Music. Welcome back to the Valley to Peak Nutrition Podcast. This is part two in a two-part series from a listener of the show just like you. In part one, we covered a ton of information about nutrition and artificial sweeteners. If you didn't listen to that, hit pause, go listen to it, and then come back for part two. Part two is loaded with a ton of other information. And as I was going through this, it was really then that I decided we should probably separate them.
The things that we cover in this range from nutrition in the backcountry to nutrition at home. We cover things like why I really could care less about calorie density, why I don't care if there's 100 calories per ounce in your food, what backcountry nutrition should look like, and how nutrition in the backcountry changes based on mileage, intensity, and temperature. Other things that we cover are, how do you actually use MyFitnessPal? What is a serving size? What if my wife makes a pot of soup?
How am I supposed to use that? What about bars? Do you eat bars in the back country? What are some of your favorite? Like I said, there's a ton of great information, no matter what you're looking for between Nutrition in the Mountains or Nutrition at Home. So grab a pen for part two between Mike and I, as we dive into some of these great topics. And learning, continuously learning. I like it.
It all comes back to, I think, something you've said and iterated multiple times, and that's dose is the issue. And if you're going to lose weight, you need to run a caloric deficit. And that's spot on. The interesting thing is, I think we, when we're running around in the mountains, we have this high caloric eat. When I was doing that, I tended to eat whatever I felt I needed to eat to, to.
Keep going and grind it out. A confounding issue is that when you come back off the mountain and you're not as active, you have to adjust what you take in as in terms of food consumption, because if you still eat the way you were eating on the mountains and you're not doing the same activity, you're going to start adding on weights. So it's understanding that change and responding to that and then learning to reduce your caloric intake, right?
Which requires an incredible amount amount of constraint, right? And I will say this too, this goes back to the, it depends conversation. There are situations, there are people, and there are times where there are some folks who cannot have that message of balance. It's because again, it's a behavioral thing. Meaning I hear you tell me that I can have a cookie, but you don't understand if I have a cookie, that whole bag will be gone before I know it. I have no restraint.
And many people listening to this will be like, well, geez, just practice some self-discipline. It is not that easy. Our brain is not wired that way. This is beyond a taste thing for many people. For some people, this is a very, very hard thing to conquer. In those situations, it would be better to not have any for a period of time, right? And then maybe further down the line, you can revisit that.
Now do you feel like you've got better balance because you've had an adjustment period or whatever? But yes, certainly there are scenarios where a person who struggles to have any personal restraint, any self-discipline, whatever word you want to use, where it would be better to say, you know what? It might be good for a period of time where you just kind of don't even have those is in the house. It's tough to go get what's not there.
Right. And, and in, in situations like that and situations like you're describing where you come back from a big trip and you've got your entire, you know, you've got two days of extra food left. Yeah. Sometimes it's going to be really, really tough to not dive into that knowing it's in the garage because you were right. If you continue to eat like that, your weight will go up. And it's not just about scale movement and aesthetics and whatever.
It's really about what does that weight translate into from a health standpoint, right? It's not, it's not just about scale weight and looking good or whatever. It's really a matter of what does that mean for chronic disease risk risk in terms of if those behaviors continue far beyond just two days when you're back home. When I was losing weight, one thing that I would do is I would intentionally throw food away.
Now, let me kind of explain what I mean before people email me and say I'm a food waster. I would see little bits of food left in the package, right? So let's say that I had planned to have half of a cheese, half of a piece of a cheese. And the only thing left was the other half of that piece. Rather than saying, I'm just going to go ahead and have it. I'm not going to put it back in the fridge. It would go back in the fridge, even if it was going to go bad, even if no one was going to eat it.
Because the mentality that I was trying to develop was there is no cost that is worth my health. And right now I am trying to get to a weight that gets me healthy. So even though that's only a half of a slice of cheese, and even though that's It's only 45 calories. For me, it was a bigger picture of it's telling myself, no, like you don't need it just because it's, I was eating stuff my whole life just because it was there. That's what got me to 270, right? So sometimes there are...
