How To Live (Comfortably) on $36 A Month For Food
andrewhyde.net
andrewhyde.net
Lard is the highest calorie per cent food you can buy.
That just seems to be the epitome of penny-wise and pound-foolish for 99.9% of people, who would be far better off trimming their budget in other categories so they could eat healthier instead of viewing food as just a source of calories.
- Cyanide is "natural".
- Hemlock is "natural".
- Mercury is "natural".
- Cobra venom is "natural".
Semantics aside, I'll gladly grant you that lard is a food that has been eaten in the past. But, once again, that doesn't mean it's necessarily better than other foods that haven't been eaten in the past.
An good example is "golden" rice. An argument could be made (and has been made) that golden rice could save millions of people from devastating vitamin deficiency which they would continue suffer from were they to avoid golden rice for their "traditional" foods.
Plenty of traditional foods just aren't very nutritious or healthy.
I think that tradition, like cuisines, is an ever changing thing, however.
(B17/Laertrile is banned in a lot of places US/Aus/etc - for links/containing/Cantbebotheredreadingthestudies Cyanide).
In my case, I buy vats of lard at the local grocer and use it liberally. It tastes delicious.
I also work out at least an hour a day. No one feels the need to moralize about people failing to work out an hour a day, and yet that will have 10 times the benefit of micromanaging the nutrients in your diet. I'm strong and fit and my cholesterol is low.
Despite the fact that everyone knows I'm fit, they still say, "Imagine how much healthier you would be and how much more energy you would have if ate "better"?"
!!
Since, I'm the one who's fit, shouldn't you be asking me for advice?
Moralizing about people's diets is part of the same line of thinking as the Progressive movement that sprung Prohibition on us. And, of course, the Progressive movement can trace its philosophical lineage to the Puritans, so there you go.
Eating lots of fruits and vegetables and low-fat foods is not a good in and of itself. A diet is only healthy or unhealthy to the extent that its quality is reflected in your own health.
So you're telling me that if you eat McDonald's for every meal for thirty years, you'll experience no health issues as long as you exercise enough? Tell you what: let's have this conversation again in thirty years, provided you're still around.
An anecdote about a personal experience over a relatively short period of time is of limited value to me. Study after study has shown that the western diet has severe detrimental effects in the long run, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Can you mitigate some of that by exercising more? Absolutely. But thinking that you can put whatever you want into your body with no ill effects as long as you exercise enough is ridiculous.
There are plenty of other things to worry about beyond our weight when it comes to health.
I'm not saying that eating lots of fast food isn't correlated with being fat. However, I would say that since it's quite possible to be skinny and eat enormous amounts of fast food, fast food cannot be making people fat. I would expect that the same character traits which lead someone to eat lots of fast food would lead to being fat for people predisposed to that body type.
What? The fact that some people eat enormous amounts of fast food without getting fat hardly means that fast food cannot be making anyone fat.
Additionally, you seem to be assuming that skinny = healthy, and fat = unhealthy.
Finally, I'm fairly certain that studies have shown that as western fast food restaurants expand internationally into new cultures, incidences of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease all rise in those cultures.
Ceteris paribus, skinny tends to be healthier than fat, with longer life and better quality of life. One study cited here even indicates skinny people don't even have to be that healthy otherwise to outlive fat people. It's a simple "assumption" that requires more debunking than you have given here.
Studies have also shown that obesity is well linked to disposable income. Is it any surprise that restaurants also expand as disposable income increases?
For breakfast get an egg mcmuffin, no hashbrown and grab a coffee or orange juice.
If you just stick to those two meals when you have to have fast food it does basically no harm.
Fast food gives you the rope to hang yourself with, you don't have to do use it.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Super-size_me...
Care to point to even a single one where the problem of fast food was not that people tend to vastly exceed their calorie requirements when eating fast food?
I'm genuinely curious. If you eat a "supersized" meal a day, you can easily exceed your calorie from that single meal depending on what you choose and how active you are. Of course you'll get fat and get other health problems in that case, but all that tells you is that eating too much is bad for you.
Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22.
If the study showed that incredibly "fit" people who smoked occasionally and had a sightly elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" (what is that, exactly?) than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be one thing.
If the study showed that slightly "fit" people who smoked heavily and had an extremely elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be something else.
The same could be asked of the fitness vs obesity results. How fit and how obese?
Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated? Or do they conflict with the results of other studies?
