> learn to budget money and manage expenses.
if you've never done this before, i very, very strongly suggest you look at how much eating out is costing you.
my wife and i are saving literally thousands of dollars a month.
If I don’t have prepared food or a snack it’s very easy to be tempted to grab something quick and overeat.
One thing that is a bit hard to get around is that we live in a city, and some friends are single, and that going "out" to a public place like a bar or restaurant gives them the feeling that they haven't "given up" on meeting someone for the night, but going to someone's house means its orders of magnitude less likely that someone will just pop up. Even amongst married friends, the spontaneity of having someone just happen to be at the same place you are is a big thrill that just isn't going to happen if they are sitting in my living room. I live in a neighborhood where there is a main drag where most bars/restaurants are, so this happens fairly often.
But taking a step back, my discretionary spending has dropped by 95% and my bank account has swelled at a rate that I could have never imagined without much drop in my overall happiness at all and this is likely to lead to changes in spending patterns for years to come.
this is somewhat inherent in the system. they message you that you need to be out and about to be happy. it's the capitalistic way. Also a bit of why a lot of jobs work you so hard so you are too tired to form any thoughts on the system at large.
I think a more sustainable economy is what america (and the world) needs. the growth at all costs has been very, very bad for our world. for instance, one unintended consequence of mass manufacturing of food is that to get reliable, consistent bread they stripped everything that made it good (including time spent fermenting) and then added in a few choice macro nutrients and now, I suspect, those types of products are causing problems health wise on a macro scale. if people went down to their local baker and bought naturally leavened breads with more wholesome flours instead of wonder bread et al we might as a country be less sick. there are other examples of long term costs associated with short term thinking. (rise in allergies and planting male only trees because of a 1940s department of agriculture recommendation come to mind but there are others) not to say it's all been bad but there have been many bad outcomes.
I do a lot of cooking, and agree there as well. We have a lot of processes that sped up our food preparation and maintained say 90% of the original quality of the product, but those losses add up and while there is much we can measure in terms of what makes our food good in terms of taste and nutrition, there seems to be much we can not. There may only be a subtle difference between chicken soup made with canned stock or bullion when you are sitting at the table, but I make my own stock, and often find a bowl of soup made from it for lunch will fill me until dinner easily, a can of Campbell's, not so much.
Especially since quarantine started, I have done tons more cooking, often of rich "slow" food. My friends have asked how much weight I have gained, and I have actually lost a few pounds despite getting much less activity in. I find myself much more content with smaller portion sizes, perhaps the net calories are actually fewer.
> those types of products are causing problems health wise on a macro scale
I suspect the same thing with most of the food supply in the US. Markets are very good at driving the price of good down while maintaining the quality just "good enough" to satisfy the consumer. Ex. you can get a hamburger for $1 at McD's or 6 nuggets for $1 at BurgerKing. I don't think large scale agriculture can provide high quality food to the masses.
As for food I can't really help there. I ended up writing my own app to manage/track expiration dates for what I have but that's barely the tip of the ice-burg. I hope to integrate with my recipe app (Paprika) to work on meal-planning and picking recipes I like while trying to use up the stuff that will go bad first.
The app is, I think, a natural evolution for the YNABer who got the discipline and now doesn't need to track every single dollar all the time.
we look at statements from our various accounts, enter into a data tab, then group expenses into categories: house (elec, water, cable, etc), food, vehicles (gas, tolls, oil, loan, etc) fun (spotify, netflix, etc).
as the saying goes, you cant manage what you dont measure.