large pie. Was that a portion or a serving of that pizza?

We are calling that out intentionally as we know there is confusion around the definitions of portions vs servings. This becomes a bit more problematic to talk about in multi-course meals where we have proteins, starches, and usually a vegetable as a main entree plus sides. 

This gets more problematic because when building an a la carte meal, you will need portions that make up all three. When you take home leftovers from a restaurant, you may see all three as one portion of a meal. This portion thing begins to sound a little weird but, no worries, we will clear it up a bit later. 

Portion Planning 

To plan for a month of meals we need to extend the number of items we need to have on hand.  Don’t worry, they don’t necessarily add to our work. Remember we can gain portions from simply cooking a little more or taking home leftovers from a restaurant. Before we get to that, let’s give ourselves a definition and again a little harmless math.

• Number of Diners per Meal (NDpM) which is, you guessed it, the number of people you need to feed.
• A complete Meal we define as a meal that approximates proteins, starches, and vegetables to approximate the USDA MyPlate standard.

Let’s also use the table and definitions we had in the previous post to work through our math.

Running Total of Meals Worksheet

The Math

Let’s assume 4 diners for our NdpM. What we then have for the total number of portions we need to make or have on hand for four weeks is 4 x 84  or 336 individual portions correct? That is not exactly the right number as we had defined a complete meal as containing 3 items. This means our Made To Order, A La Carte, and Snack-style meals all may be constructed of individual items such as a portion of chicken, rice, and say roasted corn. The Made To Order may also be complete as is such as fried rice with pork and vegetables. 

That leaves us with roughly a need for the following minimum and maximum items for a meal. 

Min and Max Items per Meal Worksheet

Putting this all together we would need a minimum and maximum number of meal portions, as shown below.

Combined Totals Worksheet

When we multiply those totals by our NDpM of 4 you will notice that we get absurd numbers of between 352 and 672 portions of food to feed a group of 4 for a month. In our case, we are only two so we get between 176 to 336 portions of food. 

They Are Real Numbers

They are real but not scary. Remember that is how much you need for 4 people for a month. We also need to realize that If you buy a 2lb bag of corn, depending on your and your diner’s calorie budgets, you may get eight 4-ounce portions of vegetables from it. When you cook a 3lb roast, after water loss, you may get ten 4-ounce portions from it. What happens if you throw in some mashed potatoes which are just as easy to create twelve 4-ounce portions?

What happens is that you have just covered a Made To Order meal that covers creating up to two complete meals for four plus extra portions left over to use for another meal. You just knocked out 20 portions in one meal. Wait, it gets better. What about pre-made or takeout? In each of these cases, you may end up with more food than can be eaten in one sitting. Those extra portions can be used to make meals later as well.

Well Duh! 

We spent a lot of time telling you something you already knew….maybe? We all inherently do this type of planning from week to week but maybe not month to month. By being cognizant of how we can plan longer term, and reduce food making to portions we need rather than having not enough or too much. 

As we started to cook at home more, we thought we needed a lot more than we did. We found ourselves cooking and storing too much. We arrived at thinking about portions over serving size or complete meals to help us plan. We also focused on a calorie budget to make sure our meals were appropriately sized. This began to save us time and money over the aggregate. 

This is also a rolling plan meaning after a while, the meals you make help support the extra portions. This happens more naturally as you learn to think about the trade-offs of say doing individual items such as a roast vs a casserole. It also eventually leads to having a larger mix of items you want to eat at home which can reduce dependency on eating out. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed the nuances of planning with portions over just meals. At first glance the numbers are scary however they are simply numbers. Once you understand this is a month of food numbers aren’t that absurd.

Further with some lifestyle tweaks, we found we could quickly fill them with very little effort. They do give us an approach to managing our food, shopping, and eating out with a goal of efficiency and reduced waste. Lastly, this approach helps us keep an eye on our calorie budgets whether we want to slim down, maintain, or bulk up. 

The post How To Make Meal Plans With Portions first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

To start thinking about a plan, we needed to break down our meals into some taxonomy so we could talk about how many of each type we would want. As discussed previously in our budget post, this will give us a rough idea of how many of each we want and the trade-offs of making them.  Here is our meal taxonomy:

• Made To Order: Any meal we are preparing to eat when done cooking
• Homemade One Dish: Any meal containing protein, starch, and vegetables in one dish such as Beef Stew.
• Pre-made One Dish: Any meal such as frozen store-bought lasagna or burritos purchased to be cooked by us that contained protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables.
• A La Carte: Individual portions of protein, starch, or vegetable such as roast turkey, mashed potatoes, or corn but not mixed.
• Snack Style: Any meal that is composed of items we think of as snacks like crackers, cheese, smoked fish, etc. 
• Restaurant: Any meal where we plan to go out to eat which can run the gamut from a 3-star Michelin restaurant to the local convenience store hot case.

