Day 28 marks the point on a line which happens to be the endpoint. At this point, I could say "I told you so" to students everywhere, but I barely see the point anymore. It was so ridiculously possible to begin with, that the whole challenge became not so much kicking a dead horse as kicking a dead horse non-stop for comic effect.
Looking back, it's now been about five weeks or 10% of my year trying to live healthily on $7.50 or less and in fact doing so. To look at the interesting results, the 'Daily Totals' worksheet in my spreadsheet shows a four-week daily average consumption of $5.89, and total consumption of just under $165, or $41.25 per week. Clearly this is manageable. But I'm a self-styled professional grocery spender. I have strategies. Instead of totally closing the blog now that my challenge is over, I'm gonna offer a few short and sweet tips in coming posts to pass along what works for me.
But back to my diet the last five weeks. The question is, is/was it healthy? If I do say so myself, I eat fairly healthily. An interesting thing is that my diet didn't change much for the challenge. In the last two years or so, I changed my diet to be more nutritious. I jacked up my intake of plant material so that I now get around 7-8 servings of fruits & veggies a day. I wouldn't be surprised if most people don't reach half of that. I replaced white flour with more whole grain stuff, and eat a variety of meats with only modest amounts of beef and much fewer processed foods. I don't eat much junk food either. But is my diet Canada Food Guide healthy? Well, I think it's close. Probably closer than most people's. You know the commercials where the cereal is "part of this complete" breakfast? Well mine has an extra piece of fruit.
One area I'm not sure I am close to reaching is caloric intake. According to the CFG, I should be eating 2900 calories a day. My guess is that in reality I'm lucky if I reach 2000. But my weight has been stable for years, my health seems to be fine, and I don't get hungry all the time. With the quantity of food I eat already, I'm not sure what more I could eat without venturing into the sugars. Maybe I could eat a crap load of trail mix and wash it down with a huge white Russian.
Non-existent segue...
The premise of the OUSA campaign was that the OSAP formula is broken. It expects students to live off of a quantity of money that would be considered below the "poverty line". My problem from get-go wasn't their idea that the OSAP formula is broken, but with the OUSA's move to mess with the part of the formula that's not. My guess is that they picked this part of the formula to mess with because it's the easiest to demonstrate. My reaction was and remains one of scorn. As I've shown, $7.50 is most certainly a reasonable budget. Still, none of the students really made it work. This doesn't mean that they've proven that it wasn't enough to live on, but they have proven it wasn't enough to make bad choices on. And their bad choices can surely be chalked up to naivete. (I wanted to say 'ignorance' instead of 'naivete' but I felt it was a bit too harsh.) Perhaps they simply didn't have enough knowledge or experience to make the wise choices. That said, if I were the government, I wouldn't be likely to revisit a funding formula to give a bigger loan to someone who lacks the wisdom to spend shrewdly and doesn't realize that eating out is the devil. Walking in to post-secondary school with better cooking and grocery shopping skills is something I could have used and it's something we might all consider developing in our own kids as they grow older. However, I did manage to learn these myself in college (with lots of phone calls home for advice) and I hope these students aren't so adverse to the idea as they seem.
Well, thanks for following my challenge. People were pretty supportive and I got food offers even from friends of friends just so they could watch me stick it to some big-spending students. Stay tuned for thriftiness tips.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Long weekends mess with a food challenge
An interesting week. It would have been run-of-the-mill if it weren't for a giant holiday at the end of it. So my dilemma was how to continue the challenge when for two days I was living on the charity of others. In fact I was living on the hospitality of my parents, as we all live on the hospitality of others from time to time and offer the same in return. So what to do with two days of zero food expenditure/consumption as it relates to my challenge, to avoid two days of basically $0 destroying the realism of the daily average? The best solution I came up with was to more or less delete those two days (1/2 day Friday, Saturday, and a 1/2 day Sunday) from my challenge. I make up those lost days by:
1) extending my week by one day so it will end on Tuesday rather than Monday now, and
2) replacing the remaining missing day with a mosaic day, so "Day" 18 is in fact Good Friday breakfast and Sunday lunch and dinner, with a snack thrown in.
There were a couple of interesting occurences. First, Days 15 and 16 were an expensive run largely, it seems, because I did tacos for dinner. I wonder if the further you go from making things from scratch, the more expensive it becomes. I may have to test this further before I'm done. Second, Days 17+ show the introduction of Tim Hortons coffee to the mix, and we'll have to see yet how that plays out. Third, I made banana bread to salvage a couple of over-ripe bananas. This required using shortening, sugar, and pecans which I had on hand from before the challenge. The quantities total less than $2 and I have a more detailed breakdown of the recipe's cost (and also that of the muffins) if anyone cares to challenge. Fourth, on Day 18 I went out for burgers with a friend and paid the larger part to simplify things. (On a side note, it should be illegal for a restaurant to call it a 'poutine' if they use grated cheese instead of curds.) All in all, it added up to under $17 cost to me. Two days later, we chanced to meet up for pho and dinner was on her - score evened. Still, a 20-dollar day will do a number on my average, but we'll see tomorrow (end of Week 1 of the extended challenge) if my savings the rest of the day will even 'er out. Check out the spreadsheet for details.
1) extending my week by one day so it will end on Tuesday rather than Monday now, and
2) replacing the remaining missing day with a mosaic day, so "Day" 18 is in fact Good Friday breakfast and Sunday lunch and dinner, with a snack thrown in.
There were a couple of interesting occurences. First, Days 15 and 16 were an expensive run largely, it seems, because I did tacos for dinner. I wonder if the further you go from making things from scratch, the more expensive it becomes. I may have to test this further before I'm done. Second, Days 17+ show the introduction of Tim Hortons coffee to the mix, and we'll have to see yet how that plays out. Third, I made banana bread to salvage a couple of over-ripe bananas. This required using shortening, sugar, and pecans which I had on hand from before the challenge. The quantities total less than $2 and I have a more detailed breakdown of the recipe's cost (and also that of the muffins) if anyone cares to challenge. Fourth, on Day 18 I went out for burgers with a friend and paid the larger part to simplify things. (On a side note, it should be illegal for a restaurant to call it a 'poutine' if they use grated cheese instead of curds.) All in all, it added up to under $17 cost to me. Two days later, we chanced to meet up for pho and dinner was on her - score evened. Still, a 20-dollar day will do a number on my average, but we'll see tomorrow (end of Week 1 of the extended challenge) if my savings the rest of the day will even 'er out. Check out the spreadsheet for details.
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