The Food Budget (or lack of it)

Food is where I do my largest discretionary spending each month.  Yes, I have to eat, but I don’t keep track of how much I spend eating, so I am pretty sure the amount I spend eating each month is way, way up there for a single person.

There are two factors at play here:

1) I have bouts of depression, and when I am depressed, I lose interest in food.  I am at the low end of the BMI chart to begin with, and I can easily become underweight while I’m depressed.  In order to make sure I eat the amount of food I need to eat every day, I’ve stopped worrying about how much money I spend on food.  I focus solely on eating.  What is appetizing?  What is easy?  And while it’s worked in terms of keeping me fed, the dollars have added up.

2) I have a health condition that gets better when I follow a certain diet.  “Diet” here means the division of foods into those I can eat and those I can’t.  It has nothing to do with losing weight, number of calories consumed, etc.  So I am not “dieting.”  Let’s say I have a “nutritional plan” instead.  Luckily, the foods that are best for me are among the foods that are best for everyone — whole foods.  But there are a lot of newfangled processed health foods that make you feel like you’re eating whole foods, and eating meals based around those foods costs a lot more than cooking from scratch.  I’ve been relying on such foods for convenience’s sake for a while now, and my wallet has taken a hit for it.

So the challenge is to get the foods that are good for me while spending conservatively, and to do so in a way that will keep me eating even when I’m depressed.  I think the latter goal here is actually an issue many of us face: we may have rice and beans at home, but we don’t find them appetizing, and we’d have to cook them.  Let’s get takeout instead!  It’s very easy to run to the nearest sandwich shop, but it doesn’t look so good on the bank statement.

Couponing?

Extreme couponing has become a thing in America: gathering zillions of coupons, doing a lot of math, and buying a ton of groceries at once to come away with $300 worth of groceries for $19.  There are television shows showing extreme couponers in action, rolling trains of grocery carts out to their cars, filling their closets and garages with household items that will last them the rest of the century (sometimes literally).

I never used to take coupons seriously.  For one, you have to want to eat the food that the coupon is for, and that’s not usually the case, especially now that I’m on a restricted diet.  But more importantly, I never saw how coupons would save me enough money to make hunting them down and gathering them up worthwhile.

Since extreme couponing came on the scene, I have more respect for coupons.  If you really know your stuff and you have the time to spend, you can save a lot of money.  Personally, I’m not going to consider extreme couponing.  I don’t want to spend the time it takes to come  up with such huge deals, and I don’t want to buy most of the stuff the extreme couponers buy.  (Besides, I don’t have the storage space!)

A little while ago, I read this Eating Well on $1 a Day Challenge.  A man’s sister bets him he can’t eat healthfully on just $1 a day.  He wins the bet, and he does so by doing a micro version of extreme couponing.  He buys Scrubbing Bubbles the first day because doing so spits out coupons worth more than he what pays for the Scrubbing Bubbles after applying a coupon he has.

Reading through his month-long challenge is dizzying — at least for a couponing novice like me.  I love seeing how a person can use coupons as shortcuts to get the food he wants to buy.  He also incorporates lazy couponing, which makes it all the more appealing.

Buying bit by bit

There are lots of “eating on $1 a day” challenges out there, and while the one above is impressive, it’s still based around prepackaged foods, which I’m trying to avoid as much as possible.  So after some googling and wandering, I happened upon the blog Less is Enough.  The writer there took up the challenge of eating on $1 a day and did it in a totally different way than I had seen before.

Rebecca at Less is Enough used the approach of buying very small quantities of food as she needed them.  She allowed herself $2 the first day and bought tiny amounts of wheat berries, cornmeal, split peas, sea salt, and sunflower seeds.  She continued the approach through the month, spending mere cents on some grocery trips.  Some of her receipts look absurd, or at least very out of place in this century.

Rebecca’s approach struck a chord with me.  She ate whole foods throughout the month, buying food as she needed it.  She didn’t have a lot of produce, but she managed to work some in.  By the middle of the month, she had accumulated enough food to create an appetizing menu.  I’m guessing she was low on the calorie count, and she noted at a couple points that if she expended more energy than normal or changed her schedule, her menu didn’t keep up with her energy demands.  But all told, she blew the couponers out of the water (in my opinion, at least) by breaking her groceries down into teeny tiny just-enough-for-now purchases.  She demonstrated that with a little creativity and discipline, eating well on a limited budget can be done sans coupons.

I am not looking to do a $1-a-day challenge anytime soon.  For one thing, I need to gain weight right now — about 10lbs according to my doctor.  But also, I need to recenter myself on a whole foods diet.  Several years ago, I was eating whole foods exclusively and managing 9-12 servings of fruits & veggies a day.  I haven’t had the drive to do that in a while, and I’m hoping this blog will help me bring it back.

I’ve decided that my near-term grocery goal is to eat all the food that I currently have in the kitchen before buying any more.  This will have two benefits: 1) I’ll save the money I’d otherwise be spending on groceries or takeout, and 2) I’ll be forced to eat more whole foods.  While I’m clearing out my kitchen, I’ll do some thinking about how I’d like to save money on food.  Maybe by then I’ll be up for a $1- or $2-a-day challenge.  It does sound like fun!