Why do we need a taxonomy to plan? Because we want to define what we need to store in our fridge, freezer, and pantry in some manner so we can have a known number of things. This classification allowed us to plan how we would use what was stored when we stored it. This eventually led to understanding how much time and money we needed to spend to keep us fully stocked. More on that later.

A La Carte Further Defined

We defined this as a specific way to think about how we stored parts of meals that were interchangeable. The point of a la carte is to have multiple ways to address both our Daily Required Intake (DRI) while attempting to handle ideas covered by MyPlate. Let’s work through an example.

If we have roasted corn as a vegetable side frozen, we can use that corn with many different things. The same for store-bought frozen carrots. We can have them with turkey, steak, or pork tenderloin. They also pair well with starch such as rice, mashed potatoes, and a dinner roll. Due to this mix-and-match form, we stuck to calling it a la carte as each was an individual item to be eaten on its own.

Doing Some math

Okay, we have to do some math here. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine, you can skip ahead to the table. For those feeling a need to understand how we got there, here is the skinny. Also, note we are discussing meal plans first and leave total portions for another part of the post. First some definitions:

• The number of Meals per Day (MpD) and Total Days to budget for (TD) should be self-explanatory. To develop our plan, we will assume most people eat 2-3 meals daily and consider a week 7 days. 
• The Total number of Meals (TnM) is MpD x TD so if you have 3 meals a day for 7 days you will have 3 x 7 =21 meals to plan. 
• Weeks to Plan (WtP) is how many weeks we will be planning for.

Let’s do some math now. We want to plan for 4 weeks of eating 3 meals a day. Based on our math TnM = MpD x TD x WtP. We then get 3 x 7 x 4 = 84 meals. That means from our taxonomy of different meal types we need to decide how to fulfill 84 meals over four weeks. Let’s not let the numbers scare us yet. We will prove that creating that amount of food is easier than it sounds. 

We Figure You Already Know This

There is nothing rocket science here in the math we have discussed so far but we feel we need to start here. Anyone can come up with the above in some shape or form. We started here to set a baseline. As planning grows in complexity, with the number of dinners, calorie budgets, portion planning, etc. we wanted to have some set of initial kick-offs to ground us. Those nuances will follow in additional posts.

Breaking It Down

Let’s put that into a table spread across our meal types. This is our ‘plan’ for what we need. We did this with a spreadsheet but you can visualize this any way you like. This is an example as you may choose different combinations for your needs based on calorie, time, and financial cost of meals.

In this table above, the keywords are running the total needed and we can dig in there a bit harder to explain. 

The running total means the total number of meals we must have in stock for the next four weeks. It doesn’t mean the number of meals we must make for the next four weeks. What this gives us is an idea of how much we need to buy, make, or eat out to satisfy our calorie budget goals for the next month. It is also a predictor of how much we can use in the next four weeks. 

Part of the challenge we faced was overstocking. We want to keep enough meals around to fit our needs without making so many we need a large amount of space to keep them. We found ourselves having too much at times which took forever to use up. Also, we found we would become unbalanced which caused us to spend more time making one-offs than we wanted. 

The totals are not related to the number of meals we have to make from scratch. We can get economies of scale here by making extra portions for a meal, buying multi-portion meals like frozen pizza, or even taking home some leftovers from say our favorite Thai takeout. 

Portions vs Meals 

What we have intentionally avoided discussing portions in this post. We will follow up in another post on how portions play into planning. It is in the portion sizes that the economies of scale start working for us. Since the number of portions needed is a function of how much we make, which style of meals, our calorie budgets, and the number of diners we have, it is best to have it in another post. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have discussed how to make a basic plan for the amount of meals you need. This planning helps budget food, storage space, time,e and turnover of items. By doing a little math based on a loose taxonomy of meal types, we can define our needs more accurately. Once this plan is understood, we can look next to how to use it to fulfill our meal and portion needs. 

The post How To Make Usable Meal Plans first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

It’s not Scary, it’s Fun with Science!

Ok, we admit the words physics and chemistry can scare people. Let’s not go there. Why? Because if you are already producing your food by way of cooking, canning, drying, etc. you already understand physics and chemistry even though you may not realize it fully yet. This is what we started to learn.

