planning – Page 36 – A Measured Life

Frugality May Days – The Challenge

Have you heard of the Live Below the Line Project? I first heard about it on agirlcalledjack.com. It’s a 5-day fundraising project in the UK where you live on 1 British pound a day for 5 days to raise awareness for people around the world who go to bed hungry. If you want to know more, click the banner to the left. While I don’t have the discipline to try this project myself, it did get me thinking about my grocery budget and how I can tweak that in order to fatten up my savings account.

The Hubs and I live a pretty simple life most of the time. With the economy being how it is, however, and our rent having gone up $71 a month last month and a raise for me currently off the table, we’re needing to find more creative ways to save money. I often clean using baking soda or vinegar, because those things actually work really well and are dirt cheap, and we’ve cut back on purchasing gallons of drinking water because we realized we were spending hundreds of dollars a year on something we paying far less for from our tap. (I still purchase 2.5 gallon jugs of water for drinking at work, since a lot of chemicals get washed down our only sink, but it’s far less than we used to buy.) I already shop for clothes almost exclusively at thrift stores, with the exception of underwear, socks and shoes. We rarely go out to eat, I use coupons when I can, and try to eat vegetarian a couple times a week to save money. But I’ve been slacking a bit and buying myself muffins and coffee some mornings, and coffee I can make at home or work. Muffins I COULD make at home, but they’re also bad for my calorie budget, so I should just avoid them altogether! I thought it might be fun to see where I can scrimp and save to maybe put a large deposit in my savings account at the end of the month. Here’s my plan:

Work the pantry/freezer. I’ve got a lot of things taking up space in my cabinets and freezers that’s staple food. Nothing like a good spring clean out so I can refill it with fresh food next month!
Limit spending on convenience foods (coffee, muffins, bubble tea, frogurt, etc.) to $20 for the month.
Eliminate eating out with two exceptions: my Walking Meetup Group is meeting for lunch on May 3rd, and my birthday is May 19th, and I want to go out to dinner, dang it!
Make 2 meals a week vegetarian to save money on meat.
Expand my grocery shopping to more stores if necessary to get better deals. (For example, I happened to check Acme’s flyer and could get bone in skin on chicken thighs for just $1 a pound!)
I’m going to be trying out several apps for my phone for coupons and rebates on groceries. I already use the Walmart Savings Catcher App, and have $11.67 in there. Apps I will be trying: iBotta, Checkout51, Shopmium, Extreme Coupon Finder. Websites I will be trying: grocerysmarts.com, eBates.com.
Try to convince The Hubs to hang some of our clothes on a line to save the $1.50 in dryer costs.

I will be keeping detailed track of the grocery receipts and coupon usage, and will update each week with my savings. Right now I have a $450 a month grocery budget, which doesn’t include produce I buy at Produce Junction, but does include some toiletries and aluminum foil and such. I’m going to attempt to shave $100 a month off that at minimum this month, and include the Produce Junction purchases in that total. I’m also starting with a detailed list of what I have on hand, and will be keeping a running pantry list in the future I hope. (I have a habit of sticking leftovers in the freezer and then forgetting about them!)

Here are links to the items I’m starting with:

Pantry

You’ll notice that I haven’t included a list of my dry spices. This is because that list is EXTENSIVE. I also did not list the standard pantry ingredients for baking like sugar, flour, etc. They are assumed. I will be recapping each week the following Monday, including plans for the following week, so my next post on this topic will cover Week 1 and will be on May 11th, with one following each week until June 1st. The menu planning will cover May 3 through May 30th, or 4 weeks.

I hope you enjoy my experiment!

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Make a Plan

I think each and every one of us has come to a point in their lives where the day to day minutiae just seems too overwhelming. We get stressed, we have a crisis, something unexpected throws our world into a tailspin and we just want to say “screw it” and give up on healthy living. It could be overeating, a relapse into drinking or substance abuse, or giving up other healthy habits like exercise or drinking water. Our minds and our hearts stop communicating with each other, and no matter how well we KNOW that continuing a healthy lifestyle will help us, we just feel like it’s hopeless. I’m going through a phase like that right now. For many years, I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression. This winter, it’s hit its absolute peak. It started building in November, and now it’s February and I’ve hit rock bottom.

