I must admit, I ended the challenge a bit earlier than planned. We had a senior event last night, and I had a drink at about 11-ish. Fun fact: booze goes a lot further when you haven’t been eating much.
I am so glad to be done. I think in these next few days, I will gorge myself on everything that I’ve been missing – fruit, meat, chocolate. In fact, I’ve already had a giant breakfast (cereal and milk and fruit and chocolate) and feel rather ill. I should pace myself better. Either way, I think I’ll easily and quickly regain the three/four pounds I dropped while on the challenge. Being poor is a pretty effective weight loss tool, for me at least, but not one that I would recommend.
You may think it strange that I lost weight while on this challenge when it’s a pretty commonly made argument that being poor in America is correlated with obesity. I was smart and lucky – I have access to a grocery store (many poor urbanites only have convenience stores with processed foods), and I chose healthy foods while sticking to my budget. Now is a good time to revisit my grocery list.
See my refusal to buy the much bigger and cheaper jar of high fructose corn syrup grape jelly? My decision to buy a bag of fresh apples? And my choice of whole grain bread? As a commenter pointed out, I could’ve taken my $21 and bought a ton of cheap, processed food. $21 buys about 80 packages of Ramen. Had I done that, I wouldn’t have gone hungry, but I would’ve finished the week bloated, greasy, and probably hypertensive with a touch of scurvy.
But if I were also trying to feed my hungry children, or I were doing this long term, I probably would soon start making that trade-off between health and bulk/convenience.
I actually didn’t finish everything I bought, partly because I didn’t have the experience necessary to accurately parcel out my food, and partly because I just got sick of eating the same things over and over again. Things that didn’t taste all that great in the first place. I think it’ll be a while before I decide to have another peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
This will probably be my second-to-last post. Expect one more academic-y post to provide “supporting text (length to be negotiated) to describe what was done and why, how the project was conceptualized, where the project fits in the larger scheme of changing the world’s diet and health, and how the project’s impact might be evaluated.”
Day 7 food log
8:30 AM breakfast: 1/2 cup oatmeal ($0.08), 1 tbsp brown sugar ($0.02), 1 slice toast ($0.15), 1 tbsp strawberry preserves ($0.10)
10:45 AM snack: 0.75 oz peanut butter ($0.06), 1/2 apple ($0.17)
1:00 PM lunch: 2 slices toast ($0.30), 0.75 oz. peanut butter ($0.06), 2 tbsp strawberry preserves ($0.20), 1 apple ($0.33)
4:00 pm snack: 1/2 cup oatmeal ($0.08), 1 tbsp brown sugar ($0.02)
7:00 pm dinner: 4 eggs ($0.60), 1/3 bag of corn ($0.33), 2 carrots ($0.60)
Day 7 total: $3.10
Taking the Food Stamp Challenge 