The first-place cooking made sense to me in Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. The show was intentionally quirky and campy however it taught scientific methodologies that could be applied across the cooking spectrum. The more I learned, the more I started researching cooking as a science. Digging further we would read books such as 

• ‘On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen’
• ‘The Science of Cooking: Every Question Answered to Perfect Your Cooking’
• ‘The Food Lab’
• ‘Fat, Salt, Acid, Heat’

With these and many more learnings, we realized good food was one part ingredients, one part physics, one part chemistry,y and one part the arts.  Let’s talk about why that is the case and why it matters. 

This post introduces the idea of understanding chemistry and physics in cooking. That is a big topic that has many different concepts. As a result, as with other early posts, we will introduce the broad idea here and the why behind it. As our experiments and learning continue, we will refer back to this in those sub-topics

Repeatable Results Come From Understanding

In another post, we discussed how to read a recipe. We will expand on it here. When you follow a recipe you are following a process. Almost anyone can do that successfully if the recipe is perfect and you follow everything exactly. That is what great cooks do. How many times has that worked for most people? Empirically our guess is not as often as most would like but why?

You can learn terms and watch videos but what is generally left out is the process going on. Why do we cook some items at an oven temperature of 300℉ and others at 400℉? Have you ever noticed that your cookies may come out differently if baked on a silicone mat rather than a piece of parchment paper? Both of those are due to a mix of chemistry and physics and you can use that to your advantage.

You Still Don’t Need Algebra 

We aren’t suggesting that everyone read the Principia Mathematica and learn Calculus to make a PB&J sandwich. What we are suggesting is trying to get an idea of why something you are making will help you be better at making it. It can also help you avoid mistakes and learn to fix things when they go bad. 

By knowing what processes are at work you can read a recipe for mistakes. You can also catch yourself making them. In the case of cookies, we mentioned, it is about heat transfer. Silicone does not transfer heat as readily as the parchment paper. In the case of cookies based on the creaming butter and sugar, the silicone version will cook slower, melt and expand more, and be slightly denser than the ones done on parchment paper. 

Chemistry in our context is any process where two or more ingredients interact to create something new. Physics is any physical process that changes the state of the food to create something new. Let’s talk about balloons and bread, for example.

When making a quick bread you are creating air through chemical leavening. Depending on the PH of the dough you will most likely use double-acting baking powder and/or baking soda to the dough. When you do this you will create a chemical reaction that produces gases and water. Those gases and steam from the water lift and create air pockets in your dough to allow it to rise. They need physics to come along to help though.

Thermal transfer from the oven to the bread will be the catalyst for those gases. The baking powder and soda need heat to break down. By cooking the bread at a specific temperature and pan size, you control how the dough sets. The mixture of the two will create the bread’s mouthfeel and crumb. 

Who Cares?

I have been on countless social media groups and forums where someone will ask for help. The questions are similar to “Why didn’t my bread rise?” or “Why did my jerky get too dry?”. My least favorite question I always see asked, “Is it Safe?!?” referring to something canned or fermented.  All of those questions really can only be answered by chemistry and physics. 

Knowing a little bit of science will also go a long way. Are you making an emulsion and did it break? By emulsion we mean, a salad dressing, gravy, cheese sauce, chocolate, or any other type of food that has fat or oil suspended in water. By break, we mean separate, became lumpy, didn’t mix right, seized, etc. If you think of it as a simple emulsion you can learn how to avoid breaking it and fixing it if it does break. That’s science at work!

A Couple Tips

Anyone can learn to cook and make good-tasting food. We have learned that doing it consistently and learning the why and how of a recipe’s steps will make you better at it. Here are the two things we ask whenever we read a recipe

• What chemistry is taking place at each recipe step so we know where things can go wrong and avoid them? 
• What physics is happening to the food during each step of the recipe with the same idea of avoiding errors?

It’s Still Art But It’s Backed By Science

Making something taste good, that is visually appealing, that has great contrasting textures and mouthfeel that someone wants to eat is an art. It is an art that uses science. By being curious about the science aspect, our knowledge grew much more quickly. We found that we had fewer dishes turn out bad and less food waste. Our increased knowledge let us then experiment with more confidence giving us a broader range of things we made.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why food is one part art, one part chemistry, and one part physics. We also gave examples of how knowing that can help us all be better cooks. If we arm ourselves with a little curiosity our knowledge will help us create connections to avoid mishaps and be more confident. By learning the science behind cooking we get to start focusing much more on the art of cooking which is where, for many, the real enjoyment of making something is. 