The groups were significantly different. The "obese" people in the study had BMIs of over 30. The "very obese" group had BMIs over 35. The "thin" people had BMIs under 25. Similarly, people with diagnosed hyper-tension were compared with those of low-risk blood pressures. A variety of fitness levels were examined, ranging from couch potatoes to daily (but not competitive) runners.
The study found that fitness had a protective effect against each of the other risk factors. In fact, the only other statistically independent predictor of mortality for men and women was smoking.
>Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated?
Yes. There have been a number of very large studies that have produced similar results.
S.N.Blair et al. 1989 "Physical fitness and all-cause mortality" JAMA Nov;262: 2395-2401 (over 13,000 subjects)
I.M.Lee 2003 "Physical activity in women: how much is good enough?" JAMA Sept 10;290(10) 1377-1378
C.D. Lee, S.N.Blair, and A.S. Jackson 1999, "Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause cardiovascular disease mortality in men." Am J Clin Nutr. Mar;69(3):373-380.
Flip to now where I eat 5-6x a day and have a nutritionist. Time and a place.
where exactly do you go about finding one? how much does it cost? what exactly do they do for you - plan meal by meal?
I usually buy what protein is on sale and plan meals around that. It has a nice side effect of varying my diet.
No matter how "noble" a diner might feel in tipping his or her server, it basically amounts to nothing, especially when she splits her tip with the rest of her co-workers.
The unfortunate fact of this circumstance is that most "tipped" workers earn sub-minimum wages. There would not be an illegal immigration problem regarding restaurant workers if it were any other case. But most Americans are fat, lazy, oblivious and don't care.
So. The next time you go out to eat, especially if it's a large nationalized chain (like Denny's or McD's) take a look around at how many of your fellow diners speak Spanish. Look at your hostess/cashier who is making federal minimum wage without tips . . . then look at the restaurant and kitchen workers who are serving you, and decide just how "valuable" it is to go out to eat. Don't pat yourself too much on the back for being a fan of capitalism.
I have to laugh at one thing:
"where bar bills can run up to $20/night"
Man, you should hang out with my friends for a night. :)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6933744.stm
...it is better than subsistence on what is often very low quality (i.e. nutritional value) food.
A better title would be, "How to sacrifice you health for money." No thanks.
I can be cheap with a lot of things, but not with the food I put into my body. The kind of diet OP proposes may work OK for a while. The younger you are, the more resilient you probably are, so that can be quite a while. But sooner or later, especially if you're a little bit older, you will be trading quality of life for a few bucks.
AFAIC, the best possible use for limited resources is excellent food. This first thing this means is fresh produce, which, frankly is difficult to find "on sale". OP's advice to eat at home is excellent, OTOH, I'd rather spend 7 bucks on a restaurant salad bar than 3 bucks for a home cooked highly processed meal.
Almost everything in life, including work, is a marathon, not a sprint. I intend to be just as strong at any point in that marathon with proper lifestyle, especially nutritional excellence. Saving $ intelligently is always smart. Sacrificing potential health and well being for a few hundred dollars per month is just not a good idea.
Pass.
I'm not advocating anyone goes near as far as I did, but something to keep in mind for that friend that eats like shit out every night spending 10x what you could by making a healthier option at home.
If I ate like most people then $36/month sounds difficult, but achieveable. But I don't and I wouldn't advocate changing away from eating excellence to save money.
A lot of it involved getting the reduced-almost-bad produce and cooking it day-of, state-level farmer's markets, and dumpster diving, though. Plus, being a college student where every week you can find something free...
Stuff and nonsense. The old-timers I grew up around - most lived into their 80s - spent their whole lives eating what I call 'close to the Earth', non-processed, non-sugared, non-transfatted foods supplemented with stuff from their home gardens. Yams, rutabagas, strawberries, potatoes, squash, herring, liverwurst, canned fruit, blueberries, etc.
Nutrition isn't about money, and I eat nicely on $25 week year spent at the store, year after year. When I needed to lose 45 pounds (from eating 'good' food) I did it in 6 months eating fruits, veggies, nuts.
If you want to talk about really healthy food, especially if you have a strange diet like veganism, then forget it, your bill will be huge.
Veganism can be spendy. I've only tried once (for a week). It didn't work out too well.
Rice, beans, pasta, and (frozen) veggies combined with different spices and sauces isn't a bad way to go when saving money and trying to stay healthy.