There's value to be gained in saying no that extend beyond calories, right? It is very much about building a different mindset. And that's really, really tough to do. But if, like we've talked about this before too, if you're willing to wade that river of misery, it's worth it. I mean, it's so worth it because you're developing something that's going to stay with you for a very, very long period of time. Yeah. And I think that that transition, Transition.
When you're out on the mountains and you're hunting, you're eating a lot. And then that transition back into your work environment when you're not as active. Sometimes there's an awareness component that we are missing. We become habituated to eating everything that's in our pack or that we have a lot of for the day. Then we come back out of that and it's like, I have to tone that back. And so we have to go back and transition to a maintenance mode for normal activity.
I'm a bit of a skeptic sometimes. And so I listen quite a bit to your podcast and you're like, oh, you know, use my fitness app. And then you can really monitor your caloric intake. And I'm like, oh my God, Kyle, I really don't want to do this. And I resisted for a really long time. But what I found is that that's a useful tool that you can use and say, hey, you know, my caloric intake is starting to creep up. I need to keep an eye on that. And so I think that's a tool that I've used.
I don't know if there's other things, tricks or tips, whatever that you would suggest for making that adjustment. So you, because you eventually, we don't want to use that yet forever. And so how do we make that transition from consuming food to enhance performance while we're on the mountain and then transition back into sort of a maintenance mode while we're at home working? It's a good question. And really what you're going to want to set up is you're
going to want to set up parameters. You're going to want to set up guardrails and guidelines. MyFitnessPal is a version of that. Here is my ceiling. I'm going to stay below that, right? MyFitnessPal is really not... In spite of what many people, and use any app, I don't have any allegiance to them, use any app. The intention of it is not restriction, contrary to what people think. People think I'm saying, use MyFitnessPal as this tool of restriction. It's not. It's accountability and budgeting.
It's ensuring that, it's like you said, it is a tool to evaluate, am I where I think I am? I mean, it's no different than finance. It's no different than than the gas gauge in your car. It's no different than the speedometer in your car compared to a speed limit. It's a gauge to measure. Am I even remotely close to where I want to be? And if not, what adjustment do I need to make? And it sure beats the heck out of guessing. You could use other parameters.
Like I think that, and this is going to come off wrong, so I'm going to clarify this, but I think using a clock is another really great way of setting a parameter. Now, many people's mind automatically go to, oh, he's talking about intermittently fasting. No, I'm not. What I'm saying is if you set up even specific times that you're going to eat, I'm going to have breakfast between eight and nine. I'm going to have lunch between noon and one. I'm going to have dinner between six and seven.
It's not that there's anything remarkable about those times. It's got nothing to do with an eating window. It's got nothing to do with the fasting window. It is that outside of those three windows of time, you're not grabbing fun-sized Snickers off the boss's desk, stopping at Starbucks for lattes, grabbing bags of mini pretzels because, oh, they look good and you heard they've got a new honey mustard flavor out. You're not just grabbing stuff.
There's an intentionality behind the intake at meals. You're fueling yourself. I don't even care what you eat at meals. It's more about you're having an intentional intake versus this calorie intake that's kind of like a slow drip IV where food's coming in all day long. And what a clock allows is it's basically saying, I had breakfast between 8 and 9. It's not noon and 1. I'm probably not hungry. I'm just not going to have it.
It is another way that you're putting parameters up or ceilings up or you're setting up some guardrails for yourself to do that. MyFitnessPal or apps like that are the same way. There's a lot of different things that are tools or instruments that you can implement in there to set those up. But they're really all centered around the same thing, which is to give us some tangible measurement that is asking the question, am I even remotely close to where I think I am?
Because I will tell you from past experience and in working with people, you can probably testify to this yourself. yourself, there is nothing that sucks more than feeling like you're giving effort, but seeing no results and no progress. That's not just true in weight. That's in anything, right? I mean, that's in like elk hunting. You work yourself to the bone all summer practicing and getting X, Y, and Z thing dialed in. You go to the West, you can't find an elk to save your life.