The post Science Is A Key To Make Great Food first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Background

We had learned to cook for ourselves and over time we began to like our food better than the restaurants. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy a great taco or fried chicken, but rather, it was no longer an event. Eating out became a thing we needed when we traveled or needed a break from our home kitchen. 

This shift also caused us to rethink some of our social activities. We would often go out with friends rather than stay in. This happened a lot if we gathered at our recreational property. Part of our traditions was to go to a restaurant in town rather than cook. We had seen it as a time saver and fun. Our calorie budget and financial choices changed that for us.

Also, note that this post will introduce many concepts. We will provide more in-depth explanations in later posts. 

The Why of the Budget

We wanted a way to justify eating in or out in a simple way. Whether eating out or in, you have so many ways you can spend money. When eating out you can choose a fine dining venue or the local gas station hot case. When eating in you can choose to cook a high-end brand name or a more generic product. Unfortunately, these are both qualifiers and value judgments. We wanted something more concrete as a value quantifier to take the emotion out of our decisions. 

The What of the Budget

Money may be the root of all evil but it is also a simple quantifier. Time, which waits for no person, is also a simple quantifier. Very few people have unlimited money and nobody has unlimited time. We decided to use these two as our guiding principles when making food choices. These two constrained the overall choices we could make to something logical over emotional.

We decided we needed to factor in the total number of portions. Why factor it in? Because the number of portions is directly related to the investment of time and money in cooking. Many dishes make multiple portions however, some like lasagna come at a high time cost. We will discuss that later on in this article.

The How of the Budget

We tracked both our spending on eating out and eating in via our bank accounts. Many banks have budget tracking as part of their offering so this was simple. Each month, we looked at our accounts and saw what we had spent. We did build in some padding around alcohol since our bank’s tracking didn’t differentiate between groceries and alcohol. Overall we were able to start to understand what we were spending per portion. 

Portion size was critical in understanding both our food and eating out. If you eat at a casual dining restaurant like fast food, you get one portion of something like a Whopper or Big Mac. A meal at dinner or family-style restaurant can contain 2-3 portions. When you bring home leftovers the money you spent is now for two or more meals, not one.

Let’s compare with some numbers. You can go to a restaurant and spend $15 for a single portion of a meal in which you eat the whole entre. Alternatively, you can go to a restaurant and spend $22 for a large or family-style meal that you take home the extra portion. The meal costing $22 is going to cost you less per portion due to the extra portion you had left over.

We also gathered our empirical evidence of time. When we cooked we decided to occasionally time ourselves to see how long it took. We did the same estimation of eating out from getting in the car to finishing the meal. It isn’t obvious until you really think about it. When you go out, you may get in your car, drive 10 minutes, spend 10 minutes waiting in line to order and get your food, and then drive 10 minutes home, which is 30 minutes of your time spent.

The Budget as a Rubric

We are going to be honest here. This is a guide, not perfection. Figuring out all the nuances of cooking at home versus eating out strictly by numbers is never going to be perfect. There are way too many variables. When you cook at home, you have energy costs. The same occurs when you drive to a restaurant. Your cookware costs money that is amortized over time. When you eat out, there is no energy used to wash the dishes but there can be costs associated with wasted food. Due to all that, we think of this as a rubric rather than a hard and fast formula to prove one is better than the other. 

The Budget

We came up with a couple of guidelines for ourselves. To keep it simple, we limited how much nuance went into each. We broke it down into eating in vs. out. The numbers are based on our lifestyle and financial values. This simple guide can be adapted to your needs just as simply.

Eating In

• A maximum cost of $5 per person per meal that includes the appropriate portion sizes needed for our DRI. That includes everything from protein to carbohydrates 
• A maximum active time investment, including clean up of 1.5  hours per meal per day. 

Eating Out

• A maximum cost of $10 per person per meal portion including gratuity.
• A maximum time investment of 45 minutes from the point we get in the car to the point we are home. 

Hold Up, There’s a Change Up

Yes, we did change the language a bit. The word meal snuck in there as did the word active. The reason is eating out vs in is two different things and isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. When we eat out we are generally served a meal. When we eat we are building a meal out of building blocks described by MyPlate. At the end of the day, both are about portion sizes but we switched the language to call out the differences. 