For someone like me, who is not an emotional eater, keeping my food healthy and limited has not been a problem. My anxiety causes me to feel sick to my stomach, and my emotional distress gives me no appetite. Often what happens is I’ll feel sick and won’t want to eat, and then I’ll feel sicker, realize I haven’t eaten in hours, eat, then feel marginally better until a few hours later when the cycle continues. Blah. The real problem is working out. My mind is all over the place right now, thoughts racing all over and flitting about and thinking negative things. Usually I can quell this by focusing on something intently, but something like going for a walk or doing kettlebells just doesn’t focus my mind enough to distract me. Wednesday I managed to force myself through my bells routine by watching a DVRed episode of Justified. I made it through, and may have even worked harder than usual. I felt better afterward, and had a fairly decent day.

Friday I felt like I needed a change. I’ve been doing the same routine for the most part for about 5 months, with a short stint of a second routine during the holidays. While these routines are still challenging, I thought that maybe adding a third routine could spice up my workout, and learning some new kettlebell moves might keep my mind occupied. Since I work out three days a week, doing a different routine every day could help keep things fresh. Having a regular scheduled work out time helps: although I’ve been a bit slacky on my start times this past week. The thing is, it’s getting started that’s the hardest part. Once I actually start, I finish.

Image Courtesy of http://www.dickssportinggoods.com

So, Friday, I went to FitnessBlender.com (uhm, if you don’t know about Fitness Blender, you need to check it out – tons of FREE workout videos that are easy to follow) and found a new full body bells workout to try. This may have been a saving grace for me: having to pay attention and learn new moves without injuring myself really kept my mind focus on the work. And the work is satisfying, once you DO it. You’ve heard that quote “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”? Well the hardest part of working out when you just aren’t feeling it is starting each workout. If you make it to the gym, you work out, right? If you workout at home, it’s the act of putting on your workout clothes that triggers the activity. For me, it’s putting on my lifting gloves. Once those babies are on my hands, it’s game on.

In short, here’s my new plan for working out through the tough times (some of these steps I’ve had in place for a while):

Have a workout schedule and stick to it. I workout Monday, Wednesday and Friday. My start time on Monday is flexible, since that’s one of my days off, but in my really good workout days I started around 6:15-6:30. Lately I’ve been struggling to start, so it’s been closer to 7 am. (And, to be fair, this week’s Friday workout was on Saturday, but that was planned because I was meeting a friend for coffee.)
Lay out workout clothes the night before and set them near my “gym”. This will have them in plain view so all I have to do is take off my pajamas and put on my workout clothes. I’ve even simplified my workout clothes because I have found my balance with kettlebells is actually better when I’m barefoot. So I don’t even have to put on socks and shoes. (This will change the first time I drop a 30-lb bell on my bare foot.)
Vary workouts. I will do a different kettlebell routine each day of my week. I will follow each workout with an ab workout, which I’m also going to try to vary, I just haven’t worked out how yet. (Note to self: do planks, they WORK.)
Plan rewards. I used to reward myself with an extra tablespoon of peanut butter on my English muffin in the morning after a workout. That resulted in, guess what, weight gain! So I stopped doing that. I need to come up with a list of non-food rewards. Ideas: self-massage with a tennis ball, aromatherapy.
Treat it like a job. Working out is something I do that I usually enjoy, and I get “paid” in physical fitness.

http://wickedhealthywashingtonian.com/tag/ron-swanson-is-a-genius/ — 6. Ron Swanson is a genius.

Do any of you have strategies for getting through your workouts when you just aren’t feeling it? Leave your plans in the comments!

How to Lose 100 Lbs Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking the Bank: Part V – Recipe Adaptation

One of the complaints about trying to lose weight is having to eat “diet” food. Well, with the occasional exception of a frozen dinner here and there, I don’t DO “diet” food. I do food. There’s a common idiom I hear often in weight loss circles: eat to live, don’t live to eat. I have a serious problem with this: it implies (much like the phrase “clean eating”) that there is a right way and a wrong way to eat. Why can’t the answer be somewhere in the middle? I have a very good friend to whom food is deserving of worship, deeply tied to emotion and memory. I have an acquaintance who couldn’t care less about food having flavor: baked chicken breasts, brown rice and steamed broccoli would make her happy for months. As is almost always the case with me, I fall in the middle of the spectrum.