That is a terrible feeling. So there's nothing worse than feeling like you're making the effort, but nothing's happening. And so what the app does, what a time schedule does, what any of these parameters do is they set up a measurable way to answer the question, am I even remotely close to what I think I am? What we often say is it's an insurance policy against guesswork. Nutrition at the end of the day is a numbers game. And if the numbers line up, the progress happens. It's that simple.
I know that I was fairly surprised when I started plugging foods into the app in terms of caloric content and like what i was thinking was a cup is you know maybe two cups or what i was thinking is you know low calorie food not like your bread surprised me a lot how can that little piece of bread have so many calories in it or a piece of chocolate fraction of an ounce how can it how can it have so many calories in it and you don't really
notice that or appreciate that you pop a few lindor chocolates in your mouth and next thing you know you've got 280 calories of chocolate you just consumed in a matter of seconds that's a great example where you could could have been making effort without using some sort of parameter like an app. And you're just baffled as to why you've made all of these quote unquote healthy changes, but you're not seeing anything.
It just doesn't make any sense. I've improved all the quality of my food, but there's no progress. And then you start plugging things in and you're like, and the most common comment that we hear is I had no idea. I had no idea X, Y, and Z contributed X, Y, and Z number of whatever's to my overall intake. Once you have that knowledge, now you can make informed decisions moving forward.
And this even sort of loops into the second question you'd asked in that email about bars and my comments from episode 34 on the mislabeling of true calories with bars and fiber. When you plug a bar in that's high in fiber and labeled as low in carbohydrate, the labeling then makes sense. How can the bar be 320 calories, yet this company is only saying 180?
Well, when you do the math from the amount of carbohydrate in the bar relative to the amount of fiber, and you understand why that could be potentially mislabeled, it starts to make sense where there's an extra 300 calories a day sneaking in from eating all all of these low carb foods. Another question I had on, you know, we were talking about those nutrition bars and so forth. Is there, there's a choice of some sort of nutrient bar. Is that influenced by your activity?
Meaning, do you take a look at what's out there and say, well, I want a high caloric bar because I'm going to be running in the mountains or is it, I want something that's more digestible to me. And probably it's more along the lines of what What works for the individual? Because when we're doing things in the mountain, certain things are appealing. Certain things are not in terms of food. I'm wondering, does the choice of the nutrient bar you take change based on the activity you're doing?
Yes. So I think there's, you know, you're really asking, you're kind of asking a couple of different angles in that. You said, and you may have not, I may be digging into semantics here, but you said, are you choosing a calorically dense bar when running in the mountains. And I think that that is a big.
Misnomer, meaning you could have all the calories that you want, but if they're not coming from the right place, the right macronutrient, it doesn't mean sufficient energy is going to be available. So in actuality, I don't really care how calorie dense the bar is. You take green belly bars. These are these gigantic bars that are, I believe, six or more hundred calories per bar. And it looks like, oh, my gosh, what a screaming deal. You know, 600 calories in a bar. Give that to me.
If there's not a reasonable amount of nutrients that are going to give me fuel, mainly carbohydrate, I could care less how many calories are in a bar. In fact, I would prefer to have a pack full of carbs and low calories than tons of calories from foods that aren't going to give me any actual nutrition as far as getting up the mountain. The one thing that I never...
Want is high protein bars because protein is not a fuel source right and so when you get into a lot of these bars and this is this is this is casting the the net fairly broad over the category of bars but i do not want bars that are really fibrous and i don't want bars that are really high in protein protein because both of those are just going to take that bar forever to digest, which leads back to point one and the number one rule, which is what sits well with you.
The bar, you may say there is one bar, only one that I've ever found to sit well with me. And they are crazy high in fiber, crazy high in protein. And I would look at you in the face and say, that's the bar you should take. Like, even though I'm telling you that's not what I look for and that that's, you know, that takes, you know, from a, from a, from a bigger standpoint, that takes a long time to digest.
If you tell me it's what sits well with you and it's always appetizing to you and you can always eat it, even when everything else in the pack doesn't taste good, that's the bar you should take because it is the number one rule for food in the back country is you've got to like it and you've got to be able to tolerate it. I guess that's probably the question I was stumbling over is like, are we chasing the wrong thing when we chase calories?