We also used the word active. Many recipes have times when you have to do nothing. If you make bread, it may take 24 hours to fully rise. Your active time, which doesn’t include cleanup, may only be 25 minutes. That is the time you spend actively engaged in making the bread from mixing to mixing to kneading. 

We will keep this post brief by addressing both those concepts in depth in later posts. If we don’t take that approach this post becomes too barque to be of value.  

How It Shakes Out

When we eat, no matter how many dinners we have, we want to spend only 1.5 hours per day actively preparing food. We also want to keep meals to a fixed budget per portion. This means a couple of things. 

• We can prepare food on other days as 1.5 hours a day yields 10.5 hours a week for preparing food. There is no reason we can’t spend 30 minutes making biscuits two days before we use them.
• It is easy to trade off the complexity of a meal by making one item easy to balance out with more active cooking of other portions. A side of coleslaw that takes 5 minutes to make and can easily offset the complexity of frying fish and the clean-up after it.
• You can easily scale up portions to feed more people. In this model, we may pay for more ingredients but economies of scale work for us if we are cooking from scratch. We will talk about this in another post.
• Additional portions can be used later to offset time and money costs for a later meal.

This leaves eating out to be focused on more time management than strictly food costs. By limiting the amount of time we are willing to use for eating out, we gain back time for cooking. Why? Because our criteria are strict enough to force us to eat on a low-time budget. In many cases, we will simply combine a stop-to-eat with other errands when we are already out. 

The Curious Case Of Lasagna

We learned some of these rules the hard way. Lasagna was where we realized time and cost were the most important factors. Let’s explore this tale of woe. 

Lasagna seems simple and it is. Lasganas is cheese, sauce, noodles, and in our case meat. It makes many portions and is essentially a one-pot meal. It contains protein, carbs, fats, and vegetables. Ok, tomatoes are technically fruits but we aren’t going there and we will consider them vegetables. You can pre-make it and cook it when friends are over so you have time to chat. What an amazing dish! What a terrible time and money suck!

It was after making two dishes for friends that we started to realize this. As we began to bring our change of habits into our social circle we did some experiments. It turns out I can make twelve pork chops in gravy with biscuits and a side of corn in the time it takes me just to make a meat sauce for lasagna. I can also make them cheaper than the lasagna. Why?

Read The Fine Print

Making a lasagna is a multi-step process with multiple ingredients. You have to buy many ingredients which drives the per portion cost up. At a minimum, you will need 3 types of cheese, meat, vegetables, noodles, eggs, and sauce. Many of these ingredients are higher-cost ingredients because they are value-added products like sausage and cheese. 

Lasagna isn’t time-friendly either. You make a sauce or augment a store-bought one with meat and spices. Then, you have to make a cheese mixture. Depending on how you do yours, you have to boil noodles. On top of this, you have to assemble everything. After that, you have to bake it in two different steps. It has to then cool. The clean up after all of this is arduous as each step produces dirty dishes and don’t get me started on the baking dish clean up.

Pork chops were a quick sear in a pan and inexpensive proteins. Frozen corn is ubiquitous. Gravy is broth, spices, fat, and a thickener and when done, the pork chops simmer in them. Biscuits take 20 minutes if you are experienced in making them and come from cheap ingredients. The clean-up time for all of the above is less than 20 minutes. Tl;dr: it’s all about active time and cost and you have to read the recipe closely to understand where the true costs are. 

Wrapping Up

We have discussed several different concepts here. At the core is the idea of the time and money cost of what we eat. These are rubrics we came up with to guide us. We will eat out at a more expensive restaurant again sometime and we will probably make another lasagna. These guidelines help us frame our decision points to make better choices in how we spend our money and time.

The post How To Make A Personal Food Budget first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Questions Needing Answers

Over the last couple of years, I have been following many Facebook groups to learn from others. The primary areas I am interested in are homesteading, food, and fishing. In all three, when an argument starts, you see two points of view: someone who has been doing something one way forever and someone who quotes a resource. I swear World War Three will start from an argument around whether water bath canning is safe or not. 

You would think this was basic science. Canning, and what method to use, is based on the PH or acidity levels of the food being canned. The safe level of PH in food to allow for water bath canning according to science, extension offices, and health experts is 4.6.  It is that simple because it is a specific PH combined with heat to kill and stop any new nasties from growing in the canned food. Some people refuse to believe this. Why is the question I have?

Beginning to See the Myths

As we started to revisit cooking, the age-old argument of how to care for cast iron cookware came up. Caring for cast iron has its own almost mystical mythology around how to care for it. That we can cover in another post. Being an engineer by trade and schooling, I have learned to trust but verify so I did some reading. Again, it is pretty simple.