I'm much more skeptical of the health consequences from a diet including large quantities of eggs, cheap ground meat, and inexpensive cheese.
I also think the key to living this cheaply would be a multi-vitamin to help replace whatever you're invariably missing from your diet.
As a vegetarian who eats like a vegan 98% of the time (and for several years lived on no more than a $60.00/month food budget), you don't have to let budgetary constraints keep you from participating in a healthy and environmentally friendly way of eating.
4-5 lbs of "on sale" meat, 10 lbs of bread flour, 5 lbs of sugar, 2 lbs of cheddar, a gallon of milk, cereal (from local mill, not the national brand stuff), vegetables, butter and lunch meat will cost around $60 here in the Upper Midwest. But if I spend that $60 on mostly processed food, I will barely get two grocery bags full.
With a bit of land you can go further. I keep chickens for fresh eggs, but I realize most people can't do that. However, my potatoes, corn, carrots, broccoli, squash, pumpkins, salad greens and some herbs come fresh out of the garden so for summer/fall at least, I don't buy those things.
Meat? No. White Flour? No! Sugar? Hell no! Chedder? Maybe a little. Milk? Maybe, but expensive. Cereal? Probably not, unless it's real like granola or muesli, in which case it's expensive. Veggies? of course, but those also cost. Butter? Maybe a little. Lunch meat? No.
Try doing without white rice, sugar and pasta, and getting fresh greens and fruits, whole grain everything, brown rice, etc. Even if you make a lot of it from scratch, it adds up.
White Flour- He said bread flour, which is technically white, but sort of a necessary evil if you're making your own bread regularly. I make a good multi grain and rye which has bread flour in it.
Sugar- Not that bad if you use it in small amounts. I make my own ice cream (real cream), add sugar some to sauces, etc.
Veggies- looks like he grows a lot of his own, as I do. Defiantly not free but cheap if you have some experience and the right tools.
What exactly is nutritionally wrong with white flour, sugar and meat (unless you're vegetarian)? In any case, I probably have 3-4 different kinds of flour in my pantry right now, plus wheat germ flakes. And the bread I'll be eating tomorrow will be home made sourdough. I'm neither fat nor malnourished.
What's a "real" cereal? This morning my 8 year-old son asked to make his own breakfast. He had Malt-O-Meal (a local Minnesota mill) raisin bran. Is that "real?" Generic corn flakes and oatmeal are probably the cheapest cereals on the market. Are they real? If you like granola so much, buy the oatmeal, honey & nuts and make it yourself. It's simple and infinitely cheaper!
To the earlier comment about organic vs. "pesticide ridden crap." Newsflash! Organic farming also uses pesticides, just different ones. That said, my veggies (pesticide free and fertilized with our chicken & horse manure compost) are no more nutritious than the (non-organic) ones in the grocery store. The difference is that the freshness makes them taste better and improves the texture.
Unfortunately, buying in bulk isn't going to be an option for many single people with lower incomes and not much refrigerator/storage space... (maybe with the exception of beans and rice, which can be stored relatively compactly and for a long time without refrigeration).
Another thing that works against people with lower incomes is that much of the nutrious food is more expensive than the less nutritious food.
Bread is a prime example. The cheapest bread is highly processed white bread. The more nutrious whole, multi-grain breads are usually two or three times as expensive as the cheap crap.
Same with organic, cage- and cruelty-free produce vs the pesticide-ridden crap.
Eggs, salads, veggies, fruits, rice, beans, cheeses, beef...As long as things are taken in the correct quantities I see very little problem here, am I wrong?
For better results, go next to the ones thrown by corporations. They usually order too much food and the employees do not care and do not want to bring the food back home.
Oh.. and bring an empty backpack :)
My arms hurt for a week.
Nutrition is a vast science.
* All carbs are not equal.
* All fat is not equal.
* All protein is not equal. Beans are not meat.
It ought to be treated as a science but often it isn't. If you ask 100 nutrition experts how much protein a person should get in a day, you're not going to get a consensus based on empirical evidence, but drastically different answers and emotional passions bordering on the religious.
Excellent point.
And then it may be too late to do anything about it.
The first clinical symptom of cardiovascular disease is often sudden death.
Many cancers are "discovered" after they've been growing for 20 years.
Poor nutrition is often a primary cause of both.