And so, because we hear that, oh, we have to have X amount of calories when we're out in the backcountry. And it's really the composition within that. Caloric value that's more important than the number. Yes. The simple mantra that I'm always beating the drum of whenever we do like a performance consultation for someone is totals and timing, totals and timing. Those are the two number one rules because here's the two biggest pitfalls we find.
Number one, either people, they are eating, eating, but they're not eating enough, right? Or they're eating, but they're not eating frequently enough. And what that looks like is this. They'll say something along the lines of, oh, well, I, you know, I had something at the trailhead and then I had something later in the evening and we hiked all day, but I, you know, I didn't have any energy during the walk. Okay. Well, your frequency is way off or yeah, I was just eating all day,
you know? Okay. Well, tell me what you were eating. I'd have like a handful of raisins every mile, or I'd have a couple of swigs of tailwind or Gatorade every mile or so. Okay. Well, you're, you, you're nailing the frequency, but how much of that you are eating is way off. Totals and timing have got to be met in order for you to continue to stay well-fueled. So you, you asked the question, perfect. Are we we chasing the wrong things by trying to get calories in?
And I would say yes, because you could have all the calories on the planet, but if the composition of those calories aren't right, you'll still hit a wall. You could have the composition right and the calories low and feel spectacular, right? Worst case scenario is you may lose a little bit of weight from a low calorie intake over the course of a couple of days.
But if the composition of those calories are still right, right you'll continue to propel well on the mountain and ultimately that's what people care about i hadn't appreciated that until you mentioned it protein versus carbs because i've always been a high protein fan and you know in terms of i'd like to eat meat right so that's that that's my go-to but on the flip side of that is carbs are the quick source of energy and certainly what i use to bribe my wife to get
to go a little further it's like oh we want to go over to check out what's over on that ridge. She rolls her eyes and like, well, I got some gummy bears. Yeah. No, you're 100% right. Those nuances can definitely matter. You had asked in the email, you said, well, what bars do I tend to personally take into the backcountry? The one that I take most often is one that we make. I make it. We've talked about it before on the podcast and we We posted before
on social media. We've included it in our newsletter. We have affectionately named it after a close friend of ours. She had kind of passed along the recipe. It is the only thing that sounds good to me sometime. We were doing a death hike training recently, and my appetite's not always great when doing those, but I can for some reason still always... Tolerate those bars, but they're called Audrey bars. So I like those a lot.
And then I also like just the plain old nature Valley honey and granola bars. I, but I, you know, more than I like to eat on the mountain a lot and bars for me, they're just very boring. So very rarely with the exception of the Audrey bars, very rarely do I take a bar of any kind.
You know, a question that ties into of this is how does your feeling habit change based on early season versus late season cold because you know sometimes we talk about when water scares and water consumption we only run one hot meal try to extend our our water supply then when you think about it in terms cold winter hunts and you're in snow you're really fighting exposure to a fairly large extent how would your feeling habit change in those two scenarios where you have an
early season hunt versus a late season And how does it, you know, you're running two hot meals a day in the late season, one hot meal a day in the summer and early season, or you're just running two hot meals every car. I am typically running one hot meal, no matter what season, what does change pretty dramatically though. We did a video on this just a couple of years ago. I think it's on our YouTube is I'm drinking hot stuff all day on the late season when it's snowing.
I'm constantly pulling the jet boil out and making coffee or hot chocolate or hot Gatorade or hot apple cider or hot water or eating ramen. So, you know, I guess I take that back now that I think about it in some of that late season hunt, I think it depends on the temperature and it depends on the time, right? You got shorter days. So the amount of opportunity, it seems like you start in the morning and the next thing you know, it's the sun is setting.
So there's not a lot of time to sit down and and cook up a dish of ramen if there is i will often do that now what does change a lot is depending on the time of season how late it is how cold it is. A lot of times we've got a base camp where water is abundant. I'm not worried about it. I fill up a, I fill up a one and a half liter Nalgene and sometimes a three liter, uh, hydropack bag and just pour out of that all day because I know I'll be drinking a lot of hot fluids, trying to stay warm.