Okay, look, if I’m honest, I fall closer to the worship side. There are most decidedly foods worth worship for me: creamy foie gras pate with concord grape reduction, perfectly cooked duck breast with crispy skin (including bits of baguette dipped in the savory juices), duck hearts grilled rare, juicy smoked kielbasa, the corner pizza shop’s chicken parmesan. The list goes on. But if I want to lose or maintain my weight (and maintain my budget), I simply can’t eat those things on a daily basis. However, there’s no reason I can’t have delicious, flavorful foods without blowing my calories, particularly if I’m willing to tweak a recipe.

http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/pork-and-cider-stew One of the complaints in the reviews of this recipe is that the photo shows potatoes but the recipe contains NO POTATOES!

I have a bit of a problem with recipes. I can spend hours browsing the internet for recipes: and Pinterest is the worst for this. The problem is, most of the recipes I wind up bookmarking might be delicious, but they just aren’t everyday recipes, meaning, the calories are on the high side. So, being fairly confident in the kitchen, I find a recipe I love and tweak it! Several weeks ago I bookmarked a delicious looking Pork and Cider Stew from Fo od & Wine Magazine. Pork shoulder, bacon, butter, olive oil AND heavy cream make this recipe sound incredibly rich and comforting. I kept going back to the recipe: it just seemed so perfect for chilly February. So, this week, I decided to adapt it. Here’s my method for adapting almost any recipe.

Find a recipe calculator. You won’t be surprised that I use SparkRecipes.com.
Enter the ingredients of the recipe AS LISTED. The original recipe for Pork and Cider Stew serves 10 – 12. I plan on making a recipe that serves 4, so I used 12 as my original serving count.
Panic a little. The original recipe is 742 calories per serving?! It doesn’t even include a starch! The photo has potatoes, but there are no potatoes! What can I do?!
Calm down, and adjust. Start by reducing the ingredients to make a recipe the size you want. Now you know the amounts of the ingredients you’ll need, and you can substitute ingredients to get the desired results.
Start substituting ingredients. This recipe has a WHOPPING 58 grams of fat per serving. It’s not surprising, considering the butter, heavy cream, olive oil, fatty pork shoulder and bacon. So we have fat covered. The easiest to replace is the heavy cream. When I want the creaminess of heavy cream in a stew without the fat, I replace it ounce for ounce with evaporated skim milk. That immediately saves you 55 calories and 7 grams of fat per serving. Next up, replacing that fatty pork shoulder with the much leaner pork loin. We’ve got 27 ounces of pork shoulder, which is a huge amount for 4 servings. We’re going to replace 27 ounces of pork shoulder with 16 ounces of pork loin (NOT tenderloin). BAM, we just lost 279 calories and 27 more grams of fat per serving. Crazy, huh? This recipe is now a manageable 414 calories and 24.2 grams of fat per serving. But if you’re like me, and 450 calories is the MAX you want to eat in one serving, you might be a little bothered by this recipe. Why? The only vegetable is onions! I hardly even count onions as vegetables these days, so I want more.
Add in veggies for bulk. Most veggies add no fat but have tons of nutrients. Hmm. Potatoes and carrots? Sounds yum. Let’s do that. Make sure you add them into the instructions as well! I decided to add the potatoes and carrots after the pork had cooked for 15 minutes, so they could get tender but not mushy. Okay, that pushed the calories up to 491 per serving. Pushing it for me. Let’s do a final once over.
Get rid of ingredients you really don’t need. There’s still a LOT of fat in this recipe. Do we really NEED the butter and oil, or can we use the vastly more flavorful bacon fat to brown the pork? Ahem. Please. Goodbye butter and oil! I’m dumping you and starting with browning the bacon so I can use its delicious fat to brown the pork loin. Booyah! Only 440 calories and 18.5 grams of fat per serving. Now this recipe is hearty AND healthy!

Here’s a comparison of the ingredients lists and nutritional information:

If I could have fit my face in there, I would have licked the bowl.

So how does it TASTE? Because I mean, really, what’s the point of cooking healthy food if it tastes awful and you don’t want to eat it, right?

I mean, uh, it’s pretty awful, I should just eat it all myself. Save you the trouble. *cough*

Just kidding, it was DELICIOUS! Seriously: it was rich, creamy, smoky, salty and the pork was so incredibly tender you barely had to chew. The only change The Hubs and I will make for this recipe in the future is to leave out the sage. We found it too strong and a bit overpowering. Maybe thyme would be a good substitute? I personally think it would be fine without any fresh herbs at all. And seriously? You do not need heavy cream in this recipe at all. The little bit of evaporated skim milk plus the cornstarch gave it a velvety mouth feel that was just divine. You can find MY lightened version of this recipe, ready to print, HERE, if you have a SparkPeople account. If you don’t, you can click the image below.

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