To Market We Must Go

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You know that moment when you realize your household is out of food, and you are 3 days short of the day you were planning on going shopping?

Yeah, we've arrived there.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't as though we can't go to the store. It just means that we are going to have to go today to get us through the next 3 days, and then again on Friday to do our regular shopping for the month. And any week in which you have to go to the grocery store twice is not a good week, in my opinion. I must acknowledge my gratefulness that I have the means to go and buy groceries, but that doesn't make me like the flickering lights, the lines, or the air of impatience in the average grocery store any better.

We have still not completely gotten a handle on shopping for the household now that better than 90% of our meals are prepared at home. We got a lot closer this month (only missing by 3 days), but holy smoke do we go through a TON of food nowadays, We're having to buy things we never used to buy (shrimp and other seafood springs immediately to mind), and we're having to buy daily quantities of items (like fresh produce) that used to only make occasional apperances on our plates. It takes an awful lot of provender to get two people through a month when you are no longer relying on fast food and pizza to supplement your diet.

One thing that has totally improved is food waste. We used to throw away pounds of unused produce and leftovers every month. Now we are scraping the bottom of our crisper drawers looking for one last pepper or cucumber. This makes me very happy - throwing food away every month used to drive me crazy. It feels not only wasteful but insulting given the amount of hunger in the world - a moral failure on my part, if you will. It is an unintended happy side-effect of healthy eating.

But the real kicker here is that starting this month we have to begin planning for 2 months worth of "protein shake only" diets in the next 90 days. (One month each, surrounding our surgery dates.) We're getting lots of help from friends and relatives on the protein shakes already, but 180 protein shakes in the next 3 months eats an awful lot of grocery money. Not to mention that we're going to have to figure out single-person meal planning for whoever is not current going through a pre- or post-surgical diet.

The bright spot? By the end of summer, this will all be behind us. With each of us only being able to handle only 2 - 4 ounces of food at any given meal, our grocery shopping should go WAY down. Leaving us plenty of money to spend on protein shakes, multivitamins, bottled water, dietary supplements...

Damn. I am never going to get out of this going to the store thing, am I?

Wondering If Cardboard Counts As Low-Carb,

- Hawkwind

The Power of The Menu

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Lots of people - some obese, some in the weight range BMI refers to as "normal" - have asked me variations on the same question: "How are you two doing this?" This is usually followed by anecdotes on how much that person hates counting calories/logging meals/following a diet/etc. In each case, I smile and tell them we have a secret weapon - one that doesn't require any of those components.

The secret? Meal planning.

When we first started this process, Lor immediately recognized a glaring weakness in our household diet. Any time the two of us were too tired or stressed out, we would not cook - we would instead head for a fast food joint rather than have to think about what to prepare for a meal. This did a huge amount of damage to our weights, not to mention our bank account. One day when we were not suffering from low energy, we took action. We inventoried every single food item we had in the house - pantries, fridge, freezer - and then Lor wrote down a series of meals we could make using the items at hand. We had a lot more than we thought we did - almost 10 days worth of meal materials. She downloaded a blank "Weekly Menu" from the 'Net, and assigned a meal to every day for the next 7 days. Done.

And, amazingly, it worked like a charm. We had to make one stop at a local Farmer's Market to pick up about $20 worth of veggies to flesh out these meals, but other than that we did not spend a dime on food that week. No frustration with trying to decide what to cook when we were both tired and cranky - the thinking had already been done. No realization that we had forgotten to thaw something out - every morning when I got up, I checked the daily menu and pulled out whatever we needed for the day. Best of all, at the end of the week we had emptied our fridge and most of our freezer - without having to throw any food away because we had failed to use it! (Something that always pisses me off since we are on such a low fixed income.)

At the end of the week, we called the experiment a success, and Lor designed a new menu for the following week. We went to the store and bought the materials we would need. This cut our usual grocery bill almost in half, by the way, because we were no longer making "off the cuff" purchases. We already knew how we would use every single thing we were buying.

Once Lor hit her first dietary meeting and the Carbohydrate restrictions began, we started using another tool. We added a little Android app called "Lose It" to our arsenal, and began to use it during once-a-week meal planning. It enabled us to figure out what the carb load was on meals that we weren't sure about. We also started substituting in fresh vegetables for things like pasta and rice, which tended to drop the carbohydrate count WAY down.

We really got to see the power of meal planning last week, after our car accident last Monday. The chaos surrounding the accident and the resulting insurance claim, the running around from body shop to doctor's office to dealerships, the exhaustion of concussions and whiplash all meant that we never got around to creating a meal plan. And we paid for it. We must have hit fast food places 5 times in the last week, all at a time when we had no money to do so. Neither one of us lost an ounce over the week. (Neither of us gained, somehow!) But we just couldn't bear the thought of going home after these activity-filled days and designing then cooking a meal. We probably need to have an "emergency" meal plan - a couple days worth of meals that we have on hand to deal with situations like these. Something worth adding to the arsenal.

Total time to prep our meal plan for the week every week? About 15 minutes. It saves you time, money, and the hassle of logging and calorie counting - you already know what your diet will be, and already know what the nutritional info is on the food you will be using. It can be a powerful tool to add to the arsenal for those of us who are fighting obesity. And it can be a time and money saver for everyone else. Give it a try for a week, and tell me what you think!

Considering My Food "Requests" For Next Week,

- Hawkwind