Also, experiment with cheap veggies. I get sick of PB&J, so I stick things like cucumber slices or mushrooms in there, and it seems totally different to my taste buds. Cucumbers are dirt cheap, mushrooms less so, but either way, not breaking the budget. I also enjoy a zucchini sandwich (between buttered toast).
Another way most people could cut their budgets is to look seriously at their portion size. I realize this doesn't apply to you, but if one's definition of a 'meal' is what fills up a 15 inch dinner plate and involves at least four different colors, then yeah, it's hard to eat cheaply. Most restaurant 'meals' are really at least two.
(Exception runs for certain restaurants of course. The more "mainstream chain" it is the bigger the portions get...)
Hell, I've even had to cut down on my portion size. Find good, nutritious food that is filling, and go for stuff that is slower to digest. I've now just about halved my carb in take and replaced it with vegetables, and I haven't felt better.
I just eat bread in the morning and afternoon and cook a different meal every night. Probably comes down to about $20 a week. I could eat for less that $0.75 if I want to, but I don't.
Put the ingredients in the bread maker, let the maker raise the bread and then throw the loaf in the oven to cook. Great bread for pennies.
Green olives, goat cheese, and crackers really do melt away my troubles.
PB+J and Rice cakes = Living comfortably?
I understand the premise but .. meh :)
...sorry...
I like to eat and spend on eating, i think it's better than spending it on some kind of mobile phones; isn't eating better.
so $36 only if you don't have money: the poor, however a hacker can write few articles or code few lines and get an easy $150 a month and feed himself well;
I knew someone in college who ate nothing but mac and cheese. After a few months his hairline started to recede. When this happened he started eating cheeseburgers every now and then and it grew back.
Go to a bakery right after they close. There will be garbage bags full of bread (and nothing but bread so it's relatively sanitary) that was baked that day. Even if you don't eat any, it will probably change your perception of waste.
Refried beans are a great source of protein, fat, and flavor, and are one of the cheapest foods around. Pair it with some rice and vegetables and you've got a pretty nutritious meal (assuming you need all those calories).
Then again, medical bills are expensive too.
That all having been said, tofu can be quite cost effective, low in carbs, and high in protein. Of course, you might tell me there's aggression issues associated with tofu ingestion, and that it contains chemicals that mimic estrogen. So, there's seitan, which is also high in protein, low in carbs, and can be made relatively cheaply from wheat gluten in bulk. Of course, there are lots of people who decry wheat gluten as well, not to mention people who're legitimately allergic to it.
So that brings us to meat and fish. Meat often comes along with saturated fats and often raises your blood's LDL cholesterol levels, not to mention all the health, environmental, and ethical concerns of factory farming. You could take part in a co-op for your meat, but that is not going to enable you to eat for especially cheap. Fish is generally better in the fat and cholesterol departments, but many carry with them mercury content that makes a lot of people nervous and the threat of overfishing. There are fish that avoid most of these concerns, such as tilapia, which fit most of the criteria, but is still not anywhere close to as price effective as dried beans.
If you don't want to get your protein from beans, that's fine. I personally advocate people pay a little more and eat a healthy, varied diet, including many (or all) of the above-mentioned dangerous foods. But this crap about "medical bills are expensive too" implying that somehow eating an incredibly traditional and largely vegetarian diet will send you to the hospital is just ridiculous.
Put another way: poor people are worse off for a great number of reasons, but I don't think that proves that rice and beans will kill you.
Jarad Diamond (among others) showed that switching to civilized society shortened lifespans. You're not advocating becoming a hunter-gatherer and neither am I, so it's not really germane. Civilized society has a lot of factors that contribute to earlier death, such as population density helping the spread of disease. To draw from his work that carbohydrates will send you to the hospital is to draw a totally unsupported conclusion.
"Weren't you the one suggesting refined beans?" I was the one who replied with a recipe when you suggested that the diet was lacking fat and protein.
You don't address the issues of cost and you still haven't shown that the level of carbohydrates present in beans are a problem. My point is that most foods present trade-offs and you should probably eat a reasonably balanced and varied diet.
Works for me. Costs virtually nothing. Keeps you fit and healthy. Provides 75% of our food needs.
Also stop the guilt complex on quality, organic foods and branded goods. People give you evil looks if you pick up the "value eggs" in Tesco in the UK. "Think of the chickens" they chant. Fuck the chickens.