Like the greatest enemy to energy deprivation in the winter is core temperature. You're, you're the coldest trying to rob you of your core temperature. Your body is having to compensate for that by increasing the amount of calories it's burning to warm you. The best thing you can do to preserve energy is keep hot food and fluid in you in a late season hunt. What I will say is what does change dramatically is September elk hunt and an October mule deer hunt.
What I take changes a lot because I spend a lot of time glassing and sitting in October looking for mule deer. Whereas September elk, I have very rarely seen them sitting still and making it easy. So you're just running all over the place. And a lot of time for September elk, we'll have a base camp and then we will just drive to multiple drainages, check and see if the elk are there, if they're vocal, if not, we leave, we go to another place.
So it's not uncommon common sometimes in September to put on 13 plus miles a day, just moving all the time. Right. And so fuel demands are a lot higher elevations, a lot steeper, you're doing a lot more climbing. So carbon take is a lot higher in early season stuff compared to mule deer. Like honestly, like a mule deer hunt when I'm glassing a lot, I'm not eating a lot of gum bears and that type of stuff. I'll have a breakfast. I'll, you know, might have some jerky or trail mix midday.
I'll have some kind of a lunch, you know, something to nibble on mid-afternoon and then your normal standard dinner. But I'm not just pounding gummy bears all day in an instance like that. So feeling strategy is really a function of your activity, how you're hunting. Yes. And in conjunction with the season. That is an excellent summary of that. And I've met recently with a few different people that were curious about like getting ready for spring stuff.
And that's what I always, That's kind of the leading thing we always say is, they'll say, well, what should my calories be? It always depends on the intensity of the hunt and what you're planning for it to be, right? So you are very right in saying that it's always going to depend on the type of hunt that you're planning from a physicality standpoint, as well as an ambient temperature standpoint and what type of season it is.
Sorry, taking notes on that. Spring bear is coming up and that's why I'm sort of asking these questions because I haven't done a spring hunt before, not for bear, at least not out west. And I'm not even sure what I'm going to get into. I don't want to have any expectations because I just don't know what it's going to be like. I'm just going to go out and see. And I would say too, because there's a lot of people who listen to this who just hike, they don't hunt at all.
The rules apply, right? So the more intense the hike, the further back the high mountain lake or the peak or the saddle or whatever that you're trying to get to, the more demanding it is, the greater the need for fuel. If you're doing winter hikes, you're doing winter snowshoe trips, you're skinning up on skis and trying to ski down, you're doing long hut. Like you're doing a yurt trip with a bunch of friends in the back country in
the winter, all on snow. no, these core temperature fueling strategies remain the same. It's not, it certainly isn't just hunting. It's anything that's got to do with, you know, like an outdoor recreation standpoint. Is there any benefit in terms of the form of the fuel in terms of liquid versus solid? Is it, do we have better access to liquid, basically drinking our calories as
opposed to eating them? Or is that just more of a function of it's carbohydrate versus protein versus liquid versus solid? That's such a good question. It is, you know, so like, I think if you were to put this on a good, better, best spectrum at its core, it's always going to depend on the macronutrient composition, which is what you're saying. Is it less about liquid versus solid and more about if the constituent is carbohydrates, proteins, or fats?
That is rule number one. Absolutely. It doesn't matter. However. Yes, liquid calories are always going to be absorbed much faster than solid calories. Now, you could rabbit trail even further and say composition of the macro could matter too. For example, gummy bears and Gatorade, rapid digesting carbohydrate. Near instantaneous fuel delivery to the muscle.
Muscle whereas oats still a great source of carbohydrate it's complex it's going to take a while to digest and process you're going to be waiting a while for that fuel so there are discrepancies and differences even among each macro but again it's always going to depend on how in the weed you want to get same could be true of protein if you've got dehydrated chicken in your meal versus whey protein powder whey protein powder
is absorbed so fast that we see blood sugar spikes the same as a piece of white bread. It's so rapid that it's literally in you and out and done processing in an hour, whereas it could take chicken up to three. So there's a lot of nuances for a lot of different scenarios. And it's always going to be, again, one of those things where you're like, it depends. What do you want?