The manufacturer of Lodge cookware, who is a well-known manufacturer of cast iron has a great page on the care and seasoning of cast iron. What I received for advice from others was contrary to their advice which is why my pans weren’t working well. Why then were there so many people still doing it, in my perception, the wrong way?

Keeping it Real 

First, a statement to keep this positive. No one is dumb. We all have the facts we have. Those facts may differ from others. Even the word fact is somewhat subjective if it is based on context. We have to start with these tenets or we devolve into unwinnable arguments quickly. That is not a path that helps us. 

It’s About Muscle Memory

Growing up, we learned about many things. These things became truths. Those truths became re-enforced. The more we relied on them, the more ingrained they became and the more ‘truthy’ they became. At some point, they became chiseled in stone and could not be changed. That is the problem but that is being human. 

Once solidified, these truths become reality even if they are not logical. Unfortunately, there are many times we make illogical arguments. That is life with us emotional humans. Fighting logical fallacies with facts turns out to be problematic as logic is based on facts and usually, the facts are what are being contested. That is still not really where the disconnect of muscle memory is most prevalent. 

Breaking The Concrete

Pro-tip, the world changes and adaptation is key for any species’ survival. Just because something was, doesn’t mean it still is. When working in software this was the basis of agile methodologies. My least favorite thing to hear is when someone claims to have been doing something for some extended period as a justification to continue doing it. That argument, to me, is the basis of many animal extinctions through specilization. 

Two axioms come into play here:

• We stop learning when we stop questioning. 
• We stop adapting when we stop learning. 

No matter what is true today, that truth can change tomorrow. Unfortunately learning is usually painful. Learning comes out of trying and usually failing at first. That is why we believe so many of us want to accept yesterday’s truth as non-changing. 

But My Great Grandma Used To

As we discussed in another post we started to get back into things like working out and cooking. We had to re-learn many things in that process. We found that over 10 years nutrition, health, and exercise information had changed. Eventually, we simply decided to start over and research our own. We challenged ourselves to not take things we knew for granted. It turns out many things that we struggled with were old information that others had discounted over time. It was an eye-opener. 

As we started to talk with others we saw the same patterns. The way they canned food was based on how their great-grandmother did. Same with seasoning their cast iron. Some would talk about how their favorite lake no longer produced the same fish. Others would talk about how it was in the old days. They started sounding old before their time.

It’s a Trap!

We started to see these patterns as a trap as we all have a lot of ingrained knowledge combined with traditions. We don’t want to relearn everything as that takes time. That requires questioning ourselves and possibly failing or finding out we are wrong. While it’s good to have knowledge to rely on and traditions to hand down, it doesn’t necessarily push us toward growth. As the world has grown, not all is as it was whether it be cooking or fishing or any other subject. 

In the book Built From Broken, the author talks about how the body protects itself when injured. To rehabilitate something, you sometimes need to acknowledge those signals and create a plan to deal with them. You can recover from injuries and improve mobility and strength if you are willing to work through some level of discomfort to do it. I know, I have personally done it.

The trap we all can fall into is not identifying when we need to re-learn. This is where the disconnect occurs. As time goes by we forget to seek new information. 

The Escape Plan

We learned some basics from our observations. These helped us break out of old habits and refresh our knowledge base. In essence, we learned to learn again to adapt to the new world we found ourselves in.

• Trust but verify your information. If you learned something 10 years ago, it usually takes no time to Google it to verify it.
• Don’t think of new information as being wrong or right. The way to view it is by seeing it as current. 
• When you find yourself starting a sentence with ‘I have been doing this for a long time so you should…’ question yourself. 
• Seek the delta between the past and present to see if what you know is still relevant. Buggy whips are still applicable to carriages but are no longer relevant to getting to work in the morning for most of us.

 Bring it Full Circle

We don’t realize that a lot of information has a timestamp. It is easy to fall into the trap of letting what you know get stale. We assert stale information is what is contested in most arguments rather than the other person’s point of view. We can improve ourselves and our interactions with others by learning to re-learn. This opens us to adapting rather than becoming entrenched in defenses. This doesn’t mean you have to throw away traditions or even what you are currently doing. It allows you to make more informed decisions about what is currently correct for you. 

The post We Need To Revisit Facts For Growth first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Digging Right In

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

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

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

Why Does That Matter?

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

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

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

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

Portions over Servings FTW

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

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

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

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

With Every Cloud

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

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