Watch me spend only 50 cents per day for food in the month of February.


One upping random people on the internet.

I'll get right to it. I was greatly inspired by Evan's Hungry For a Month blog. Just to recap his journey, Evan restricted his food budget to $30 for the month of November, averaging out to a dollar a day for food. He did not consume any free food that may have been available to him at his job which made it more of a challenge. He did not include items such as coffee, sugar, salt, pepper (the type of stuff easily jackable from your local fast food joint). I feel it was a great undertaking and it taught him a lesson or two. I'm going to one-up Evan. My food budget for the month of February will be $15, averaging to out 50 cents a day. Being a caffeine-aholic I'm going to keep coffee in the mix just like Evan did. I'll also keep the salt, pepper and ketchup as items available for free (not that I eat much of those things anyways). Any free food available to me at my job is also off-limits. This may be a problem. Working at a refinery, there is an exorbitant amount of free food. We have lunch meetings, product vendors bring free food, and there is almost always food left over from other people's lunch meetings. But I also feel that I have an edge in this whole issue. Being a Muslim, I am required to undergo fasting in the month of Ramadaan. lasting for about 30 days, these fasts require that I do not eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk. Ramadaan was in October 2006, and I feel I did pretty good. It was a challenge, but I managed. I am going to show that a 50 cent a day diet is very much possible, and even comfortable. Evan wrote in his blog that he did not really plan out his meals nor do any prior research. That's where I will also do things differently. I've already started to evaluate what foods are most cost effective. One-upping Evan is not my only motivation. This experiment will also be conducted to show that using a proper budget and planning, even low income people can live comfortably. I will try my best to provide as much information as I can. Lets see how this goes. Note: Read the Days from the bottom of the page to the top.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Day 22 - Fewer Calories, Higher Quality

Well I looked into the whole Caloric Reduction (CR) Diet, and the results looks very promising. Dont get me wrong, what I'm doing is not a CR diet. The philosophy with a CR diet is that you eat approximately half of the calories you normaly would (~1500 calories), however the food you eat is high quality. Heres a graph I ripped off which shows the lifespans of mice as a result of a reduced calorie diet:

We can see how mice which were fed 65% less lived considerably longer. Some studies have shown mice to live up to 40% longer.
When executing this diet, one must make sure that all the basic nutritional needs are met such as minerals, vitamins etc. Even the CR crowd feels that caloric intake below 1000 calories is technically caloric starvation. Plus the calories I'm consuming is are not high quality calories.
For additional information on the Caloric Reduction diet, visit this wikipedia page.
As for me, I'm making a list of all the food I plan on eating once I'm off this ridiculous diet. My weight today: 153.2 lbs.
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