You know, I'm sorry, and this brings me back to another question that we talked about proteins and the bioavailability and that. And so one of the things that sort of struck me is that you take a look at meat composition and we sort of lump meat all together. My suspicion is that fattier meats are going to be harder to digest than lean meats, but I don't know that is true.
Is there something to the digestibility of meat based on its composition in terms of how dense is it or how much fat it contains? Or is it flaky fish versus a solid dense fish, for instance, a salmon versus a tuna or something like that? There is going to be a difference, but it's in the macro composition more so than like the flaky and the solidity of a fish.
So, for example, if you take a sirloin, relatively lean meat, and you compare that against a ribeye, relatively fatty cut of meat, the ribeye is going to take longer to process because of the presence of fat. And what happens is when you eat that, there's a small valve that exists between our GI tract, our stomach, and our small intestines. That small valve has a gatekeeper. That gatekeeper is determining how often it's going to open that valve based on what's in the stomach.
The more fat, the more fiber, the more protein in that stomach, the slower and the less often that gatekeeper is going to open the valve. So in other words, a really high fat cut of meat is going to take a lot longer to go through your stomach because it's higher in fat. It's got nothing necessarily to do with the type of meat or even the quantity.
If both steaks, a ribeye and a sirloin were 3.5 ounces, 4 ounces, 6 ounces, whatever ounces you wanted to talk about, the time difference would still be different because of the fat content, not necessarily the, you know, nothing to do with anything beyond that type of steak.
Protein digestion does change though when you start talking about liquid calories when you talk about eggs and egg whites and whey protein instead of meats so there are still quite a few differences that can exist even among those things sorry that's probably splitting hairs a little bit no it's it's a fabulous question i think i mean that's why i love things like this is because you're asking questions that everybody likes everybody wants
to know and to me the best information that I could give is stuff people really want to know about versus me just jumping on rambling about things that I care about. One thing, and sorry, this is circling back to the MyFitnessPal app. What I struggle with the most with using things like that is the uncertainty around... A quantity. And so I'll see a lot of things like a serving size has this much calorie, they list out the macronutrients and so forth.
Well, what is a serving? I mean, realistically, is it a cup? Is it two cups? Is it four cups? That's where my wife puts in recipes and she's like, oh, well, it's one serving or it's one and a half servings. And I'm like, but what does that really mean? And so how do I translate that? If I'm trying to get a fair estimate on what is my caloric range or intake, how do I know what a serving size is? And so we we have to guesstimate. And I think that's one of the things that I struggle with is that.
And so then it comes back to how precise do we really need to be in is directionally correct, good enough. And I suppose it depends on where you are in that weight loss journey. If you're just starting out and you have maybe a lot you can lose, then it's probably not that difficult to lose something. But if you're trying to lose those last few pounds, the last 10 pounds or body weight, You're looking at body fat, not necessarily weight.
I don't care about weight. I care about fat, right? And performance. And so that's sort of where it becomes more important. So I don't know if you've had trouble reconciling that whole bit of like, what is a serving? Well, if you want the accurate answer to this, prepare to be annoyed. You'll have to measure it, right? I mean, you will truly have to get out a scale, a spoon, et cetera, and measure this.
And then the key in using that app, if you really want to get into the weeds and get accurate data, and I'm not even suggesting you have to, I'm just saying if you really wanted that, is you would have to make the choice of the food entree or the choice of the item or the choice of the dinner or whatever. You would have to pick the correct one that allows you to then toggle between ounces, cups, tablespoons, or whatever metric that you're using, not serving.
So for example, if you type in grilled chicken and you find one that says one serving, two servings, three servings, and it's only letting you pick between servings, you would want to go back into the database and find one when you typed in grilled chicken that let you pick between one ounce, ounce, two ounce, three ounce, four ounce, because you can weigh that, right? You can measure that. That's tangible. That's something you can get.
Otherwise you're right. What is a serving? I mean, a serving could be anything. Now there are some, there are some universal things like a tablespoon is sometimes a single serving of peanut butter. Four ounces is a single serving of chicken breast. One cup is a single serving of rice. One teaspoon is a single serving of olive oil. Well, some of that stuff is assumed, but even that's not true.
And that is admittedly the pitfall of MyFitnessPal is that it is a user-generated database, meaning your grandmother could go in there and punch something in if she wanted to. And who knows if it's right? Now, they've tried to eliminate or mitigate the risk of that by putting little green checkboxes to the items that have been verified. They're decent, but they're not always accurate, right? And frankly, that's one of my jobs in the one-on-one coaching is somebody's hitting a wall.
They're not seeing progress. And I'm looking at their tracker and they're like, dude, this is as accurate as I can be. Something's wrong because of the app, not the person. And I've got to go in there and figure out what it is. And if they're eating it often enough, sometimes it's enough to prevent progress. I'm blessed because my wife is an amazing cook and she likes to cook. And so she will do, she'll put in her own recipes. And so that's where I sort of struggle and she'll get the recipe.
We cook a lot from Hank Shaw's book and a lot of stuff there. Of course, we put the recipe in. It's always in serving size. And I'm like, hey, you're killing me here. I love you, but I need something that I can measure. Well, if that's the case, because MyFitnessPal does have a feature where you can go in and you can add your recipe and you can divide it by the number of servings and it will give you the nutrient content.
The key then is making sure that you actually portioned it out to that number of servings. So I'll give you two examples. If you make a meatloaf and you plug in all of the ingredients and you say, this is for six people, but you cut the meatloaf into fourths, well, it's not accurate. But if ahead of time, you cut that meatloaf into six pieces, it's going to be pretty doggone close to what that serving size is. The harder thing would be something like a gumbo or a soup or a stew of some kind.
Are you sure that each ladle is going to eventually end up being only eight cups and eight servings? Or what if one label, you know, what if you find out at the end of that, that you've been using half the amount that you should have been, but it's five days after the fact? Again, it really depends on how detailed you want to be. The idea of MyFitnessPal is not to allow it to be some sort of oppressive tool. The idea is, is that it's giving you some guidelines and some instruction to
make informed decisions. Now, back to the scenario you painted it a little bit ago. If you've only got a little bit more left to go, you can't seem to get the last 10 off. The details matter. The last little bit is always a challenge and the margin for error is extremely small and the details will make or break you if that was important to you to get that last little bit off.
I think from my own personal perspective is that I'm not necessarily are looking to to lose weight it's more just to be healthy and enable me to hunt in the mountains and not get crushed right and then come out of it enjoy it that's really what it's about, that's kind of where it all started was that was, struggling a little bit with weight that I didn't feel I should be struggling with. I was like, man, if you're struggling with this much, you're going to get hammered
out there. You have to change something. It's very motivating. You've got a tag. Your wife's got a tag. Game on. Make sure you have fun and you're going to have to lose weight to do it. Yeah. Well, congratulations to you because you definitely took that message and went and did something about it and had success both in the mountains and in your own personal journey. And question and you're agreeing to come on and talk through these things.
And if people are interested in reaching out to you, you do not have to, but you're welcome to give me some contact information and I can plug that in. I am on Instagram, the Stone Age Goat. I'm an old grumpy old goat. Just kind of hang out in the background and try to learn. Still learning. It's like we never, never stopped learning. Mike, thanks for coming. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great chatting Thank you for listening.
We appreciate it. And I appreciate Mike joining us. A couple of other notes. One, Google Play or the platform that Google was using to broadcast podcasts has gone away. We are transferring all the episodes from there onto the YouTube podcast platform. It won't be video YouTube. It's actually just audio. But you can check those out if you're planning to use that.
We have if you're interested a couple of spots available for the foundations plus group that opens up in april the 2nd you can grab those right up until april 1st if you're interested in being a part of that but we do cap it at 10 people there's only a few of those left finally thank you again for listening to the podcast we appreciate that immensely if you enjoyed it or if you heard something in here that maybe you and a friend or relative or spouse or whatever,
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